Thanks to the monumental efforts of Josh Marshall and the folks at Talking Points Memo all the world now has a link to the House Judiciary Committee Website and all 3000 pages of documents the Department of Justice dumped there last night around 9:00 pm eastern (my assumption is they did so to avoid the morning news cycle; sadly for them, Marshall et al. asked readers to read and highlight those parts they found interesting; Fire Dog Lake has already found some doozies).
I have scanned about 300 pages or so, and the one striking conclusion I have is that the Bush Administration is so inept, they can't even do scandal and cover-up well. It would be one thing if all these e-mails, memoranda, and other documents had been shredded or deleted, as would have been done by any other group of unconscionable persons. Apparently they figured, however, that none of this would come out, and they kept to the letter of the law by preserving these documents which pretty clearly outline how they were planning to sack a bunch of US Attorneys for no reason whatsoever, some of whom continued to express loyalty even after it was clear they were being "pushed out" (in the words of one memo) for no reasons other than crass political ones.
You know, if you are going to act in an ethically and perhaps legally questionable manner, one would expect consistency. Don't hang onto 3000 pages of email that, among other things, detail how a talking-points narrative of the firings is to be created and held to by all involved personnel. For just one instance, the whole "serves at the pleasure of the President" business was first mentioned in a memo dated November 15, 2006, before the final list of canned attorneys was approved, before a single phone call notifying any of the attorneys of their impending unemployment had been made.
These people are so dumb they manage to hang themselves with a rope strung from the printouts of their own emails. It's one thing to screw up a war, an economy, and the Constitution of the United States; it's takes a special kind of stupid to mess up a good conspiracy like this, but leave it to BushCO. to find a way.
