A classic semantic frame-shifting (might we say shape-shifting?) exercise is underway, as Attorney General Alberto Gonzales seeks to evade responsibility for his and his department’s role in the firing of the eight U.S. attorneys.
According to Eggan and Kane’s article in the Washington Post:
Prepared testimony released yesterday indicates Gonzales will apologize to the fired prosecutors for the way they were treated and will acknowledge that he has been "less than precise" in describing his role in the firings.But Gonzales will also hold firm to his contentions that any missteps were "honest mistakes," that "nothing improper" took place, and that most of the details were handled by his then-chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson, according to the testimony.
"I have nothing to hide and . . . I am committed to assuring the Congress and the American public that nothing improper occurred here," Gonzales says in his remarks.
"I made mistakes in not ensuring that these U.S. attorneys received more dignified treatment," he adds later. "Others within the Department of Justice also made mistakes. As far as I know, these were honest mistakes of perception and judgment and not intentional acts of misconduct."
What Gonzales is trying to shift our attention from is the essential frame—that the Department of Justice is the executive branch’s law enforcement division,
…designed to enforce the law and defend the interests of the United States according to the law and to ensure fair and impartial administration of justice for all Americans….
The United States Attorney General
is concerned with legal affairs and is the chief law enforcement officer of the United States Government.
That means that the Attorney General’s primary responsibility is to ensure that the laws of the country are followed.
So what does this have to do with apologizing to the fired prosecutors and whether the fired attorneys received “more dignified treatment”?
Absolutely nothing.
This case is not about hurt feelings, undignified treatment, or personal apology. It is about laws and whether the Attorney General, Department of Justice staff, and other members of the government followed the law and honored their pledges to uphold the Constitution of the United States. Period. And that fundamental fact is what Gonzales is trying to distract the Senate Judiciary Committee, the media, and the public from focusing on.
The effort to shift the frame to a personal offense against individuals tries to take advantage of what Ian Frederick Finseth has called Americans’ “pervasive cultural fascination with personality.”
Americans too often are not oriented toward the "forces and processes that shape their world," and this aspect of our national character results not only from a broad decline in critical thinking skills but from a pervasive cultural fascination with personality. Not a fascination, precisely, but a habit of mind, an inclination to think in terms of individuals -- their backgrounds, characters, doings, looks, relationships, accomplishments, failings, and so forth -- rather than in terms of a complex array of impersonal "forces and processes."[….] The personalizing of reality becomes dangerous to the degree that it limits understanding of how the world actually works.
[….] Regarding people narrowly as pure autonomous agents, as self-initiating moral actors, rather than as participants in larger social systems and expressions of broader, impersonal forces, can blind us to the elaborate patterns of cause-and-effect that have much more to do with our collective destiny than do the lives of, say, Vladimir Putin or Britney Spears.
Or the putative hurt feelings of fired U.S. prosecuting attorneys.
Whatever the particular scandal, conflict, or triumph may be, we need to balance our human desire for "the good story" with more contemplative analysis of its conditions, causes, and potential consequences. We need, in other words, to be better critical thinkers.
Critical thinking is what members of the Judiciary Committee, the media, and the public will need to keep their eyes on the ball here. This case is about following the laws and the Constitution.
The frame is central here because the potential consequences depend on the frame through which the events are seen. For a personal offense against individuals, the appropriate remedy might be a public confession of having done them harm and a personal apology. For breaking the law and failing to uphold one's oath to support the Constitution of the United States, the penalties are considerably more serious--loss of one's job and reputation, and possible imprisonment.
Note that Gonzales' current frame-shifting effort is just the latest that he and his colleagues have used in this case. Earlier efforts had to do with alleged “performance problems”, every President lays off attorneys, poor memory, and lost records (“The dog ate my homework,”). Look behind Kyle Sampson, who appears to be being set up as the scape-goat for the the attorney firings. Look behind Alberto Gonzales for that complex array of impersonal "forces and processes" that includes Karl Rove and the administration’s embrace of the “unitary executive” interpretation of presidential power. And look behind that to the pervasive mindset of those in the conservative movement that they are above the law and to the conservatives' authoritarian personality type.
The processes -- the tactics -- that Gonzales and his conservative colleagues use are ones that we’ve seen them employ again and again: lying, loss of memory, making mistakes, Orwellian language, Swift-Boating, blaming others….and frame-shifting.