More malfeasance from the Bush Administration

Paul Krugman's NY Times column is only available for subscribers (a nice way for the Times to reduce circulation of its more interesting and popular features; not sure if they've thought through the long-run implications of that strategy). But I always get the column through LexisNexis for free (to me). Today's, about the mass firing of federal prosecutors, is particularly interesting:

The bigger scandal, however, almost surely involves prosecutors still in office. The Gonzales Eight were fired because they wouldn't go along with the Bush administration's politicization of justice. But statistical evidence suggests that many other prosecutors decided to protect their jobs or further their careers by doing what the administration wanted them to do: harass Democrats while turning a blind eye to Republican malfeasance.

Donald Shields and John Cragan, two professors of communication, have compiled a database of investigations and/or indictments of candidates and elected officials by U.S. attorneys since the Bush administration came to power. Of the 375 cases they identified, 10 involved independents, 67 involved Republicans, and 298 involved Democrats. The main source of this partisan tilt was a huge disparity in investigations of local politicians, in which Democrats were seven times as likely as Republicans to face Justice Department scrutiny.

How can this have been happening without a national uproar? The authors explain: ''We believe that this tremendous disparity is politically motivated and it occurs because the local (non-statewide and non-Congressional) investigations occur under the radar of a diligent national press. Each instance is treated by a local beat reporter as an isolated case that is only of local interest.''

That's fascinating stuff. Someone with more time on his hands oughta find out if the statistical pattern identified by Shields and Cragan holds for other administrations as well, or whether this is another Bush-Rove special. Were prosecutions under the Clinton administration disproportionately against Republicans? I'm willing to bet money that the answer is no.