Josh Marshall: There's this old line the wise folks in Washington have...

This has been one of the more comedic aspects of this 72 hours - watching a cavalcade of extremely wealthy pundits, editorialists and political operatives from New York and Washington tell me how rural Americans won't stand for this.

Josh Marshall

hours political new-york

I think of us as journalists; the medium we work in is blogging.

Josh Marshall

blogging mediums thinking

Authoritarianism and secrecy breed incompetence; the two feed on each other. It's a vicious cycle. Governments with authoritarian tendencies point to what is in fact their own incompetence as the rationale for giving them yet more power.

Josh Marshall

government giving two

We are Republicans. How I see our mission is we always want to be transparent with readers about what we think, about our opinions. But, fundamentally, we are out there to collect and report facts. And that's always our guiding mission.

Josh Marshall

republican opinion thinking

When Hillary's getting knocked around by the folks on the Hill is Bill going to go Larry King to knock her enemies around? Will he be going off to foreign countries on his own little diplomatic missions? I had assumed he'd remain a step in the background as he has through through most of this decade. But that doesn't seem to be the case. If the constitution allowed it, I'd happily have Clinton back. I'd happily have Hillary in his place. But I don't want them both.

Josh Marshall

kings country enemy

If you look at the people who are advising Rudy Giuliani it turns out that they seem to be all the people who were too insane or too extremist to even get on the George W. Bush team.

Josh Marshall

insane team people

With Jack Abramoff under indictment, a number of readers have suggested that now he might flip and try to offer the feds some figures higher up the food-chain.

Josh Marshall

ties numbers trying

The President appoints the U.S. Attorneys. They're political in a certain respect. But the Department of Justice - the power that they hold is so great, it's life and limb, you know - put you in jail, make you run up hundreds of thousands of dollars of legal costs. Even though we understand that political appointees take these jobs. We don't assume that the party in power is going to use that kind of power to advance its political interests.

Josh Marshall

party justice running

That D.C. grand jury investigation of Abramoff can't go on forever. Eventually the lawyers at the Public Integrity Section will go to their bosses with some decisions about just who they want to indict. That's when Al Gonzales will have to show his cards.

Josh Marshall

boss decision integrity

I’m not a gun owner and, as I think as is the case for the more than half the people in the country who also aren’t gun owners, that means that for me guns are alien. In the current rhetorical climate people seem not to want to say: I think guns are kind of scary and don’t want to be around them.

Josh Marshall

gun mean country

The Federalist Society is this conservative legal organization. And I think, for the Bush administration, being a member of the Federalist Society meant you were - a reliable, ideological, partisan Republican. It wasn't enough just to be registered as a Republican, or to be - have a generally conservative judicial philosophy, or prosecutorial philosophy. It meant that, basically, meant that you were a real movement conservative, a Party regular. That's what being a Federalist Society member means.

Josh Marshall

party real philosophy

Success can be built on a strong relationship between a lobbyist and a single, powerful lawmaker.

Josh Marshall

lobbyists powerful strong

One of the failings of ideologues is their inability to see that everyone else isn't necessarily an ideologue like them.

Josh Marshall

inability libertarian failing

There's a difference, though, between being a political appointee and putting a political operative in charge of a U.S. attorney's office.

Josh Marshall

political office

The President doesn't just appoint the Secretary of State, he appoints the Secretary of State, and then the Congress votes. And if the Congress approves that person, that person becomes Secretary of State.

Josh Marshall

secretary vote president

For David Halberstam journalism was a calling, not a job. You couldn't fire him and he wouldn't quit.

Josh Marshall

quitting journalism

Officials and journalists live in parallel but separate realities; they see and talk to each other, may have a meal and gossip together, but their worlds never touch, because officials use words that don't mean what they say, while for those reporters in Vietnam - Halberstam, Peter Arnett, Morley Safer, and others - words were vessels of reality.

Josh Marshall

gossip mean reality

The further you get from power, the closer you come to the truth.

Josh Marshall

The death of honest and courageous a reporter leaves America a little more vulnerable.

Josh Marshall

courageous honest vulnerable

This broke my heart, i told him if people wanted to stare, they could stare at us both.

Josh Marshall

health

There's this old line the wise folks in Washington have that "it's not the crime, but the cover-up." But only fools believe that. It's always about the crime. The whole point of the cover-up is that a full revelation of the underlying crime is not survivable.