Atty Gen: Court Martial the Skipper, Fire the Night Watchman

My father spent 27 years in the U.S. Navy. If a Navy ship runs onto a reef, they court martial the captain, whether the pilot issued a warning or not. It's the captain's responsiblity to keep the ship safe, and the captain bears the responsiblity for the failure.

Or say you own a business. If there's a robbery in the night, you fire the night watchman, whether he says he heard any suspicious noises or not.

When State Sen. Marc Dann (D-Liberty Township) accuses Auditor and former Attorney General Betty Montgomery (R) of failing to detect or prevent pay-to-play corruption like Coingate, she makes excuses and complains that it's not fair criticism. For example, she says that the 2004 audit of the Bureau of Workers Compensation was delivered late, so she didn't know about Coingate until she read it in the papers. The excuses don't cut it. It was her job to uncover the abuses, and she didn't do her job.

Montgomery portrays the attorney general position as top vice cop, focusing on catching sexual predators. Dann portrays the position as watchdog on government, ferreting out corruption. With all due respect to Montgomery, prosecuting sex crimes is not where Ohio has experienced spectacular failure over the last decade or so. It's government corruption where the failings have occurred and the malefactors go unpunished.