It seems rather hasty, and quite frankly misguided, of your Board of Opinion to insist in its most recent editorial that the Bush White House has become a modern version of Tammany Hall ("Bush must separate loyalty from competency," March 19). The polemic unfortunately misses the mark widely. Although you might really wish it were the case, wishing and hoping are far different from reality. United States attorneys serve at the pleasure of president. The president has the capacity to fire them at his discretion. I'm not sure why, if an attorney is not ambitiously prosecuting at the direction of his superior, that he should be kept on his position.

As for Karl Rove, again, what part of questioning whether firing all 93 US attorneys were palatable is illegal? After all, President Clinton fired all 93 of his attorneys when one in Arkansas was pursuing an investigation into some of the Clinton's rather dubious practices in that state. I don't recall hearing Ted Kennedy and Patrick Leahy crying about his duplicitous corruption and lobbying for subpoenas then as they are now. Maybe loyality would be praised instead of condemned if those in the administration wore a D beside their names instead of the scarlet letter R.