Tuesday, September 18, 2007
 
Too Important Not Too Use For Cheap Political Maneuvering
The headline on the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel editorial? Editorial: Too important a job.

The lede?

    Retired federal judge Michael Mukasey's credentials seem to make him ideally suited to be the next U.S. attorney general.
The but:
    Mukasey reputedly has an independent streak, but administration officials probably liked what they read in an August op-ed article he wrote for The Wall Street Journal.

    In it, he seemed to sympathize with the need for broader investigative detention of suspects (beyond holding them as material witnesses) and the unlawful combatant designation and wrote that a separate national security court deserved scrutiny.

    That responsibility for scrutiny now falls to the Senate. It should determine precisely what Mukasey had in mind in that op-ed but mostly whether he is the independent-minded attorney general this country so desperately needs at the moment to guard against excesses from any quarter.
That's right; it's an important job, the nominee has the credentials, but the Senate should conduct its regularly scheduled witch hunt to tar or feather this nominee because he thinks differently than the Senate majority party and the editors of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

After all, the associative property would seem to indicate that when the political is the personal, then verily the personal is political, and man cannot hold private (or publicly expressed) opinions and still do a job objectively according to the law of the land. Because the personal conscience or lack thereof is the highest law that some people can imagine.


 
To say Noggle, one first must be able to say the "Nah."