SIGH….Mukasey is in:
A divided Senate narrowly confirmed former federal judge Michael B. Mukasey last night as the 81st attorney general, giving the nominee the lowest level of congressional support of any Justice Department leader in the past half-century.
The 53 to 40 vote came after more than four hours of impassioned floor debate, and it reflected an effort by Democrats to register their displeasure with Bush administration policies on torture and the boundaries of presidential power.
I suppose the glass-half-full position is that no Bush nominee would ever have declared waterboarding illegal, so it’s not like we could have done any better. And we really do need someone running the Justice Department, since it’s basically been on autopilot for the past year or so. And most of the Democratic caucus voted against him.
And the glass-half-empty position? We’ve got an attorney general who acts like a refugee from a communist reeducation camp, dutifully reciting party-line nonsense dictated by his superiors even though he plainly doesn’t believe a word of it. What a shameful episode.
