-By Warner Todd Huston
In 2007 when Barack Obama was running for President the first time there was a controversy raging over whether U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez was right to accede to President Bush’s order to fire a handful of U.S. attorneys. Obama then criticized the AG for politicizing the office. Flash forward to 2013 and he’s now standing up for an AG that is far worse than what he claimed Gonzalez ever was.
The controversy over Gonzalez was a manufactured, fake, left-wing nothing of a controversy, of course, because U.S. attorneys serve at the President’s discretion and many presidents have fired theirs. Clinton fired all of his and even Carter fired one for “political reasons.”
In any case, then Senator Obama went on CNN’s Larry King Live to rip Bush and to say that his AG was acting too politically.
Obama criticized AG Gonzalez for seeming to think his role is “being the president’s attorney instead of being the people’s attorney.” Obama also claimed that Gonzales should be fired because he wasn’t “somebody who was actually trying to look out for the American people’s interests.”
Flash forward to 2013 and we have an Attorney General who has created the most politicized Department of Justice in history. Yet, today Obama has forgotten all about those high-minded concepts that an AG that should be “the people’s attorney” and is happily standing by his political enforcer, Eric Holder.
Now Obama is the President who has an AG that acts as his political enforcer, a man who does his job as if it is part of his boss’s political campaign instead of an autonomous office whose goal is to enforce the laws of the United States of America. Not only that, but we have an AG that is far and away more political with his actions than any AG in history.
Yet, Obama stands by this partisan hack even when members of his own party call for his resignation.
Once again we see that Obama is a liar and hypocrite.
Transcript of March 19 Larry King Live broadcast:
Larry King: All right, the most important — I guess the major issue at hand these days is Alberto Gonzales’ firing of the U.S. attorneys.
What’s your read?
Senator Barack OBama: Well, I voted against Alberto Gonzales’ confirmation for precisely the reason that we’re seeing now. My–and I said this on the floor of the Senate–that although he seemed to be a capable attorney, he seemed to conceive of his role as being the president’s attorney instead of being the people’s attorney.
And part of the role of the attorney general is to say to the executive branch here are the limits of your power. Here are the things that you can’t do.
I don’t think Alberto Gonzales ever told the president that there was something he could not do.
And so, as a consequence, when the White House decides that a–a U.S. attorney is not carrying out the political vendettas of the White House, then there are some questions as to whether Gonzales was encouraged to fire these individuals.
You’ve got a situation in terms of the FBI where the procedures used for issuing national security letters seemed to have been completely sloppy and based on erroneous fact. There doesn’t seem to be any oversight there.
What you get a sense of is a–an attorney general who saw himself as an enabler of the administration as opposed to somebody who was actually trying to look out for the American people’s interests.
And for that reason, I think it’s time for him to step down and for another attorney general who can exercise some independence to be put for the reminder of this president’s term.
(H/T Where Are My Keys)
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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