Lost Highway Times...Paths in Oblivion

Which is to say that when the government turns on them then they think there's a problem.

The title link is to a story about how Democratic senators are now pressing for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to resign. They say that the reasons are the politically motivated firings of federal prosecutors and misuses of the Patriot Act. But we've seen evidence, albeit indirect because so much of the Patriot Act process is secret, about abuses of the Patriot Act before and nobody in government not the Democrats or the Republicans, seemed to care.

To me, it seems like the government's firing of prosecutors is being given much more press and is being taken much more seriously than John Conyers' statements about the Patriot Act and the report that his committee commissioned, which would be the first real government investigation into how the thing has been used.

Maybe I'm just not reading the right news sources, but the attorney's being fired story is being followed in excruciating detail while the Patriot Act story is largely dying down except for the ACLU rebutting FBI claims that it really hadn't made many errors.

I think the reason for the disparity is that the firing of the prosecutors involves lawyers, who belong to the same social class as many members of Congress. Many members of Congress are in fact lawyers and lawyers are present on Capitol Hill en masse.

So when members of Congress see people who work for the same government they're part of, of the same social class, be arbitrarily fired by the President, they freak out because they know that if he can do it to the prosecutors that other people from the political class may be next.