To me, the idea that they've completely changed their standards of behavior based on whose doing the behaving, is important to point out but is nevertheless unsurprising. What gets me more about this particular scandal is the fact that they lied repeatedly under oath when they didn't even need to. It's as if lying to Congress is a reflex as unavoidable as sneezing.

The fact that, as is repeatedly being stated, the US attorneys serve at the pleasure of the President, then the firings, though suspicious (based on the scuttling of ongoing investigations and the punishment for failure to mount inappropriate ones), were in fact pefectly legal. Certainly Gonzoles is suficiently mealy-mouthed to have been able to say, "we didn't feel that the current appointees were sufficiently attuned to the administration's priorities and wanted to bring in people who were more responsive" Poof...end of non-scandal.

But instead....

Well, as they say, the rest is History.

This is not directly related to the specifics of your argument, but since you opened the post with Gigot quoting the trope about USAs serving at the President's whim, it seems worth commenting on. As a Kos diarist pointed out over the weekend, the whole notion that this was okay because the attorneys served at "the pleasure of the President" really stands in direct contradiction to their line that this is merely a minor personnel matter that the President was not at all involved in.

Ah, Lexis-Nexus our old friend. I can't believe the Republicans didn't find a way to get rid of it. Wasn't that winston's job in 1984? Altering the past records so the lies of the Party would never be exposed?

Lexis-Nexus is the antedote to Colbert's "wikiality."

Glenn, a further suggestion since you obviously have a LN account: In 2001, Bush fired all 93 USAs as well. It would be a further point worth raising to confirm that no one on the "left" went and made a big deal about that decision. I do not remember any "scandal" about it, but it would be worth saying: "Look, we defended Clinton's decision as fair and routine, and we will not criticize Bush for the same thing"

Of course, 95% of the "swing" voters would have absolutely no memory of this if it weren't for Greenwald's work.

Everyone print out out a copy of this column and post it on you company's bulletin board. It probably won't last long, but there's a chance that quiet guy or gal who mostly votes Republican will see it and get a glimmering of how much they have been duped.

You presented a clear example of the depth of deception mode of operation these neo-crazies continue to operate within.

You have shown this to be such an overt effort on their part to lie and lie and then to lie again with no concern on their part of any criticism from anyone.

This type of behavior on their part I find curious? Why do they act like this? Do they know something that the rest of us do not know? Are they of the opinion that they are protected and above criticism? Do they not worry about their job performance like the rest of us have to? Are they so loyal and so protected they know not to worry because their fearless leader will always be in power?

There must be a clinical definition for this kind of behavior,as there seems to be for everything else done today.

I sometimes get the impression from these people that they know and understand that the "ship of State" is on the way down and they will either "right" the ship in their image or they will see it destroyed and that is the attitude that comes across to me on many occasions from their actions.

I hope I am wrong.

Give the man LEXIS/NEXIS and watch him go!

Seriously (and as Glenn anticipates in his concluding paragraph) this is just the sort of Greenwaldian observation that eventually generates comments about how "this is no surprise"; "we already know this"; "What's the point of dredging this up; you're not going to change minds etc."

But all of that is nonsense. This is exactly what should be happening in blogs and online venues like this. The tremendous democratic power of the internet is what will force the mainstream press to start doing its job again.

Already we've seen FireDogLake and Josh Marshall be (grudgingly) singled out as having been ahead of the pack on the Libby trial and the Prosecutor firings. Glenn's analysis is part of the vanguard, part of this first wave of the assault on the calcified mainstream press.

Ordinary citizens cannot watchdog the press (for all kinds of reasons); the press, of course, has no interest in scrutinizing its own lazy, trusting methods. (It was no different in the Nixon era, by the way, when James Reston assured his masters at the Times that there was "nothing to" the Watergate story -- because he had "personally asked" Kissinger about it and had been told that it wasn't anything worth bothering with.)

Until it's taken away from us, the Internet is the only weapon we've got, and its already a spectacularly effective one. Please keep up the great work, Glenn! Together we can all tear down the wall, brick by brick.

While the litany of Republican about-faces documented in today's post is worth the publicity you've given it, the tone of your post suggests (when read quick in a first once over) that the prior pattern of "cleaning house" at the beginning of a President's tenure is reasonable or right. I can't support that idea, and I can't tell if you do after reading today's post.

I'd read in the comments of one of your earlier posts that blatantly political, wholesale replacement of US attorneys began when Reagan entered the White House, and appears to have been turned into "policy" or SOP by Clinton. I'd contend that neither former President acted well in this matter. The idea that you shouldn't hyper-politicize every organ of government is one that shouldn't be forgotten or ignored -- there was a period in my lifetime when both parties were capable of recognizing this. Now neither does.

The standard contemporary arguments invoked by Beltway insiders are: that "everyone does this..." that it is "within a President's right to mold the Executive branch as he sees fit...". These hackneyed "arguments" evade the fact that when Presidents intensively pursue their narrow partisan interests through a hyper-politicized Executive bureaucracy they act against the longterm interests of the nation.