Hurricane Alberto

Today's San Francisco Chronicle had an article about how the morale of attorneys in the U.S. Department of Justice has plummeted under Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. The story included portions of a letter from one of those staffers calling the administration's politicizing of the firing of the U.S. Attorneys "unethical" and "illegal." Well, what's improper about firing people you don't want and replacing them with people you do? Well, to a career civil servant, okay. They don't like that. But to everyone else, people who are political appointees are precisely that -- political appointees. When the president changes, they probably have got to go. The problem with what the administration did is that they lied about it, under oath, in testimony before Congress. All they had to do was say, 'Yeah, we fired people we didn't want and hired people we did.' But they didn't even have the nerve to own up to what they did. That's why they're being investigated. That's what perjury is about.