In the Moussaoui trial, the flawlessly superb work of the toilers of Bushworld is once again undone by one bad apple—ooh, that Carla Martin!

It's unfortunate that Rachel Maddow's current Air America Radio show, weekdays from 7am to 9am ET, had to come on the bones of that great and, on the whole, fabulously successful experiment in radio, Morning Sedition, because on any other imaginable count the show seems to me an unmitigated triumph. From the start, Rachel and her team hit the ground running, with a terrific format for bringing listeners up to speed on the day's political agenda and a really thorough and enlightened research effort to do the job right. Not much gets past them.

One of my—and I suspect most listeners'—favorite features is the "underbelly" segment, where "we poke a sharp stick at the soft white underbelly of the right-wing scheme machine," trying to pinpoint the strategies that have made them, well, what they are. I haven't heard today's yet, so I don't know if we're thinking along the same lines, but as soon as I saw this morning's Washington Post story "Embattled Lawyer Had Limited Role in 9/11 Trial," all I could think was: underbelly!

You know Carla J. Martin. She's the government lawyer who demolished the Zacarias Moussaoui prosecution by flagrantly violating what are apparently fundamental and routine judge's instructions against tainting witness testimony with exposure to the rest of the proceedings—in other words, attempted witness coaching. The legal community seems truly stunned by the magnitude and flagrance of this legal incompetence.

Now think about it a moment. When faced with the decision "to taint or not to taint," when has anyone connected with anyone connected to George W. Bush or anyone in the American Right ever gone the "no taint" route? On any issue or question, from the largest to the smallest?

And yet, by a process that is so consistent as to arouse my immediate suspicion, it turns out once again that Carla Martin was an isolated case, a lone wolf, a single bad apple, etc. etc. And once again miraculously, it turns out that she had an incredibly unimportant role. She was nobody, of no importance to the prosecution. She was just some kind of "go-between." You know that she's a former flight attendant, don't you?

That's right, ladies and germs, every single other person involved in this Bush administration prosecution effort, everyone of even the tiniest importance, is uniformly staggeringly competent, almost divinely perfect, in fact. There's just this one bitch-loser, this no-good no-account former-flight-attendant mutant, who singlehandedly undid the unfailingly better-than-perfect efforts of everyone else on the holier-than-godly Bushteam.

At this point, if the story doesn't go away, it's just a matter of time before the Foxnewsniks are informing us that their Carla is really our Carla, that the bitch was planted on the government team (which of course has such a stellar record in 9/11-related prosecutions) by traitorous elements in our . . . um . . . er, Ann Richards? . . . you know, Democrats.

The technical term for this is, I suppose, scapegoating. Except that as practiced by the right-wing scheme machine, scapegoating has been raised to such a magisterial art form as to cry out for a fancier name.

And by the way, if it turns out (courtersy of Johnny G and Billy O and Sean H and the gang) that our Carla is in reality Hillary Clinton's lover, remember, you heard it here first.