Gonzales affair

Dorothy Wickenden writing in the 4/2/07 New Yorker provides the essence of the Gonzales affair in an even-handed manner as follows:

“The President has the right to hire U.S. Attorneys with like-minded political leanings. The prosecutors are political appointees and, as such, are often replaced at the start of the President’s term. What’s unusual is to fire them in the middle of their own four-year terms. Assembling a compatible legal team is on thing; expecting its members to tailor individual investigations to partisan demands is another. The firings are symptomatic of how the Administration’s zeal for political loyalty and its intolerance of independent thinking result in chaos."