WP: This Time, the Prosecutor's a Corker
By Tina Brown
Thursday, October 27, 2005; Page C01
....Fitzgerald has been thrust into the role of the un-George W. Bush -- the gritty cop vs. the rhinestone cowboy. In this corner, the scholarship kid from Brooklyn who worked summers as a doorman and went on to be the stellar student mentoring the less gifted. In the other, the son of privilege who goofed off at school, ducked the draft and always fell back on his dad's influential pals to -- in the memorable phrase of Colin Powell's former chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson, writing this week in the Los Angeles Times about Powell's role in the Bush White House -- clean all the dog poop off the carpet.
It's hard not to see Fitzgerald as the possessor of authentic traditional American virtues. Fitzgerald deals in facts, and lets facts speak for themselves. Bush talks ceaselessly of faith. The prosecutor is all about substance, the president all about surface. In nominating his personal attorney to the most august thinking body in the land, the Supreme Court, the president was caught showing the dismissive view he's always held of intellectual depth and scholarly accomplishment.
Fitzgerald's noir mystique was only strengthened this week by news accounts relating that in contrast to the rapier focus of his mind, Fitzgerald lives in a bachelor apartment with old socks stuffed in the desk drawer and three-month-old lasagna stiffening in the oven. Remember how in the first year of the Bush II presidency there was constant promotion of this administration's crisp corporate values? New-broom indicators like the CEO starting every meeting on time and retiring to bed at 10 p.m. were supposed to signify that personal discipline was a sign of intellectual rigor. But an empty desk can sometimes mean an empty head, one that's comfortable only with spoon-fed executive summaries and filtered "coverage" instead of self-processed information....
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We thought we wanted transparency from the Bush administration. Now we're getting it, thanks to Fitzgerald (and no thanks to the White House), and it feels ominous. We've already had a preview of what the Bush presidency will look like with its Praetorian Guard down. Karl Rove's absence with kidney stones and his legal distractions in the last six weeks gave us a glimpse of the Bush presidency minus Bush's Brain: the out-to-lunch Katrina response, the botched Miers nomination. At least before they could pretend to have their act together. Now, as Thomas DeFrank's scoop in Monday's New York Daily News reveals, a panicky, irritable president is taking out his frustrations on what's left of his inner circle, which he could never see beyond to begin with....
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...Little wonder we are obsessed with the strength and silence of Patrick Fitzgerald.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/26/AR2005102602524.html
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