Wendy McCaw, A.G.?

It seems that when Wendy McCaw is done dismantling the News-Press, she might have a futute as the Attorney General of the U.S. (Quick aside--let's have a 50/50 pool to pick the date the paper folds; the winner gets half the pot and the rest of the money goes to start a real newspaper!) In case you didn't see it this morning, Talking Points Memo presented the latest news about the Bush Administration's firings of seven federal prosecutors.

Before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week, Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty explained that six of the seven federal prosecutors who were suddenly dismissed last December were axed for "performance related" issues.

Today, McClatchy reports that of those six, five of them "received positive job evaluations before they were ordered to step down." But there's an explanation:

A Justice Department official who spoke on behalf of the administration said the dispute might simply be a matter of "semantics."

"Performance-related can mean many things," said the official, who asked to remain anonymous because the Privacy Act bars officials from discussing personnel decisions. "Policy is set at a national level. Individual U.S. attorneys around the country can't just make up their policy agenda."

So "performance-related" doesn't necessarily mean that the prosecutors performed badly -- it's just a coded way of saying they were not sufficiently lockstep with policy at the "national level."

Making folks be lockstep is what McCaw is all about, so she would certainly fit in with the Bush crowd. After all, it doesn't matter how good you are at your job in a Bush-McCaw World, all that's needed is the ability to kiss endless tuchas.