Thursday, March 15, 2007 ::
"Good Faith"
How many more stories like this one before Gonzales loses his job, do you think?
In testimony on Jan. 18, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales assured the Senate Judiciary Committee that the Justice Department had no intention of avoiding Senate input on the hiring of U.S. attorneys.
Just a month earlier, D. Kyle Sampson, who was then Gonzales's chief of staff, laid out a plan to do just that. In an e-mail, he detailed a strategy for evading Arkansas Democrats in installing Tim Griffin, a former GOP operative and protege of presidential adviser Karl Rove, as the U.S. attorney in Little Rock.
"We should gum this to death," Sampson wrote to a White House aide on Dec. 19. "[A]sk the senators to give Tim a chance … then we can tell them we'll look for other candidates, ask them for recommendations, evaluate the recommendations, interview their candidates, and otherwise run out the clock. All of this should be done in 'good faith,' of course."
I guess if you're willing to lie to the Senate under oath, then you don't have much compunction about dicking them around outside of the hearing room. I'm sure this email will make AG AG (and the White House) a lot of new friends on the Hill.
It Depends What the Meaning of "Win" Is
A new CNN poll is out about the War in Iraq. Here's their lede:
Less than half of Americans think the United States can win the war in Iraq, according to a CNN poll released Tuesday.
Forty-six percent said the United States could not win the war in Iraq.
And although 46 percent also said the United States still could win, the results mark the first time since the war began four years ago that a majority of Americans said the United States is not capable of winning.
Too late now, but I wish there had been a followup question for the people who said the US could still win: "What do you mean by 'win'?" I bet we'd have gotten some interesting answers.