To the Editor:

In “Playing ‘Survivor’ in Washington” (Week in Review, May 6), you say that “several key officials in this administration have stayed in their jobs well beyond their perceived expiration dates” and that “Mr. Bush has a reputation for standing firm by his charges—something his supporters laud as loyalty and critics decry as blindness and arrogance.”

There is another explanation for why officials in the Bush administration remain in office so long, which sheds some insight into the defining feature of this administration.

When the will to power trumps all other considerations—competence, effectiveness, even lawfulness—it should be no surprise to find public officials clinging to their jobs with the cold grip of rigor mortis.

Power, after all, was not the means to an end; it was the end.

François Furstenberg
Montreal, May 6, 2007

Note from KBJ: I’m shocked—shocked!—to learn that politics has something to do with power. By the way, did the desire for power begin with the Bush administration? The letter writer makes it seem as though it did. Has he ever heard of the Clintons?