and

#188 looseheadprop

one thing i think is important to take into consideration in evaluating comey as dag re padilla is

when you are working in a corrupt and dangerous environment,

you must never, ever take on all the bad guys at once.

if comey was dealing with fitzgerald/plame, and with other matters we don’t know about, and with trying to save the doj from greater white house influence,

he may have had to take a pass on the padilla matter.

you can label that “giving in” if you choose,

but to me

it is just using common sense and wisdom to “stay alive and effective” in a treacherous environment.

equally, one could fault fitzgerald for having let rove off,

but to me it was very wise, in a matter involving the office of the president,

to make sure you had a simple, clean, and bullet-proof case.

that’s what fitzgerald did.

i would guess that fitzgerald re rove

and

comey re padilla

would be delighted to take another crack at those cases.

it would have been brave and morally upstanding to comment publicly on padilla or to indict rove,

but doing so would have put at risk some much needed smaller success against the white house’s corrupt influence on american government.

before you take an absolutist position on comey re padilla,

consider that the comey/fitzgerald attack on the bush white house vis-a-vis plame’s outing was the beginning of the end for bush/rove/cheney corruption.

that little sapper venture against bush corruption blew just enough of a hole in the dam to let truth come trickling thru.

and now truth is pouring thru an ever widening breach.

that’s some accomplishment.

playing a game of moral all or nothing with the bush gang is not smart strategy;

only our american fantasy heroes like superman could have gotten away with that.

why did comey leave the doj?

and

wow, this man would be one hell of a great leader for doj.

just the way he talked about getting out into the field,

about the violent crimes initiative,

about listening to employees,

about being “turned around” by the arguments of a subordinate,

about the pride he and other doj folks take in their work

about the satisfaction of helping others.

we should be so lucky as to have comey for ag.

but in this administration,

it would take more than luck,

it would take an act of god or nature.

You seem to want to have it both ways. On the one hand, you say Comey’s position as the US attorney for Southern New York is nearly autonomous and one of the highest in the Justice Department. On the other, you think he will forget the fundamentals of the Constitution as soon as a father figure presents him with a difficult case. I thought he was chosen the USA for the SDNY precisely because he couldn’t be intimidated.

The same I should point out can be said for your example of Colin Powell he was the Secretary of State and a former general not a mid level functionary. He was just potentially at odds with a small handful of the top players of which he was one.

Powell and Comey can’t be both the top guy and not the top guy. They can’t both be tough guys and ready to roll over for anyone.

jayt @ 67

Stephen Parrish, CPA says
May 5th, 2007 at 4:28 pm

Mr. Parrish:

(Oft) Any idea how Wolfowitz’s girlfriend gets her salary tax-free?

Isn’t she domiciled in the U.S.?

Senior Employees of the World Bank are considered to have Diplomatic status, and Diplomats aren’t taxed (apparently).

Its not just “senior employees”. All employees at the Fund and the Bank are paid tax-free.

You know I repsect greatly. But the world is nt nearly as simple as you make it out to be and your analysis, while incredibly thorough displays the classic fault of al monday mornug quarterbacking.

Decisions that seem so clear now, made from the comfort of your armchair, are vry different from those made when there were other competing things going on, when information was incomplete, when there were too many balls up in the air.

You are very right about one thing, Jose Padilla was a rbid dog and if swinging a bucket of fisionable material over his head to create a centrafuge so he cold make a dirty bomb, I think he would have done so.

That does not excuse the damage that has been done to the rule of law. Nothing does.

But, I don’t think a) you appreciate the legal and procedural limits on his power once Padilla was laready in custody. To drop a case after that point required a lot of peole to sign off and without clear exculpatory proof, it would be hard to get that to happen.

b) I don’t think you understand the climate he was living in. Rove’s great genius was toget preople to doubt their own judgement. It only works on decent people.

They create a climate where if you think you want to act in contravention of the Admin., that they had you convinced it was just your own pride and belief taht you knew better than your bosses. They also stack the meetings so that you are the only one decenting, and so if not quite convince you that you are wrong, make you hestitate and put your own opinion to the side because how could evey other person in the room see things differntly if you are right? So, absent clear proof that you are right, you hestitate–again.

It explains why Powell got punked into going to the UN and telling that fantasy story.

They isolate you from people who would support your view, or they distract you with other genuine emergencys where you have a clear decision and can act for the good.

In your life, if you have several decisions in front of you and these 3 over here, you know exactly what you think and can act on them today and dod soemthing good today. Then there are those other decisions where you are not sure what the best path is. Other people, people who claim to know more than you and who you regard as authority figures, tell you that you are dead wrong and don’t understand, they also limit your ability to talk things over with the folks in your life who have heretofore provided prespective and gut check. What tends to happen? you hesitate to make a fuss, because you are doubting your self, you are not sure you are right.

Do you have guilt afterwards? yeah.

If you have never had that experience, you have lived a far more charmed life than I.

You know, before I became a rugby referee, I was very critical of many of the folks that reffed the games I played in. Then I tried to do it myself. It was so much harder than I ever could have imagined.

It’s not just the pressure of making the decision in real time (which you have taken into account) lots of folks on the sifdelines of the game can make the correct call in real time, so why can’t the ref?

It’s the sprinting, it’s the pressures of game management, not just diagnoses and whistleing, it’s the need to try to think ahead so as to be in position for the next phase of play, and then there is timekeeping.

I used to be closto infallible making correct calls from the sidelines, and my scores on the referees written exams should have qualified me for a very high slot, but I was a terrible referee. Why? There is so much more to the on the feild experience.

It’s not that I cracked under pressure. It’s more that I was distracted from analyzing things clearly in real time because I had so much esle going on.

I know this explaination is not adaquate, but if you could spend even a week trying to do what he was called upon to do, I thihnk you opinion would change dramtically.

One last thing, mary you are clearly a person who questions authority and does not hold authority figures in awe.

Like lots of Irish Catholics (but, by no means all) everything about his public demeanor make clear that Comey believes in authority figures and in repsect for the office even when there is no respect for the office holder.

Just like the Constitution is mor ehtan just a piece of paper, the office of the president is more than Shrubya. It may be an old fashioned world view, but I understand it on a gut level.

It’s easy to sit on the nice safe sidelines and criticize. It pains me when people sit and take shots at a guy who did so well, under such difficult circumstance, because he didn;t do even better.

We didn’t stop Shrub from doing anything. Comey stopped him from doing a lot of things. And he did it without any help or support from us.

thank you for the additional background.

it’s even worse than i thought.

The fact that out of 100 Senators, two republicans with knowledge of bush senior crimes died in separate plane crashes less than 24 hours apart before they would possibly be asked to testify in Iran-Contra ( Sen. Tower and Mrs. Kerry’s first husband, Sen. Heinz) as well as the other Congressional plane crashes, auto crashes and other suspicious deaths (the Dems main Social Security expert just before bush tried to destroy SS) shows that we must offer real protections to witnesses and prosecutors from bushinc and their puppetmaster financial elites and Israel.