An embarrassing story

By Creature

I generally like Dana Milbank, but embedded in his piece today is a bit of the conventional, stuck-in-the-beltway thinking that exemplifies why the progressive blogosphere is up in arms over the media's coverage of the US attorney scandal.

The Bush administration's mishandling of the firings of eight U.S. attorneys and the misinformation its Justice Department sent Congress turned an embarrassing story into a full scandal.

An "embarrassing story." Sorry, Dana, but this scandal is far from simply an embarrassing story.

This unprecedented second-term US attorney purge is about obstruction of justice and using the DOJ as a blunt political tool to help Republicans get elected. The bumbling, bungling Bush administration should indeed be embarrassed (though as I postulated this morning on State of the Day, at this point the bumbling and bungling seems too coordinated to simply pass off as unintentional incompetence), but more importantly they should be held accountable. And accountability is what this "embarrassing story" is really about.

(Cross-posted at State of the Day.)