Category Archives: Wingnuts Being Wingnuts

Some Poor Are More Deserving Than Others

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The House GOP continues its war on the poor by underfunding agriculture and food safety programs, but this part of their budget proposal is really, um, special —

And in a surprising twist, the bill language specifies that only rural areas are to benefit in the future from funding requested by the administration this year to continue a modest summer demonstration program to help children from low-income households — both urban and rural — during those months when school meals are not available.

Since 2010, the program has operated from an initial appropriation of $85 million, and the goal has been to test alternative approaches to distribute aid when schools are not in session. The White House asked for an additional $30 million to continue the effort, but the House bill provides $27 million for what’s described as an entirely new pilot program focused on rural areas only.

Democrats were surprised to see urban children were excluded. And the GOP had some trouble explaining the history itself. But a spokeswoman confirmed that the intent of the bill is a pilot project in “rural areas” only.

Gee, I wonder why they’d have issues about aid to urban but not rural children (she said, not really wondering). See also Josh Marshall.

The New Black Helicopters

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Oh, by the way, there will be a violent takeover of the federal government this weekend. If you live in the DC area, there could be traffic tie-ups.

Self-styled revolutionary patriots plan to converge on Washington, D.C., this week to drive President Barack Obama and disloyal lawmakers out of office.

“We are calling for the removal of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Harry Reid, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Nancy Pelosi, and Eric Holder as a start toward constitutional restoration,” said retired Army Col. Harry Riley, leader of the Operation American Spring protest group. “They have all abandoned the US Constitution, are unworthy to be retained in a position that calls for servant status.”

I don’t recall which part of the Constitution provides for mobs driving elected officials out of office, but I’m sure it’s in there somewhere. These guys are all about the Constitution, you know.

Operation American Spring aims to pressure those lawmakers who remain — or are replaced by officials of their own choosing — “to sponsor and pass very Constitutionally crafted State legislation to dissolve the size, powers, scope and spending of the U.S. Government by 2/3rds.”

Um, dudes, the Constitution doesn’t give state legislatures the authority to do that. You have to get two-thirds of the states to call a convention to amend the Constitution before you can do that.

The activists say they expect 10 million to 30 million like-minded Americans to join them Friday in the nation’s capital for a rally patterned after Occupy Wall Street and “Arab Spring” protests.

You see what I mean about the traffic.

They also plan a sister event the same day in Bunkerville, Nevada, where militia groups have gathered to support scofflaw rancher Cliven Bundy in his dispute with the federal government.

One of the chapters in The Book (Rethinking Religion: Finding a Place for Religion in a Modern, Tolerant, Progressive, Peaceful and Science-affirming World) is about “True Believers and Mass Movements,” which more or less argues that many people have a proclivity for believing ridiculous things, and eliminating religion won’t stop that. In fact, according to current research in social psychology most of us live inside a kind of personal myth that colors how we understand everything.

Some of us do seem a tad more mythical than others, though.

Organizers also anticipate “incremental nullification” by state legislatures of “all withholding taxes, employment taxes, employer taxes, and income taxes.”

“This will effectively DOUBLE the size of ALL American Middle Class family weekly paychecks and cause our local city and town economies to boom,” the group promises on its Facebook page.

Oh, goody! They have a facebook page!

Tea Party Nation promoted Operation American Spring last month in an email to its members from founder Judson Phillips, who hinted at a violent response from the federal government, and sent invitations in January to the protest.

“There is no way a militia with small arms can defeat the kind of arms the U.S. government can bring to bear on such a battle, but one has to admire the courage of those people who showed up to confront them,” Phillips said, comparing the protest to the American Revolution. “That’s quintessentially American!”

I predict they’ll get about 86 guys in DC this weekend, and the U.S. government will ignore them unless they litter the mall or try to climb on the monuments. The DC Park Rangers are a vigilant crew.

Operation American Spring spokesman Terry Trussell told the “Patriot Nation” radio program that he feared Obama would order drone strikes on protesters, and host Mark Hoffman suggested participants bring emergency supplies and make other preparations in case of violence.

Drones are the new black helicopters, I take it. But you don’t need “emergency supplies” in DC except for cash and credit cards and some sunscreen for the white guys. Well, OK, they’re all white guys.

Riley told Before It’s News that his group does not want violence, but he admits that peaceful solutions have thus far proved ineffective.

“For more than five years, ‘we the people’ have been writing, calling, faxing Congress, the media, screaming in Town Halls, marching, rallying, demonstrating, petitioning, all to no avail,” Riley said.

Yeah, the rest of us went through eight years of that during the Bush Administration. It sucks.

Skipping a bit —

“Every political persuasion, rich, poor, every color, all ages, men, women, liberal, conservative, independent, unemployed, et al, are now mobilizing to participate in this peaceful, non-violent, cause in the search for constitutional restoration for America,” Riley said. “We have well over 1 million militia members mobilizing; bikers, truckers, hunters, Tea Party groups — citizens across America. No, I don’t think 10 million (participants) is high at all.”

Or, as a blogger speculated at Before It’s News, the whole operation could be a false flag planted by the Obama administration to launch a civil war.

I so want Christopher Guest to make a movie about this.

Little Boys With Big Toys

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Today the war between self-appointed “militia” and the BLM continues with a protest of the closing (in 2007) of Recapture Canyon, Utah, to motorized vehicles. Today a bunch of spoiled brats with big senses of entitlement plan to ride around Recapture Canyon on ATVs in the name of “freedom.” The issue with the area is that it is full of archeological sites, including some nearly intact Pueblo dwellings, and the ATVs were smashing things, which is why the BLM made it off limits to ATVs. Here’s a video made in 2010 that shows what the area is like:

(Update: Saturday’s Illegal Cliven Bundy-Endorsed ATV Rally Runs Through Sacred American Indian Sites)

As soon as the BLM said people had to stop riding ATVs in Recapture Canyon, the Spoiled Brat Militia, also called the Little Boys With Big Toys, made riding ATVs in Recapture Canyon a Big Deal Cause. Never mind that Utah is this huge sparsely populated state with who knows how many trails to ride on; if they can’t ride through Recapture canyon and smash up artifacts at will they are being Oppressed.

A fellow who loves the canyon named Don Peacock wrote,

One immediate consequence of the illegal ATV event is the cancellation of a well-planned trip for veterans co-sponsored by the BLM and the Sierra Club. I was to be a partner in this invaluable veterans’ program and had intended to address the vets at Sand Island, 20 miles south of Blanding, on the day following the ATV trip. Many of the veterans are, like myself, disabled from combat, with service-related trauma both physical and psychic. Native American medicine men were to prepare sweat lodges, along with traditional healing ceremonies. Navaho war veterans, whose ancestors were forced off these lands and fought in great numbers in our country’s foreign battles, had planned to assist the veterans healing program. I was especially enthusiastic to participate in the vets program because of the Navajo and the quality of the leadership of both BLM and Sierra Club outreach personnel. One of them wrote this on April 24:

“Due to the potential risk of an illegal ATV ride on BLM lands conflicting with our Cedar Mesa trek, we are postponing the event until October of this year. While the spiritual side of the event could be affected by the ATV ride, there is also the potential safety risk to BLM staff and trip participants due to the recent hostile atmosphere in the West surrounding these events.”

This great healing event for veterans has been pushed aside by a few ATV advocates insistent on illegally riding their silly toys. What a missed opportunity.

The Salt Lake Tribune reports:

Fed up with federal control over lands their families have used for generations, about 30 people on ATVs on Saturday drove into Recapture Canyon, a nearby trove of prehistoric sites the Bureau of Land Management closed to motorized use seven years ago.

San Juan County Commissioner Phil Lyman, acting as a private citizen, organized the event, which started with a rally in Blanding’s Centennial Park, to protest what he and supporters call federal “overreach” into local jurisdiction. Prompting the protest is their anger with what they say is the BLM’s failure to process San Juan County’s applications for ATV rights-of-way in Recapture, which is filled with Native America prehistoric sites.

It’s federal land; there is no “local jurisdiction” and never has been. These guys are destroying things that belong to all of us.

… there was little sympathy from environmental, hunting and preservation groups, as well as tribal members, who claim an ancestral affiliation with the Native Americans who inhabited the canyon 1,000 years ago. Critics say ATV enthusiasts have themselves to blame for the closure by building an unauthorized trail over archaeological sites that harbors middens, kivas, farming plots and cooking areas.

Vehicle traffic accelerates erosion of intact deposits under the routes, which can help reveal how prehistoric people thrived in this arid landscape, but only if studied in proper scientific context, according to Jerry Spangler of the Colorado Plateau Archaeological Alliance.

“Damage to archaeological sites is permanent and the information about our collective past is then lost forever,” Spangler said. “It is sad that irreplaceable treasures of importance to all Americans would be sacrificed on the altar of anti-government fervor. It is worse that protesters would be so blinded to their own insensitivity as to what others consider to be sacred treasures of their past.”

They don’t care about anybody but themselves and their “right” to ride around in noisy, smelly vehicles and ruin things for everyone else. Little boys with big toys.

Desperately Seeking Desperation

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The New York Times editorial board gets shrill:

The hottest competition in Washington this week is among House Republicans vying for a seat on the Benghazi kangaroo court, also known as the Select House Committee to Inflate a Tragedy Into a Scandal. Half the House has asked to “serve” on the committee, which is understandable since it’s the perfect opportunity to avoid any real work while waving frantically to right-wing voters stomping their feet in the grandstand.

They won’t pass a serious jobs bill, or raise the minimum wage, or reform immigration, but House Republicans think they can earn their pay for the rest of the year by exposing nonexistent malfeasance on the part of the Obama administration. On Thursday, they voted to create a committee to spend “such sums as may be necessary” to conduct an investigation of the 2012 attack on the consulate in Benghazi, Libya. The day before, they voted to hold in contempt Lois Lerner, the former Internal Revenue Service official whom they would love to blame for the administration’s crackdown on conservative groups, if only they could prove there was a crackdown, which they can’t, because there wasn’t.

It may be starting to dawn on some of them that Obamacare isn’t going to be the magic bullet to a midterm sweep that they had assumed, which has a lot to do with why Benghazi!!! is so important to them now. Because it’s all they’ve got.

You know they’re getting desperate when they start asking each other why the Democrats are so afraid of [fill in the blank]. This is something they do whenever the Democrats call bullshit on their grandstanding. (See? They aren’t cooperating. They must be afraid!)

Lots of Griping on the Western Front

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This is what Freedom!® looks like, folks:

Yes, it looks a lot like a Monty Python skit.

It may be we won’t need reinforcements after all, as the Cliven Commandos appear to be on the brink of taking each other out.

The armed anti-government play-warriors who built a military force around a racist redneck rancher in Nevada have split into rival factions and are now at the brink of civil war, calling each other crazies and traitors and spreading rumors that Eric Holder planned a drone strike on them. . . .

. . . In this Waco-wacko Woodstock of woolly-bully mountain men, the irony and the insanity spiked last weekend when leaders of the most prominent militia group, the Oath Keepers, began complaining of armed madmen “in the camp running amok.” They eventually pulled back from their positions, claiming they had received intelligence suggesting that the Obama administration’s attack drones were incoming.

That “redeployment” pissed off other armed patriots who stayed behind in Nevada, who now call the Oath Keepers and their prominent leader, Stewart Rhodes, cowards and traitors who might actually be working for the U.S. government. “They committed a deliberate act of desertion,” Blaine Cooper—a de facto leader of the remaining militiamen—said in his own video, embedded at the top of this post.

They appear to sincerely believe Eric Holder has ordered a drone strike to take them out, and the fact that this hasn’t happened yet is attributed to the mighty power of their stalwart resolution. I’d also hate to think what they all smell like by now. I’m thinking that if they don’t shoot each other soon either the fumes or the summer heat will at least cause them to redeploy back home. No need to waste taxpayer dollars on drones.

Speaking of crazy, I’m closing in on finishing The Book, and there’s a chapter on True Believers and Mass Movements that these guys fit right into. I’ve been helped a lot by a book called The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science by Will Storr (Overlook Press, 2014). This book actually is a kind of meditation on why people believe crazy things, and it is absolutely fascinating. I just wish Storr had spent some time with 9/11 truthers, who I think qualify as enemies of science, or at least enemies of things like gravity and principles of architecture.

Storr suggests that our brains haven’t evolved as far beyond the age of myth as we’d like to pretend, and we all live inside our own personal myth. Our experiences are framed by our personal, mythical (and usually self-flattering) narratives, not data. We feel emotions and impulses, generated in the subconscious, that we cannot explain, so we make up stories to explain them. We create our stories from our biases, however, not from objective fact, and that’s how we interpret the world. And we all do this.

I would argue that some of us are better at critically examining what we want to believe, though. We may hear a rumor about X, and we may want to believe it, and we may flirt with believing it. But then we cast about for something approximating objective fact to support X, and if we don’t find it we (possibly reluctantly) put X aside, clinging to a hope that maybe it’s true while acknowledging that it probably isn’t.

Others of us, apparently, lack self-critical filters and embrace whatever we want to believe as the Holy Truth. And if you can find others who have embraced the same beliefs, you’ve got yourself a mass movement, or at least a Band of Feedback Loopy Brothers.

Git Along, Little Wingnuts

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U.S. Congressman Steven Horsford (D-Nevada) sent this letter to the Clark County Sheriff, home of our old buddy Cliven:

April 27, 2014

Sheriff Douglas C. Gillespie
Clark County Sheriff’s Department
400 S. Martin L. BLVD
Las Vegas, NV 89106

Dear Sheriff Gillespie,

I am writing to bring your attention to the ongoing situation in northeastern Clark County which has caused many of my constituents to fear for their safety.

Residents of Bunkerville and the surrounding area have expressed concern over the continual presence of multiple out-of-state, armed militia groups that have remained in the community since the BLM halted its actions to impound the cattle of Cliven Bundy earlier this month.

My constituents have expressed concern that members of these armed militia groups:

1. Have set up checkpoints where residents are required to prove they live in the area before being allowed to pass;
2. Have established a persistent presence along federal highways and state and county roads; and
3. Have established an armed presence in or around community areas including local churches, school, and other community locations.

We must respect individual constitutional liberties, but the residents of and visitors to Clark County should not be expected to live under the persistent watch of an armed militia. Their continual presence has made residents feel unsafe and maligned a quiet community’s peaceful reputation.

Residents have expressed their desire to see these groups leave their community. I appreciate the responsiveness and accessibility you and your office have provided during this difficult time for those directly impacted by the situation. I urge you to investigate these reports and to work with local leaders to ensure that their concerns are addressed in a manner that allows the community to move forward without incident.

Sincerely,

Steven Horsford
Member of Congress

First: Don’t any of these bozos have jobs?

Second: As John Cole said, patriotism looks a lot like domestic terrorism these days.

Adam Weinstein reports for Gawker:

Even though mainstream America was never with him, and the rightward fringes of mainstream America abandoned him after his 48-hour-virus of racial frankness, Bundy is still attended by untold numbers of camouflaged and heavily armed dudes dedicated to continuing “his fight with the government over his refusal to pay fees for his cattle to graze on federal land,” the Las Vegas Sun reports.

Weirdly, these jack-booted lugs don’t make Bundy’s neighbors grateful for their liberty.

I get the impression that the sheriff is not in a big rush to confront the militia. Has anyone talked to the governor about sending in National Guard? If these thugs were stopping me and asking for ID, I’d call the bleeping Guard myself.

Update: Wonkette is a must read on this.

All Your Billionaires Are Belong to Us

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John Hinderacker the Power Tool is livid that there’s a billionaire out there who has pledged support to … Democrats. This is unnatural; it violates the God-ordained order of things.

Billionaire hedge fund operator and “green” energy magnate Tom Steyer has pledged $100 million in the 2014 election cycle to help Democratic candidates who oppose the Keystone pipeline and who favor “green” energy over fossil fuels. Steyer claims to be a man of principle who has no financial interest in the causes he supports, but acts only for the public good. That is a ridiculous claim: Steyer is the ultimate rent-seeker who depends on government connections to produce subsidies and mandates that make his “green” energy investments profitable.

I don’t know John Steyer and have no idea where his head is. It may very well be that he’s taken a good, hard look at the world and reality and decided that, sooner or later, fossil fuel energy will be as extinct as the dodo and that the future will be green, and he might as well prepare himself to cash in.

To which I say, good for him. Imagine what the world would be like if the Koch Brothers suddenly had the same epiphany. Among other things, they’d stop subsidizing climate change denialism, and then maybe we’d actually be able to do something to, you know, save the planet. See, for example, Secret funding helped build vast network of climate denial thinktanks; Who Funds Contrariness on Climate Change? and Inside Koch’s Climate Denial Machine.

And by the way —

Koch Brothers likes to champion themselves as crusaders against the welfare state. But a new report shows that they took $88 million of your taxpayer dollars while demanding that governments stop wasting taxpayer dollars. In total, $110 billion goes out to corporate welfare projects from state and local authorities. This does not even include money coming from federal sources.

In other words, the Tool is angry that Steyer is doing exactly what the Koch Brothers are doing, except he’s doing in a way that benefits Democrats. It’s unnatural, I tell you … Although I do find it amusing that a tool like the Tool uses the term “rent-seeker” as an insult. He sounds almost like a socialist.

The GOP Crazy Arcade

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Most of the reviews of the SOTU coming from non-rightie media are describing it with words like “cautious,” “modest” and “conciliatory,” which tells me I didn’t miss anything interesting. According to the wingnuts, of course, the President as “Kommandant-In-Chef” — something like that hot-tempered British fellow who stars in all those cooking shows on cable, perhaps — announced tanks in the street and a new Politburo of Central Planning.

“The world is literally about to blow up,” Lindsey Graham (R-Drama Queen) said.

There were four Republican responses, two official and two not. Sensitive to the fact that women laugh at them but incapable of comprehending why, the Party called on two women representatives — Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Stockholm Syndrome) and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (likewise) to give Republican responses in English and Spanish. The womenfolk were assigned the task of sounding sane and reasonable without getting into specifics, and I don’t doubt they carried out their mission. But it seems the guys went their own way.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Bagger), who appointed himself to speak for the Tea Party, has noticed that “income inequality” is the new new buzz phrase, and he spoke of it in spite of not being entirely sure what it is.

“Today, Americans know in their hearts that something is wrong. Much of what is wrong relates to the sense that the ‘American Dream’ is falling out of reach for far too many of us,” Lee said. “We are facing an inequality crisis — one to which the President has paid lip-service, but seems uninterested in truly confronting or correcting.”

“But where does this new inequality come from? From government — every time it takes rights and opportunities away from the American people and gives them instead to politicians, bureaucrats and special interests.”

“Special interests,” like, I don’t know, the 1 percent, perhaps? OK, senator, and you keep favoring special interests, because . . .?

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Rand Paul) gave his own response, which I understand was videoed before the White House had even released the text of the SOTU. Paul evoked Ronald Reagan, blamed the 2008 financial meltdown on the Federal Reserve, and promised economic utopia through “economic freedom zones,” a plan that’s been tried already and doesn’t seem to work.

Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-Looney Tunes) had a meltdown on Maddow’s show after he was called out for some Tweets he posted while the President was speaking. Rep. Michael Grimm (R-Flunked Anger Management) threatened to break a reporter “in half.”

And Sen.Ted Cruz (R-Pure Unadulterated Bullshit) today is in the Wall Street Journal waxing sad about the “imperial presidency.” Do we want to talk about “obstruction,” and “refusing to govern,” Senator?

Fickle Fingers of Fate

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I’ve passed the 15,000 words mark in the ebook, and I think it’s going to take me another 10,000 words to say everything I want to say, although probably not more than that. So it’s cooking.

Meanwhile, here are a couple of things to read together. Charles Pierce quotes a Romney fundraiser who is still angry about “the hug” between Chris Christie and President Obama after Hurricane Sandy. The fundraiser thinks “the hug” gave the election to Obama. Pierce writes,

Part of me wants to point out that, apparently, the utterly self-centered cluelessness of the candidate spread pretty widely throughout all levels of the Romney campaign. (Christie was supposed to let his constituents fight each other for bottled water rather than accept help from the federal government? People on the Jersey Shore were supposed to live in lean-to’s until Willard closed on that new place in D.C.?) Part of me wants to point out that this is yet another indication that the prion disease afflicting the collective brain of the Republican party rages unabated. But a much bigger part of me wants to laugh and laugh until I fall down.

The point being that the clueless wonders who supported Romney never understood that elections are about governing. The whole governing thing seems to elude them.

At Salon, Elias Isquith argues that Christie’s tendency to stoop to governing now and then, or at least talking about it, is what’s behind the Tea Party’s intense dislike of him.

The difference in framing between how Christie’s describing his job and how, say, Sen. Rand Paul or Sen. Ted Cruz or Rep. Paul Ryan or even Gov. Scott Walker would describe their job is subtle but important. If Paul or Cruz or Ryan or Walker were bragging about their accomplishments in a victory speech — the moment above all others when a politician can “campaign in poetry,” as Gov. Mario Cuomo once said — they wouldn’t wax rhapsodic about their own management of the state. They wouldn’t make the point, as Christie did, that government is there to “give” and “work with” and “work for” its citizens.

On the contrary, they’d say something about “Getting government out of the way” or “Removing government’s barriers to liberty” or “Liberating the American spirit from big government’s red tape.” At most, theirs would be a grudging acknowledgement of the necessity of government, a recognition that much as they’d like to live in a world without an activist state, they’re willing to accept one, reduced to a minimum, all the same. Similarly, while Christie as governor has come to accept Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, and was too smart —and too pragmatic — to continue mounting a doomed bid to stop same-sex marriage from becoming a reality in his state, other top-tier Republicans, the ones the Tea Party actually likes, would more likely flaunt their ideological rigidity and relish the chance to fight a losing battle in the name of true conservative principles.

The rhetoric difference is also the difference between New Jersey and, say, Mississippi. You can’t win a statewide election in New Jersey by promising to shut down abortion clinics or promoting concealed or open carry laws or spouting homophobic nonsense. There’s a strong fiscal conservative streak in New Jersey, however, so yelling about the teacher’s union can get you some votes.

Nevertheless, if Christie hadn’t responded to Hurricane Sandy as he did, the state would have been done with him. He knew that. Everybody in New Jersey knew that. The fact that baggers nationwide can’t even fathom that tells me that Romney supporters aren’t the only ones who are clueless.

Do You Really Want to Talk About U.S. Attorneys, Righties?

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When I went to bed last night, conventional wisdom was that Chris Christie was on the ropes. But now I see the Noise Machine magicians have pulled a distraction out of a hat:

CNN, likely reporting on an email received last night from Reince Priebus:

Paul J. Fishman, the U.S. attorney tasked with looking into New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s bridge controversy, has donated to several Democratic politicians and organizations, according to Federal Election Commission records.

Most notably, Fishman – who was nominated for the post by President Barack Obama in June 2009 – donated to then-Sen. Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign on June 30, 2007. At the time of the contribution, Clinton was battling then-Sen. Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination. Fishman donated $2,300 to Clinton, according to the FEC.

Steve M says,

You know how this will be spun on the right, don’t you? Eric Holder’s Justice Department is now investigating Christie after refusing to investigate blah blah blah blah blah. Now the right has a liberal enemy in this matter. Game on

Because there’s nothing righties love more than painting themselves as the innocent victims of evil liberal oppression. Yesterday, the baggers saw Christie as a RINO. Within a few hours he’ll be Holy Saint Martyr Christopher of Blessed Persecution, or something.

But do indulge me as I take a little trip in the wayback payback machine to an item in the Maha Archives:

Further into the Kirkpatrick & Rutenberg article we find:

In New Jersey, Mr. Rove helped arrange the nomination of a major Bush campaign fund-raiser who had little prosecutorial experience.

That would be Christopher J. Christie.

Mr. Christie has brought public corruption charges against prominent members of both parties, but his most notable investigations have stung two Democrats, former Gov. James E. McGreevey and Senator Robert Menendez. When word of the latter inquiry leaked to the press during the 2006 campaign, Mr. Menendez sought to dismiss it by tying Mr. Christie to Mr. Rove, calling the investigation “straight out of the Bush-Rove playbook.” (Mr. McGreevey resigned after admitting to having an affair with a male aide and the Menendez investigation has not been resolved.)

Christie’s name popped up in another post from 2007, which led me to this NY Times editorial:

The Justice Department has been saying that it is committed to putting Senate-confirmed United States attorneys in every jurisdiction. But the newly released documents make it clear that the department was making an end run around the Senate — for baldly political reasons. Congress should broaden the investigation to determine whether any other prosecutors were forced out for not caving in to political pressure — or kept on because they did.

There was, for example, the decision by United States Attorney Chris Christie of New Jersey to open an investigation of Senator Bob Menendez just before his hotly contested re-election last November. Republicans, who would have held the Senate if Mr. Menendez had lost, used the news for attack ads. Then there was the career United States attorney in Guam who was removed by Mr. Bush in 2002 after he started investigating the superlobbyist Jack Abramoff. The prosecutor was replaced. The investigation was dropped.

Of course, if you point these inconsistencies out to righties they curl up into a fetal position and play the martyr well enough to make Joan of Arc at the stake look like a slacker.

BTW, the investigation into Menendez was closed by the Justice Department in 2011, but not in a way that made Christie look any less like a bully. Menendez had been collecting rent from a nonprofit community activist organization and had also helped the group secure a lot of federal grant money, so there was an appearance of quid pro quo. This was the matter that triggered the subpoena. But the rental arrangement had been pre-approved by the House Ethics Committee, so it’s not clear to me what Menendez was doing that warranted a subpoena, or that couldn’t have waited until (ahem) after the election.

BTW, the U.S. attorney who was originally assigned the Menendez case was Paul Fishman. But the newly appointed Fishman recused himself because Senator Menendez had backed him for the post.