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The following editorial appeared in The Washington Post. Guest editorials do not necessarily reflect the views of Messenger Post Media.

Attorney General William Barr has delivered two speeches in the past month that are alarming in substance and which raise questions about his understanding of the proper role and temperament of the nation's chief law enforcement officer.

Barr's speech last month to the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group, was stunningly and dangerously at odds with reality. He argued that Democrats have devolved from "loyal opposition" to a force "engaged in a war to cripple, by any means necessary, a duly elected government" while Republicans "tend to have more scruple over their political tactics and rarely feel that the ends justify the means."

Barr is right that politics today makes too little room for compromise. But the idea that the right is the aggrieved party and only the left is guilty in this decline is almost laughable. It was then-Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who declared in 2010 that "the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president." It was McConnell and the Republicans who refused even to consider Obama's nomination of the well-qualified Judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court.

When Barr complains that lawmakers "drown the executive branch with 'oversight' demands for testimony and documents," is he honestly forgetting the unending GOP investigations of the Benghazi attacks or the Fast and Furious pseudo-scandal, which culminated in the Republicans voting to hold then-Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. in contempt of Congress? In accusing the Democrats alone of justifying means by ends, did Republicans' aggressive gerrymandering and restrictions on the franchise just slip his mind? It is Republican legislators who recently stripped governors of powers in states where Democrats had just won gubernatorial elections. It is Republicans who have sought to roll back Florida's voter initiative to enfranchise ex-felons.

Barr again raised concern in an address to police officers on Tuesday, in which he warned that communities that don't give police more support and respect "might find themselves without the police protection they need." Of course police officers deserve support and respect as they carry out their often dangerous duties. They also owe accountability as they exercise their considerable powers.

Exposure of police wrongdoing and racial disparities in law enforcement has led to healthy reforms progress that the Trump Justice Department has undercut. The public has a right to expect police powers will be used with care. Taking criticism comes with the badge. So does the responsibility to protect everyone in the communities police serve even the critics and complainers.

Most of Barr's Tuesday speech praised exceptional police officers, and, as such, it was not as uniformly slanted and alarming as his Federalist Society address. But his implication that criticism may lead to endangerment by police neglect, delivered in the halls of the Justice Department, was still careless at best.

Regrettably, obliviousness and partisanship are all too common in Washington. For it to reside in the attorney general's office is way beyond regrettable.

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