another tragedy …

Posted on Thursday 26 June 2008

Only two people were tagged in the DOJ Inspector General’s report (pdf) released yesterday for having violated federal law and department policy by screening applicants for career positions based on "political or ideological" factors.

One, Michael Elston, the former chief of staff for the deputy attorney general, we’ve already heard plenty about and has been in the mix since almost the moment the story of the politicization of DOJ broke. But the other, Esther Slater McDonald, is new to the DOJ name-game.

So who is she?
This is actually two stories. One is about the insanity at the Department of Justice not so very long ago under Alberto Gonazales.. This lady’s job was making sure that young lawyers picked for the DoJ Honors Programs were credentialed conservatives. Her criteria for rejection were simple. Any sign of Liberal tendencies, even using "buzz words" like "social justice," and they were rejected immediately.

The second story is this young woman’s own environment. She went to Pensacola Christian College in Florida, an unaccredited fundamentalist religiously oriented school. The memo above is from a website put up by a graduate of the school. While the anonymous author of this web site makes it clear that he remains a committed Christian, he exposes the "rules" of this school. It’s tempting to laugh, but it’s a tragic story. You can reach this site by clicking the Memo above. Essentially, there’s a dramatic dress code that outlaws anything that smells like counterculture – basically dress is like what one finds in a 1950’s high school annual. But there’s more. Any sign of sexuality or the appearance of sexuality is verboten. The most striking thing though is the level of mistrust. Everyone in the school is on the lookout for any sign of romance – to head it off at the pass.

If you then read the TPM Piece, this young lady was outrageous in her rigid adherence to her "principles" – war on something, something that’s hard for me to define but it wasn’t hard for her, deviency of any kind from her limited view of the world. The tragedy of this story is that this college she went to taught her that one must constantly be vigilant for even the appearance of "sin." She took this vigilance to the DoJ where, I’m sure, she saw herself as stomping out "sin" – the sin of Liberalism. The day before she was to be interviewed about her activity, she quit the DoJ. I wonder if she knows, even now, that what she did at the DoJ was both against the law and wrong

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