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blue bits. red rocks.
Saturday 21 April 2007

The notion of a disinterested civil service, of government officials chosen for their ability to do the job rather than their loyalty to political bosses, is one of the great accomplishments of the modern world. The nation’s corps of 93 United States attorneys are not civil servants in the strictest sense—they’re not part of a system in which merit is measured by formal examinations, nor are they protected against firing without cause. But by sound tradition, written and unwritten—the kind of sound tradition conservatives once felt themselves duty-bound by definition to respect—they have always been considered something close: political appointees serving a non-political, even anti-political, function. Rick Perlstein

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