Why Does the Prosecutor Purge Matter?

Well, here's a big reason:

The leader of the Justice Department team that prosecuted a landmark lawsuit against tobacco companies said yesterday that Bush administration political appointees repeatedly ordered her to take steps that weakened the government's racketeering case.

Sharon Y. Eubanks said Bush loyalists in Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales's office began micromanaging the team's strategy in the final weeks of the 2005 trial, to the detriment of the government's claim that the industry had conspired to lie to U.S. smokers.

She said a supervisor demanded that she and her trial team drop recommendations that tobacco executives be removed from their corporate positions as a possible penalty. He and two others instructed her to tell key witnesses to change their testimony. And they ordered Eubanks to read verbatim a closing argument they had rewritten for her, she said.

"The political people were pushing the buttons and ordering us to say what we said," Eubanks said. "And because of that, we failed to zealously represent the interests of the American public."

Politics in; zealous representation of the interests of the American public out.

Does that sound familiar? It should. It's the raison d'être of modern conservatism, fanatically pursued and largely realized by the Bush administration. The American public is now only worth as much as they provide cheap labor to corporations, votes to keep conservatives in power, and cannon fodder for the military-industrial complex. That might have sounded like some sort of conspiracy theory or communist hyperbole not so long ago, but consider what the Bush administration and the (formerly) GOP-led Congress actually did for the American public in Bush's first six years. They didn't raise the minimum wage, or create new jobs, or protect existing jobs, or strengthen workers' rights, or make voting easier, or require elections with verifiable paper trails, or improve schools, or clean up the environment, or decrease poverty, or increase access to affordable healthcare, or ensure equality of every American under the law, or reduce the deficit, or make the country safer. No—they gave us tax cuts, piddling amounts for most Americans, while they bled the federal coffers dry and then some. They gave us an unwinnable war, more hunger, more poverty, more homelessness, more people with no insurance, more offshored jobs, more rewards for corporations taking jobs offshore, more global terrorism, more national insecurity, and fewer civil rights.

From Dick Cheney's secret energy commission to the subversion of habeas corpus, it was politics in; zealous representation of the interests of the American public out. The prosecutor purge represents more of the same. More politics, to the benefit of BushCo.'s political allies, the American people be damned.

And so we are.