Much of the commentary on this story has seemed disingenuous about this: breathless revelations that the White House was involved in the decision, that it may have been (gasp!) political, and so on. ~Michael Kinsley

I share Kinsley’s puzzlement about the scandal of this when we are talking about something that was neither illegal nor obviously, necessarily unethical.  Believe me, an epic, administration-destroying scandal would be a glorious thing to behold, and no one would be more glad of it than I would be.  I would be cheering on the dogs as they tore Mr. Bush and his entire team down, if they were actually tearing him down for his real crimes.  My view here is very much like my view of the hounding of Clinton in ’98.  Had they gone after him and Gore for any of their real misconduct and violations of the law, whether in fundraising scandals, violations of the Constitution or possible breaches of national security, I would have been a lot more enthusiastic about the entire process; instead they chose to go after him for the most trivial of his failures and his lies about them.  Consequently, they could not actually remove him, even though he had broken the law, because the basis for the entire proceeding was ultimately too trivial to merit taking the political risk.  

In the case of this “scandal,” it is possible that something unethical is going on here, but if the case of Iglesias in New Mexico is representative the unethical behaviour may have been Iglesias’.  He may have demonstrated a lack of diligence in prosecuting voter fraud, and he may have done this because he didn’t want to upset the powers-that-be in Santa Fe.  Which is more corrupting of the course of justice: a prosecutor who overlooks prosecutable crimes, possibly out of concern for his own political career, or the administration that fires him because he does this?  The people outraged by this scandal often want to deal in great generalities (where the political firing of political appointees is political and therefore somehow bad), even though they insist that it is the details that indict the administration here.  The Democratic approach seems to be to keep stressing how “serious” the charges are: “Perverting the course of justice!  Politicisation of the law!These are very serious charges that have to be addressed!”  Baseless, meaningless charges in these particular cases, maybe, but very serious.  What baffles me is why the Democrats are pushing so hard on this.  Do they really want people to start digging into questions of voting irregularities in 2004?  Do New Mexican Democrats really want to get into an ethics contest with Pete Domenici?  They would lose.  Guaranteed.  And I don’t even like Pete Domenici.    

It seems that the main knock on the administration is that, after being the most obtusely politically-obsessed administration in its hirings of key managers and major agency heads, when it finally fired some political appointees for equally political reasons (and perhaps some other reasons as well) it refused to admit its political motivations and pretended that it actually cared about competence.  Since they have never cared about competence in six years, everyone could tell that something was fishy, and the AUSAs being denigrated didn’t want to suffer the indignity of being called incompetent.  This is the case even though, according to folks back in New Mexico, David Iglesias handled the prosecution of Robert Vigil pretty incompetently and only barely got a conviction in the second go-round, and he probably ran his office just as badly as he ran the Vigil prosecution.  So people are mad about this because…why exactly?  Because it proves the administration is incompetent?  We knew that already.  Now they are just shooting themselves in the foot politically rather than starting a war or abandoning an American city to be annihilated.  That sounds like a kind of progress to me!