Sometimes when I read the Daily Kos, I am just shocked by what I find. This is one of those times:

Some day, once the current GOP dominance collapses under the weight of their corruption, we’ll have Dems playing the same dirty game. Republicans rally around their sleaziest bad-government practicioners, as we know the elephant flies above the Stars and Stripes to the typical Bush/DeLay apologist.

The moral imperative behind a “clean government” crusade is self-evident. But there’s also a practical reason to oppose corruption even amongst Democrats — it’s a sure-fire way to lose elections. Rampant Democratic corruption cost us Congress in 1994, and we’ve yet to recover. And continued Democratic corruption has made House Dems wary of charging ahead with the “corruption” theme to hard, lest some of the current members get snared in the web.

Good. Let those who sit in Congress enriching themselves go down. They are supposed to be doing the people’s business, not their own. Unlike the GOP apologists, I consider corruption a non-partisan issue. I’d like to see them all thrown out with the Capitol trash.

I concur. And for extra fun, it even comes with a dig at Kerry at the end.

I ConcurPost + Comments (24)

This post by Matthew Stinson is about the best thing I have seen written on the Crawford political circus I have seen yet.

And here is another opinion worth checking out.

And Peter Daou asks:

I posed the question in this space last week, and I’ll repeat it: what would happen if Rove-Plame or Cindy Sheehan got the Natalee Holloway treatment? Would it change the course of history?

While Rove/Plame has not been as sensationalized as Holloway, I fail to see any shortage of ink on the issue. I have a feeling the same will come of the Sheehan affair.

Last on SheehanPost + Comments (141)

A report in the NY Times on the tensions between Congress and the FBI is worth your time:

Disputes between the Justice Department and some of its Congressional allies over the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s performance, leadership vacancies and management issues are spurring tensions at a time when the department is seeking to remake its antiterrorism operations.

Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, the influential chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in an interview on Friday that he was deeply dissatisfied with the pace of reforms at the F.B.I. and that he hoped the national intelligence director’s new role in overseeing its terrorism operations would spur greater accountability at the Justice Department.

“Bringing in the director of national intelligence is a firm statement of dissatisfaction with the performance of the bureau and the director,” Robert S. Mueller III, Mr. Specter said.

“When you have all these issues where the F.B.I. has not performed, there’s no doubt that the director is on the spot,” he said in perhaps his harshest criticism to date of Mr. Mueller’s performance. “He’s not responsible for 9/11 – the problems came before his watch – but that was four years ago, and we’ve expected a lot of things to happen since then that have not happened…”

Among the issues that have divided them are the failure of the bureau’s $170 million software overhaul, after repeated assertions by Mr. Mueller that it was on track, as well as F.B.I. turf battles with immigration agents, questions about the training and experience of bureau counterterrorism supervisors, and complaints from lawmakers who learned that Mr. Mueller had not been writing or reviewing written Congressional responses that bore his name.

Bureau officials said on Sunday that they were puzzled to learn of Mr. Specter’s criticism.

“We have a lot of people going after us lately, but it’s not like we haven’t made an amazing transformation,” said an F.B.I. official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he did not want to jeopardize relations with Congress. “This is not the same agency it was four years ago.”

Officials at the Justice Department, which oversees the F.B.I., said they were confident the bureau was making strong progress in bolstering its counterterrorism operations, with new personnel moves announced just last week as part of a major restructuring. They added that they had full confidence in Mr. Mueller’s ability to reshape the agency…

Judiciary Committee members said that for the first time in memory, none of the most senior officials at the Justice Department – Mr. Gonzales, Mr. Flanigan, Robert D. McCallum Jr., the No. 3 official there, or Ms. Fisher, if she is confirmed – would have experience as a criminal prosecutor.

Justice Department officials said that while the department’s most senior officials might not have been criminal prosecutors, they all had significant experience in the department’s top priority, countering terrorism. They also said that Mr. Gonzales had surrounded himself with senior Justice Department advisers who had extensive experience as criminal prosecutors.

But Mr. Specter said the lack of criminal experience at the top of the department “does concern me.” He said that while there were “lots of first-class professionals” throughout the ranks of prosecutors, “there are tough judgment calls that have to be made at the top, and it’s good to have some experience on what criminal intent means when you have to make those decisions.”

Something else to keep an eye on. If anyone has anymore background else on this, please link it in the comments.

FBI/Congresssional TensionsPost + Comments

Not sure what use the Daily Flame thread is, since flame wars have erupted in virtually every comment thread, but via Memeorandum, this story by Murry Waas that actually has new information:

Justice Department officials made the crucial decision in late 2003 to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the leak of the identity of undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame in large part because investigators had begun to specifically question the veracity of accounts provided to them by White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove, according to senior law enforcement officials.

Several of the federal investigators were also deeply concerned that then attorney general John Ashcroft was personally briefed regarding the details of at least one FBI interview with Rove, despite Ashcroft’s own longstanding personal and political ties to Rove, the Voice has also learned. The same sources said Ashcroft was also told that investigators firmly believed that Rove had withheld important information from them during that FBI interview.

Those concerns by senior career law enforcement officials regarding the propriety of such briefings continuing, as Rove became more central to the investigation, also was instrumental in the naming of special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald…

Also of concern to investigators when they sought Ashcroft’s recusal, according to law enforcement sources, was that a number among Ashcroft’s inner circle had partisan backgrounds that included working closely with Rove. Foremost among them was David Isrealite, who served as Ashcroft’s deputy chief of staff. Another, Barbara Comstock, who was the Justice Department’s director of public affairs during much of Ashcroft’s tenure, had previously worked for the Republican National Committee, where she was in charge of the party’s “opposition research” operations.

“It would have been a nightmare scenario if Ashcroft let something slip to an aide or someone else they had in common with Rove . . . and then word got back to Rove or the White House what investigators were saying about him,” says a former senior Justice Department official, familiar with the matter.

You know the drill.

Daily Plame Flame ThreadPost + Comments (6)