Dangerous job assignments in Washington

John Podhoretz:

IMAGINE a job interview for a position you really, really want. Then imagine the person who is interviewing you says the following:

"We calculate the odds of your having to hire a lawyer at some point during your employment with us around 40 percent. The more senior the position and the more interesting and controversial topics you have to deal with, the greater the likelihood of your needing a top-flight lawyer with a top-flight firm charging top-flight hourly fees."

The interviewer continues: "You'll almost certainly have to foot the bill yourself - even though you will be earning an annual salary that will be eaten up by those hourly billings if you need your attorney and his associates to do 500 hours of work for you."

You're just about ready to bolt from the room, but you're curious. "Why will this happen?" you ask.

The interviewer responds: "Oh, there's no way to know, really. Things happen in the course of a very busy working life that you can barely remember but that become of intense interest to people later on and they spend a great deal of effort getting you to recreate every particular - and they want to do it under oath just so they can indict and convict you of a crime if they need to."

Oh, great, you think. Indictment and conviction. That'll look good on my resume. Yet still you persist in discussing the job: "Why would they need to?"

"All kinds of reasons," the interviewer says. "Hunger for competitive advantage by the other guys. Self-righteous sanctimony on the part of people who disguise their desire to defeat you with invocations of their purity and your corruption."

You should get the hell out of there. But this is just too fascinating. "Well," you say, "maybe I'll be one of the lucky ones who doesn't have to hire a lawyer."

The interviewer shrugs. "Maybe," he says. "But you can still get it in other ways. Stories will appear in the newspaper attributing remarks to you that you probably never made. Newspaper columnists whose views generally contradict yours may try to convert some part of your name into an adjective to be used interchangeably with the word 'corrupt' or 'venal.' "

...

There is more.

This is what Democrats mean by "accountability" and "oversight." Their definition of oversight is opposite of what most people perceive as a failure to notice. It is part of the criminalization of political differences and it is what the Democrats do. That is why they should never be elected to positions of power.