In Defense of Lizards

I read this thing:

One rumored scenario has Bush elevating homeland security adviser Frances Townsend to become AG or take over the Homeland Security Department if Michael Chertoff is tapped instead.

Many don't trust Townsend, who boomeranged from being a top Clinton Justice Department aide who was demoted early in the Bush administration to landing at the President's side in 2003. "She's too much of a chameleon," said the Democratic aide.

I don't know anything about Townsend, but that doesn't make any sense to me. Okay, I guess it makes a certain amount of sense if you're trying to appear inhumanly apolitical and perhaps willfully ignorant of reality. Gonzales, and Ashcroft before him, have worked over the Justice Department. It's a hotbed of conservative ideology, teeming with executive branch sycophants. Like the 2006 election, the best-case scenario here involves applying the breaks; holding the line. No real transformation of government will occur until Democrats take the White House. And that's looking like a real possibility for 2008. It seems to me that it might very well behoove the Democrats to approve an Attorney General who aspires to a career beyond January 2009; i.e., someone who can tell which way the political winds are blowing and is inclined to help out the ascendant power structure while appearing to toady-up to the departing one. In other words, a chameleon. A strong and independent – and, yes, apolitical – Department of Justice is what we need. To get there, we need to use political fulcrums and political levers to move it away from the dark side.