McKay talked to the P-I, oh my

A P-I article suggests that John McKay was also being targeted for dismissal partly because he talked to the newspaper.

Two months before U.S. Attorney John McKay was fired, top Justice Department officials traded e-mails excoriating McKay for commenting in a Seattle P-I story about deep budget cuts and layoffs in his office.

If you read the full article, McKay made the mistake of pointing out failures at DOJ regarding intelligence sharing.

As shoephone at Evergreen Politics puts it after poring through the emails released last night:

Sadly, it's not a novel. It's Your Government at Work. The insecurity and hostility of those populating the place is rivaled only by the idiocy most of us displayed in junior high school. The spoiled kids at the DOJ don't appreciate people with independent streaks and that's one of the main reasons they didn't like John McKay. He didn't fall in line well enough or often enough.

This is an administration that claimed the GWOT is so important that they could discard ancient legal standards and violate whichever laws they deemed necessary. And here you have a guy like McKay trying to make sure that law enforcement can do a good job fighting terrorism, and a bunch of sick Republican political hacks decide it's more important to exact revenge against McKay.

This scandal is the defining symbolic moment of what it meant to be a Republican Party official or politician in the Bush II era. Far worse policies and failures have occured, like the war in Iraq and the aftermath of Katrina, but this one crystallizes for the public the vindictive and incompetent nature of today's GOP.

If Alberto Gonzales had any honor he would resign today, but the buck never stops anywhere with these people.