From The Progressive
By Ruth Conniff

The Justice Department claimed that bad management and lack of aggressiveness were the reasons for firing the prosecutors. Delta Zeta claimed it only got rid of sorority sisters who weren’t dedicated enough to its recruitment drive

Like the sorority sisters at Delta Zeta, White House officials Karl Rove, Harriet Miers, Alberto Gonzales, and President Bush looked around at the nation’s U.S. attorneys’ offices, and didn’t like what they saw: Too many embarrassing investigations of corrupt Republican lawmakers, and not enough Administration cheerleading.

As Newsweek put it in a story about Delta Zeta’s purge of overweight and minority sisters at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, the sorority was “acquiring a campus rep for being more brainy than beautiful.”

Karl Rove couldn’t have put it better himself. It was more or less the same complaint he made to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales about the U.S. attorney in New Mexico, David Iglesias, getting on the wrong side of Republican hacks in that state. Iglesias wasn’t pressing hard enough on corruption investigations of Democrats. Rove managed to get him, along with six other prosecutors, fired. The Justice Department replaced the U.S. attorney in Arkansas with a Republican Party lawyer who was a Rove acolyte.

But while Delta Zeta only cut two-thirds of its “uncool” sisters at Depauw, the Bush Administration decided to go for broke. Bush’s tightest home girl, Harriet Miers, asked her good buddy, Gonzales aide Kyle Sampson, if they couldn’t just get rid of all 93 U.S. attorneys and replace them with members of the Republican Party clique.

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