Much like David Brooks yesterday, Charles Krauthammer would like to fool us into believing that there is no real scandal here, just bad actors on both sides of the aisle. So let's pick him apart too:

It's not a question of probity but of competence. Gonzales has allowed a scandal to be created where there was none. That is quite an achievement. He had a two-foot putt and he muffed it.

Yes, that would be the incompetence dodge. Forget that Gonzales lied to Congress. Forget that Gonzales has changed his story. Forget that Gonzales just wants this problem to go away. According to Krauthammer, there never was a scandal, never any wrongdoing, yet Gonzales is so incompetent that he can't tell the truth without lying. That is what Krauthammer is arguing.

How could he allow his aides to go to Capitol Hill unprepared and misinformed and therefore give inaccurate and misleading testimony? How could Gonzales permit his deputy to say that the prosecutors were fired for performance reasons when all he had to say was that U.S. attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president and the president wanted them replaced?

That's what I'd like to know too. That's what Congress would like to know. And that's what the American people--at least those who are paying attention to this story--would like to know as well. All of these unanswered questions require an inquiry, but Krauthammer is distracting us, again, with Gonzales' would-be incompetence.

And why did Gonzales have to claim that the firings were done with no coordination with the White House? That's absurd. Why shouldn't there be White House involvement? That is nothing to be defensive about. Does anyone imagine that Janet Reno fired all 93 U.S. attorneys in March 1993, giving them all of 10 days to clear out, without White House involvement?

What conservative column would be complete without repeating the "Clinton did it too" diversion? Krauthammer is either lying or ignorant. Clinton, like all previous and subsequest presidential administrations, replace US Attorneys at the beginning of their term(s). And, again, to repeat, what is is so unique about what Bush did is that he fired them in the middle of a term for reasons that were later proved to be false or at best, highly questionable. There is no doubt, repeat, no doubt about this anymore. Apparently the Washington Post, and whoever else carries this fool's column doesn't care about basic factuality.

For the next six paragraphs Krauthammer attacks Democrats by saying things like

Democrats are charging that this was done for reasons of politics and that politics have no place in the legal system.

Are they really arguing that? So far we've seen a Congress interested in getting to the bottom of what happened and an administration doing everything it can to stonewall. Like I've said, if there's nothing to hide, then who cares if there is sworn testimony before Congress?

Those decisions are essentially political. And they are decided by elections in which both parties spell out very clearly their law enforcement priorities. Are you going to allocate prosecutorial resources more to drug dealing or tax cheating? To street crime or corporate malfeasance? To illegal immigration or illegal pollution? If you're a Democrat today, you call the choice "political" to confer a sense of illegitimacy. If you're a neutral observer, you call the choice a set of law enforcement priorities reflecting the policy preferences of the winner of the last presidential election.

Because Republicans never do this. Only Democrats are motivated by politics, right?

There is absolutely nothing wrong with this. Pursuing voter fraud is not, as the New York Times pretends, a euphemism for suppressing the vote of minorities and poor people. It is a mechanism for suppressing the vote of (among other phantoms) dead people. Conservatives have a healthy respect for the opinion of dead people -- conservatives revere tradition, which G.K. Chesterton once defined as "the democracy of the dead" -- but they draw the line at posthumous voting.

It gets pretty incoherent here as Krauthammer ties the super-politicized Democratic party to the liberal media and then sprinkles on a healthy dose of conservative reverence for the dead, which as we all know, those godless liberals would never do except when they need to stuff ballots.

But this is an opinion piece, so Krauthammer can rant all he wants. I'm not particularly interested in his worldview which I find something less than disgusting. The real gem comes at the end where he ties everything up:

If the White House decides that a U.S. attorney is showing insufficient zeal in pursuing voter fraud -- or the death penalty or illegal immigration or drug dealing -- it has the perfect right to fire him. There is only one impermissible reason for presidential intervention: to sabotage an active investigation. That is obstruction of justice. Until the Democrats come up with real evidence of that -- and they have not -- this affair remains a pseudo-scandal. Which would never have developed had Gonzales made the easy and obvious case from day one.

I have no idea what the "easy and obvious case" Gonzales was supposed to make. Just another 11th hour incompetence distraction. The point Krauthammer is making is that this isn't a scandal. It only becomes one when real evidence arises. I see. So, until we have the smoking gun with fingerprints, everything else, the lies, the distractions, the stonewalling, the documents, the testimony--all of that--is fueling a "pseudo-scandal." Krauthammer can hide behind neologisms all he wants. It doesn't change the fact that no one really knows the reason why those attorneys were fired, it was highly unusual, and the Democrats are going to get to the bottom of it. I doubt Krauthammer felt the same way when the Republican Congress spent three years and $50 million dollars investigating Clinton and coming up with...nothing.

But Republicans never do anything for shallow political reasons, right?