The Doughfaces vs the Square-Jaws

Today, Alberto Gonzales assistant D. Kyle Sampson resigned over his role in the prosecutor purge. It was a case of the assistant taking the fall for the boss all the way. Sampson wrote an e-mail on criteria for evaluating federal prosecutors that linked the purge to the White House. So he had to go.

But, if you look at the pictures of Sampson at TPM Muckraker and CNN, you realize that he's a doughy-faced dead ringer for Karl Rove in the same vein as the even more doughy-faced Rush Limbaugh, Jerry Falwell, and some of the right-wingers on my campus. A lot of preachers and priests also have that same chubby little boy in old man's bodies kind of look. They all look like evil assistants to the arch-villain in James Bond movies. You can almost see them clearing out brush in George Bush's toy ranch to prove how tough they are.

This is where I wish that I could figure out how to put pictures into this blog. That's because David Iglesias (picture here) and most of the other fired federal prosecutors look like ram-rod straight district attorneys--no-nonsense, no irony, true, blue, all-American, hero types. The Pat Tillmans of the legal profession. Even Carol Lam looks like a macho hero compared to Limbaugh, Rove, or D. Kyle Sampson.

Expanding on an earlier post, the Bush administration has been characterized by an endless battle between doughfaces like Karl Rove and D. Kyle Sampson who waste their lives trying to prove how tough they are and principled square-jaw good guys like David Iglesias and Carol Lam.

As the Bush administration falls apart, it's obvious that the square-jaws are winning.