The storyline. That's the thing. Feed the storyline.
The media has been just enthralled with the idea that the removal of political appointees, and their replacement with other political appointees, somehow constitutes a grand scandal, since it's a Republican adminstration that did it. The storyline was promoted again in a Reuters piece on Friday.
An assistant attorney general at the Justice Department announced her resignation on Friday, becoming the seventh official to quit the department since the Democratic-led Congress launched an investigation in March into the firing of nine federal prosecutors. Rachel Brand, assistant attorney general for legal policy, said she would step down on July 9. No reason was given.
Sounds pretty suspicious, doesn't it? Pretty sinister? Just more fuel on the fire that is the scandal of the President exercising his power to appoint and remove federal prosecutors.
But maybe, if they'd actual done some investigation and research, they could have reported it differently. At NationalReview.com, Ed Whelan has some relevant information:
To anyone who knows Rachel, that news would hardly come as a big surprise. With the exception of a one-year Supreme Court clerkship, she’s toiled tirelessly in the Bush Administration since January 2001, first in the Office of White House Counsel, then in OLP. She became head of OLP in July 2005, just in time for the exhausting work of preparing Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito for their confirmation hearings. I recall hearing from Rachel a year or so ago that she wasn’t planning to stay in the Administration for the remainder of President Bush’s second term. The timing of her decision to step down was plainly dictated by the fact that she’s due to give birth to her first child in August.
Hey, why let the facts get in the way of a good smear, right?
