We've just seen a jawdropping illustration of Beltway Blindness. First, Brooks writes an astoundingly stupid article. Then Kinsley shows up with his crayon and scrawls an even more stupid article. Then Ignatius shows he has no clue either. And then Joe Klein shows up, links to it, and says "excellent advice."

The only thing you can conclude is that they don't actually research anything. They chat with friends and then write columns. The only good thing about all this is that we're now getting a pretty good idea why the administration has been able to peddle obvious lies on a routine basis.

So here's an introduction to this subject I can't do this in words of one syllable, but I'll try.

The issue here is actually very important, and speaks to the foundation of how the United States operates under the constitution. I shouldn't need to say this, but at this point, with four Beltway pundits all missing the point, I'm going to.

Brooks seems to get this:

"but the founders, who had a low but accurate view of human nature, figured that wasn’t possible. They placed the federal prosecutors within the executive branch of government, a political branch. They ordained that prosecutors would be overseen by the attorney general, a political officer."

Yes. And that is why the constitution calls for the _confirmation_ of US Attorneys. This is not as clear cut as I thought. You should read discussion in comments about this.

Got that? The key to preventing the executive branch from using the judicial system as a dirty tricks adjunct is to use the third branch of government to review these appointments. So that they can't do things like appoint Karl Rove's favorite oppo researcher as the US attorney in a purple state.

Back to the story. Last year, according to the then chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Arlen Specter, a staff member inserted a provision into the Patriot Act that reversed the Founders and made it possible for the president to appoint US Attorneys without confirmation hearings. He did so without the knowledge of any of the senators.

Let's just stop there for a minute. This is a bad thing. Senators are supposed to vote on little things like this. At the very least, they're supposed to know about them. So, you know, right here is something that is worth paying attention to.

Now why did the administration get this staffer to do this? They did it so they could appoint people who could not be confirmed, like the aforesaid oppo researcher. In fact, they did it so they could appoint people that they would be embarrassed to put in front of even Specter's committee.

This is a very bad thing, especially because it's clear that the project the appointees would be working on is "voter fraud." That is, doing all they could to suppress voting in Democratic precincts. This would include investigations into activity that the current crop of prosecutors found without merit and, more importantly, NOT investigating the various vote suppression schemes Republicans engaged in in the last three elections.

And, whoa, whattya know? What states got the new appointees? Utah and Massachusetts? Nope. NM and AZ. Purple swing states. 5 out of 8 were purple swing states. 2 were CA, including Carol Lam, who was prosecuting cases of corruption that pretty clearly would reach the White House. One, apparently, was included because performance reviews were so awful that it would have made the performance excuse transparently false.

Sorry for the length of this. But it looks like they need some help in understanding this.