The Justice Department’s Truthiness Problem

By Scott Horton
Harper's blog

“Truthiness,” a phrase coined by the comic Stephen Colbert, has emerged as one of the hallmarks of the Bush Administration. Truthiness, Colbert tells us, is something a government spokesperson knows “from the gut”–without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts. “Truthiness” has the outward appearance of truth. However, statements offered as “truthiness” are invariably false. Worse, the person who utters them usually knows they are false. But telling lies and getting away with it is a political art form. Call it the art of “truthiness.”

The Bush Justice Department has a huge truthiness problem. This helps explain why public confidence in the Justice Department just reached an all-time low point. Americans now have more confidence in the integrity and reliability of Post Office employees than they do in federal prosecutors and FBI agents. But is the Justice Department going to start coming to grips with its “truthiness” problem, or will it just plod along through inauguration day, 2009?

The clock is ticking on a series of important internal investigations. In recent weeks the public has gotten important details about a Bush Administration effort to pack the career-level ranks of the Justice Department with political hacks, in violation of laws protecting the integrity of the civil service. The Inspector General concluded that two figures, Kyle Sampson and Monica Goodling, both trusted acolytes of Karl Rove, implemented this program, successfully hiring dozens of hacks for the Justice Department and firing or passing over career employees for a variety of illegal and unethical reasons. They were enabled in the process by an unprecedented sweeping authorization given them by Alberto Gonzales–an authorization designed to give Gonzales himself plausible deniability with respect to an illegal, and possibly criminal exercise.

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