AG #Holder & St. Meinrad of Swabia

In the continuing saga of whittling down my hoard of books, I ran across Charles Merrill Smith's When the Saints Go Marching Out . Smith's a Methodist & his book is a snarky compendium of saints' bios with Aesop fable like morals tagged onto the end. The moral Smith wrote for poor Meinrad, which would be germane to Holder  invoking executive privilege:

If you act secretive, don't be surprised if people think you have a secret.

However, upon perusing a slightly less biased bio of Meinrad, it sounds as if his life is a warning for future tax-payers under Obamacare:

On 21 January 861 he received, fed, sheltered and entertained two rough-looking travellers. They were thieves, and when they found that Meinrad was a holy hermit who owned nothing worth stealing, they were so angry that they beat him to death.

Going from the sublime to the ridiculous, John K Brilhart Effective Group Discussion gives advice that wouldn't be germane to any lawyer, or most politicians, but sounds awesome in a college faculty lounge:

Dialectic, the "search for truth" (in the sense of the best possible answer), since Aristotle has been considered to be a counterpart of rhetoric (the science and art of influencing others through speech and writing).  Discussion, in most instances, is a form of group dialectic. [...] To join a discussion group with one's mind closed on the issues facing the group, unable to suspend judgment and undergo the process of cognitive dissonance, is no less than a breach of morality.  It demands of others what one is not willing or able to do himself -- change position.

Conversely, Holder seems to triangulate between being both stubbornly closed minded & able to sustain tremendous levels of cognitive dissonance.  For example, by trying to persuade people that a memo labelled "Fast & Furious" was actually discussing "Wide Receiver". When that didn't work, Holder tried to pretend that the Bush admin Wide Receiver program that shut down in 2007 was actually the same Obama Fast & Furious program started in 2009. Or, failing that, Holder tried to persuade that everyone who disagrees with your policy of handing automatic weapons to Mexican drug cartels, not tracing them, and having them end up at hundreds of murder scenes on both sides of the border are actually racists.

However, back to St. Meinrad, in the end, the thieves who murdered the poor monk were eventually ratted out by ravens:

Now there were some ravens who used to come regularly to the servant of God [St. Meinrad] when he was alive and take what was offered from his hands. And as if wishing to avenge the dead man, the ravens followed the thieves while they were fleeing from the hermitage, and filled the woods with loud cawing. And flying as close to the murderers' heads as they could, they published the crime that had been committed.Not long afterwards, the evil men were arrested, and the crime which they had committed in secret was revealed

So, hopefully, Rep Issa & Sen Grassley will both be as diligent in pursuing justice for deaths of US Border Agent Brian Terry & ICE agent Jamie Zapata as the ravens were for poor Meinrad.