Michael Mukasey

by tristero

In today’s Times, Adam Liptak discusses the career of Attorney General nominee Michael Mukasey. The general impression is one of a non-ideological judge, very “conservative” in the older sense of the term, and one who is intelligent, educated, and articulate.

Maybe Bush ran out of incompetent neo-Birchers to appoint, but that doesn’t seem possible, given his incredible enthusiasm for dipping into sewers to locate the worst-conceivable candidates available. More likely, Bush knew that if he nominated one more shit-eating rat, he knew he was in for a huge fight which he couldn’t entirely control.

In any event, I hope that the Senate takes notice of this for a potential line of questioning:

In a 1989 copyright case brought by Kennett Love, a former New York Times reporter who claimed that too much of an unpublished manuscript of his had been used in the defendant’s book, Judge Mukasey revealed a deep knowledge of history and journalism.

“It was once accepted,” Judge Mukasey wrote, “for journalists not to print information they believed disserved the national interest.” He went on to cite coverage of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s disability, of the overthrow of the Iranian government in 1953, of the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion and of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.

Judge Mukasey then quoted ruefully from an article by Max Frankel, a former executive editor of The Times, discussing how things changed after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination and as the Vietnam War progressed: “The essential ingredient was trust, and that was lost somewhere between Dallas and Tonkin.”

These somewhat ambiguous comments jibe with other hints that, for Mukasey, the government may, perhaps, deserve to be trusted. Needless to say, that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense in 2007 – whether it ever does is a whole other question – so it would be useful for someone to ask Mukasey whether he thinks the Bush administration should be entitled to any benefit of a doubt in its claims of trust.

I, for one, would very much like to hear his answer.

There’s another question I’d like him to address: Given the extent that the Bush administration has transformed the once prestigious office of Attorney General into a pathetic joke – when, that is, they haven’t exploited it for the most corrupt kind of politics – why on earth would he want the job?

—
[Full disclosure: Adam Liptak is a friend of mine. I immensely respect his journalism, but no one is immune to criticism (except The Man Called Petraeus and Crawford’s Own Churchill, but we knew that already). If you feel his article is biased – I didn’t – please say so. ]