This is possibly the best opening to an article, ever:

In 2002 conservative political journalist John Miller wrote an extraordinary call to arms in which he declared open season on the civil rights division of the Justice Department. … What makes Miller’s piece so extraordinary is that nearly every one of his proposals was implemented.

It appears in The Nation, and it refers to an article from NRODT that riled the Left because it suggested that the Bush administration should accept the old truism that “personnel is policy” and take steps to ensure that conservatives occupied positions of authority at DOJ–or at least ensure that left-wing career lawyers didn’t. Elections have consequences, after all. But leftists inside DOJ have been screaming like banshees ever since Al Gore lost in 2000.

You have served me well, my minions. Your next set of orders will be revealed shortly.

Anyway, Andrew Gumbel (who never bothered to contact me, even though I’ve had perfectly cordial interviews and converations with writers for The Nation such as David Cole and Ari Berman) thinks he has written an expose of a scandal. His sources are the same old disgruntled left-wing career lawyers who have tried to obstruct the Bush administration’s right-of-center policies on civil rights. The result is… yawn.

Unless you think this sort of thing is outrageous:

Another recruiter, Esther McDonald, weeded out candidates using criteria that had nothing to do with their suitability for the job. She once took a candidate who had been at the top of his class at Harvard out of the yes pile and put him into the questionable pile solely because he was a member of the Council on American Islamic Relations, a Muslim lobby group.

I don’t. And it’s certainly a strange thing for Gumbel to whine about when he elsewhere suggests other kinds of associations are truly sinister, such as membership in the (“ultraconservative,” natch) Federalist Society.