Accountability

I just Youtubed (yes, it's a verb) Alberto Gonzalez's press conference on this whole "sneakily firing lots of competent federal employees in order to politicize their positions" scandal. In response to the first question, which was inaudible on my speakers, he said "As we can all imagine, in an organization with 110,000 people, I am not aware of all the information that passes through the halls of justice, nor am I aware of all decisions. "

Then, in response to the next question, he says "I am ultimately accountable and responsible for what happens within the department." Well, this really shouldn't need to be said, but the fact that he didn't know what the hell was going on in his own department is not an excuse for anything. In fact, it's a fairly good reason for him to resign. The idea that an event of the magnitude we're talking about could have taken place without Gonzalez's knowledge is totally absurd unless you assume that he isn't doing his job at all. I'm not particularly interested in whether he's lying or slacking, because either way, he should not be the AG of the United States of America.

Here's a fun analogy. Lets say at Oberlin College, there was suddenly no electricity on North Campus. Nancy Dye could hold a press conference and say "I'm really not in charge of electricity." That would be totally true, but also totally irrelevant, because as president of the college, a disaster of that magnitude would ultimately be her responsibility. And if it was obviously preventable, or the motivations behind it were less than pure, or if she proved unable to effectively solve any of the resulting problems in the aftermath, it would certainly be cause for her to resign. It also would have been much more dramatic than her decision not to return next year was in real life.

Anyway, I suppose it's inevitable that the term accountability will be butchered by people who refuse to be held accountable for anything, but at its core, it does actually mean something. Gonzalez is saying that he's "accountable", but um... nothing will happen to him even though he utterly failed his job. That sounds an awful lot like a little thing I like to call being "not accountable".