Anyone who enjoys watching this is kind of bent themselves...

Kevin Drum sums up the whole sorry, getting more painful to watch them stumble as they they to cover their tracks mess that is the Attorney Firings Scandal:

They've now had nearly two months to come up with a simple, clear, understandable explanation for why they chose those eight to fire but not the others. So what is it? And why has it taken such an interminable amount of internal chaos to come up with something?

People aren't stupid. If there were a simple, innocent explanation we would have heard it in January. The fact that the President of the United States held a press conference eight weeks after this issue first hit the media and still didn't have a plausible story to tell suggests pretty strongly that there is no plausible story to tell.

Steve at Crooks and Liars:

It’s an important point about this scandal, which is probably helping drive the media’s interest. The White House, and its vaunted communications office, has had eight weeks to come up with a plausible explanation. What have we heard? The Bush gang said a purge like this is normal and routine. It wasn’t. They said Clinton did the same thing. He didn’t. They said the U.S. Attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president, which is true, but doesn’t offer any substantive explanation why these specific U.S. Attorneys had to go.

They couldn’t decide whether (and which) prosecutors were actually bad at their jobs. They can’t explain why Justice Department officials lied to Congress. They can’t explain why White House officials can’t testify under oath. They can’t explain what role the president had in the firings. They can’t explain what role the Attorney General had in the firings. They can’t explain the meaning of the phrase “loyal Bushies.” They can’t explain the 18-day document gap (which is slowly closing... see here). They can’t explain why they can’t explain.

It's hard for me to conceive of a mindset capable of subscribing to a line of reasoning that goes something like this:

Someone has an idea that seems really ingenious and solves a lot of problems. Never mind that actually executing the idea may bend a few rules--"hey, we enforce the rules, so we can bend them, and in the unlikely event that we're asked about it, we can just bend the truth about bending the rule". Then when asked about bending the rule or bending the truth about bending the rule, they claim ignorance based on how many people were involved in the bending of the rule and the bending of the truth about bending the rule. And if, God Forbid, the question askers want sworn testimony about the rule bending or truth bending, the benders (or the bosses of the benders) feign horror and indignation claiming partisan witch hunting and swear to protect the sanctity of the workings of the inner sanctum of the rule and truth benders.

They even try to invoke supposed precedents set during past administrations and try to employ tactics used in attempts to stave off the questioners by previous embattled administrations, but eventually to no avail. That is what makes the whole affair painful to watch, it is the beginning of the panicked last throes of an administration that thought itself more impervious and immortal to criticism and oversight than any other known in the history of this country...