The 5th Labor

Donald C. Shields and John F. Cragan report on Political profiling and partisanship.

Excerpt:

Data* indicate that the offices of the U.S. Attorneys across the nation investigate seven (7) times as many Democratic officials as they investigate Republican officials, a number that exceeds even the racial profiling of African Americans in traffic stops.

The Bush administration has put a cloud of doubt over the Justice Department that will take years to dispel. Given the importance of the Rule of Law to our way of government, this greatly tarnishes our society as a whole. The only way to revive the confidence of the American people will be non-partisan investigations with full cooperation and tranparency from government officials. Anything less will do little to restore the lost faith of Americans in government anytime soon.

I am reminded of the 5th labor of Hercules,to clean the Augean stables in a single day. The amount of dirt and filth amassed in the uncleaned stables made the task surely impossible. However, Heracles succeeded by rerouting the rivers Alpheus and Peneus to wash out the filth.

We need a Herculean effort, and shovels wont do to clean out the filth in government, we need to start diverting rivers and clean out the mess in one big rush, if we try to do it piecemeal it will only, like the stables, recreate itself.