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Frankly I'd rather have HUNGRY people from third-rate schools with real world accumen than a bunch of spoiled Ivy Leaguers. I have attended 5 different schools - one top ten, two third rate, and one solid first tier, and you know what? The top 10 kids are mostly worthless for any real world needs you would have! Why? Because they are underexposed and have had little social adjustment. I'm painting them with a broad brush but this is the trend.

Mueller is a dumb choice for FBI director. I have no idea why they would put him there. Give him some cush job in the Justice Department (i.e. non-supervisory legal position). In all honesty a better candidate would be the graduate (i.e. Associates degree holder) of a third-rate law enforcement school who has run a border county's sheriff's department for a decade or so.

Government is not academia. Institutional education is extremely overrated. It rarely has a tenth of the value of raw experience as far as government work goes. Law degrees in particular seem to give people credibility far beyond the value added by that degree. This is probably OK if you're hiring a management consultant or something, but not a security chief for God's sake! Instinct, I want instinct!

I could name 10 of my police friends, military and civilian, that would make better FBI directors than anyone on the President's shortlist. Unfortunately, none of them have political connections and some have belonged to a (gasp) labor union so they are on the country clubbers' blacklist as far as high-level appointments are concerned...

Couldn't agree more. My sense is the FBI has a wretched reputation, mostly earned.

A cop friend told me if you want to be a good cop, you have to work where the crimes are. My personal opinion is despite the corruption, you're probably going to see the best cops in organizations like NYPD. Work homicide cases in New York for a decade and if you are talented, you're going to become a good homicide detective. Work homicide in Colorado Springs or Greenwich, Conn. and a big case comes along, you're not going to know what to do. By reputation, the FBI never got its hands dirty. When a big case came along, local police would do the work and the FBI would take the credit. Eventually, an organization's or an individual's reputation is a reasonable approximation of their merit. In the FBI's case, it took 90 years, but they've earned the reputation they deserve. So the FBI finds itself run by a lawyer who has never lead more than a few scores of prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney's office. He doesn't speak English very well. What does he know about counter-intelligence, Arab culture or the Muslim religion? He has nothing to offer. I'd bet the special agents in charge who run the FBI's local fiefdoms pay him even less heed than we do, because they know they'll be there and he won't. If they want to spend their time chasing a druggie who copped $100 knocking off the local branch of Riggs Bank, there's absolutely no one tell them they can't do that. So unfortunately, Americans are going to have to get used to losing a major metro area or two to nuclear detonations or smallpox. There's a news story tonight reporting the Iraqis got a virulent strain of weaponized smallpox from a Russian scientist. After the death toll rises a couple of orders of magnitude from September 11, the American people will be ready to fund a functional counter-intelligence agency. Meanwhile, we've got the FBI. If the FBI flipped to work on Al Qaeda's behalf, the U.S. would be better off.