Detecting principle

You may detect a faint whiff of sulfur. I have only gone over to the dark side briefly to read what they are thinking over on the right. This also accounts for admitting to the existence of Dick Morris as I did in the post before this one.

Since I have cast myself as a moralist more or less, I have made the detection of principles my business when I read: are any consistent rules about right and wrong showing or to be inferred?

Your principles and any claim to have principles may be a crock if you can't see the same problems as others who, though with different principles, do operate from a principled rather than a dumbly partisan view of the world.

These days, the professional conservative Andrew Sullivan writes, with increasing frequency, the same damning posts about how the administration is promoting rot in areas of rule-of-law, civil liberties, etc as many of us progressives have been writing all along. Don't be alarmed, cats have not started sleeping with dogs and Sullivan still says good things about the war in Iraq, George Will and GOP presidential hopefuls...I'm just saying he's not blind [and I am loving the well deserved trashings with which he repays the coultergeist.]

So these are the days when those with a few scruples are to be distinguished from those with a stake in the current climate of corruption. I say current. We vanquished hopelessness last November but have yet to accomplish much else in turning the tide of anti-democratic meddling and abuse of privilege that creep toward fascism. Andrew is not flunking here, not at all.

We look moment by moment for new revelations of tampering with justice by the administration but I have to stop and think what these events say about the character of the sacked attorneys. I take back every nasty generality I may ever have uttered against lawyers as a profession. The Attorneys fired by Gonzales for for not executing political dirty tricks were all appointees of that administration: All lawyers by training who recognized a greater allegiance to law and the rule of law than they do to the raw cult power and pyramid of fealty that bushco thinks should be the real force in government. In a way, I have actually made this apology to lawyers once before, but here we have a proving incident to cite. If that does not redeem lawyers in the eyes of any of you who still crack lawyer jokes then consider how close you are to the right winger's position on such matters: long before the coultergiest barfed up her latest slurs against Edwards, there was a right wing campaign against him as a VP candidate wherein the wingers expected us to find Edwards a questionable person because he was (oh horrors!) a "trial lawyer". Not that Gonzales didn't got to law school too but you really have to wonder what marks he got in Ethics.

These few attorneys who bucked the coercing to execute a directive that was wrong in their eyes paid a high price but earned my respect. There are people in the administration who operate on principle....and they are systematically being weeded out.