If the Bush regime was to throw the Decider's boy toy Idiot Al "The Torture Guy" Gonzales overboard today, would his itty-bitty carcass make a splash?

It's a symptom of how clueless the Bush regime has become in its second-term wheels-fallen-off-the-bus phase that the "brains" there imagined, however briefly and half-heartedly, that they could contain the scandal of the purging of select U.S. attorneys by throwing Idiot Al the AG's chief of staff, Kyle Sampson (whose picture, by the way, seems to have been stripped out of Brigham Young University websites that once showed it proudly), to the sharks.

"Hey, it's worth a shot, no?" you can imagine the regime "brains" squealing even as they put their underlings to work concocting a Plan F, G, and H. "If nothing else, it'll buy us a news cycle's worth of time while we come up with some other way to change the subject, and who knows? Maybe by then nobody will still care."

Sampson is by all accounts the kind of worthless-punk scumbag that authoritarian regimes depend on: a thoroughly degraded and repulsive human being with no attributes except a cosmic ambition for power matched by a cosmic ruthlessness and servile doggedness. (We don't even have to look to his Mormonism to flesh out the picture of an out-and-out thug with a law degree on the make.)

We already know that our Kyle was angling to have himself installed as a U.S. attorney, a job for which he is lacking every imaginable qualification except that aforementioned law degree. The fact that no one in the upper echelons of the regime responded instantaneously, "The little shithead's either kidding or out of his frigging gourd," may tell us all we need to know about the regime's attitude toward U.S. attorneys, and indeed the entire Justice Department: In the regimists' view, the job of the Justice Department has nothing to do with justice, or fair application of federal law; it's only about furthering our political agenda--protecting our guys, no matter how crooked, and screwing theirs, no matter how innocent.

In most accounts, the slot into which our Kyle would have most comfortably fit was Karl Rove's. He was actually proposed as Karl's successor when it looked as if the then-minister of policy and propaganda (before he had the policy portfolio officially taken away, though one can wonder if the change was anything but titular) might have to be shelved for leaking Valerie Wilson's CIA identity. To give our Kyle his due, there's no question, from the e-mail trail we've already seen, that he was in the thick of planning and executing the U.S.-attorney purge, but it seems equally clear that, for all his skillful clawing and scratching, he was still way too far down on the food chain to qualify as more than a henchman.

Uncomfortably for the regime, Kyle's mouthpiece, Bradford Berenson, has been signaling that his client isn't necessarily inclined to go quietly--even after (as we now know) Idiot Al worked his tiny tushie off to find a place at DoJ for Kyle after his "resignation" as chief of staff. It's natural that attention should focus next on the idiot AG himself, but I've been trying to argue that in the regime's chain of ideas, he's still too humble a figure to make a proper target. He is so totally the Idiot George's hand-held stooge that it's doubtful any of the real power players in the regime think of him as anything but a less-well-behaved presidential pooch than the far abler, more principled and in general more highly respected Barney.

If it becomes necessary to throw Idiot Al overboard, I can't imagine that anyone in the regime would feel even a twinge except the Decider himself, who would be deprived of one of his last playmates from home. Luckily for him (though not so luckily for the people who unaccountably expect a showing of loyalty from him), he seems to have a pretty easy time getting over such rare twinges of conscience as he becomes aware of.

Even the wingnutosphere seems cheerfully resigned to the dumping of Tiny George's even tinier boy toy, though not without the ritual head-firmly-lodged-in-ass smear, namely the preposterous proposition that Idiot Al was more qualified to be AG than Janet Reno, an expression of the loony right's unfailing scum-sucking dishonesty and imbecility, reflecting:

(a) on a scale of zero to a zillion, absolutely zero knowledge of Idiot Al, and

(b) on a scale of zero to a zillion, absolutely zero knowledge of former AG Reno, and

(c) on a scale of zero to a zillion, an infinity of in-the-shallow-depths-of-their-souls loathing for everyone and everything that is intellectually or morally superior to them, meaning everyone and everything except their lying, brain-dead selves.

It would certainly be embarrassing for the regime to have to heave its attorney general over the side. But the fact is that beyond that momentary embarrassment, losing Idiot Al costs them almost nothing. The Justice Department will continue to run as the fiefdom of the regime's political masterminds (after all, neither Idiot Al nor his predecessor, "Honest John" Ashcroft, seems to have had much of a voice in the regime's policy-making), with just the additional complication of having to come up with an official replacement who can get through Pat Leahy's Senate Judiciary Committee without being laughed out of the room.

One of the people who gets it, not surprisingly, is Washingtonpost.com's peerless Dan Froomkin. Earlier today, while waiting for his Monday post to appear, I was catching up on his column from Friday, "The Politics of Distraction," and as usually happens, Dan sounds even smarter with the passage of time.

"As far as the White House public-relations machine is concerned," he started out--

here is all you need to know about the firing of eight U.S. attorneys last year: The Justice Department made some mistakes in how it communicated that those prosecutors were let go for appropriate reasons. And, oh yes, there is no evidence that White House political guru Karl Rove ever advocated the firing of all 93 U.S. attorneys previously appointed by President Bush.

But from the very beginning of this scandal, the central question has been and remains: Was there a plot hatched in the White House to purge prosecutors who were seen as demonstrating insufficient partisanship in their criminal investigations?

Everything else is deception or distraction.

After reviewing the latest developments, Dan concluded:

As I first wrote in Tuesday's column, the proposed housecleaning of all 93 U.S. attorneys is a red herring. Not only would firing all of them have been a political and logistical nightmare, but it would have been foolish from Rove's point of view. After all, the vast majority were apparently behaving exactly as he wanted -- as "loyal Bushies."

The key question, that the White House continues to duck: Did Rove approve of -- or perhps even conceive of -- the idea of firing select attorneys? And if so, on what grounds? The latest e-mails certainly indicate that he was involved very early on.

Right now, Washington is engaged in feverish speculation about whether Gonzales is in his last days, or even moments, as attorney general. But as I wrote in my Wednesday column, Gonzales is a diversion.

The mainstream media was slow to get hot on the trail of this story. . . . But now, the mainstream media is in danger of getting distracted by the White House razzle dazzle -- and, quite possibly, by the spectacle of Bush throwing Gonzales, one of his oldest friends, overboard.

Keep your eye on Karl Rove, people.

Keep your eye on Karl Rove, people. It was good advice on Friday, and it's good advice today.

The good news is that I don't think Senator Leahy is going to need much persuading.


UPDATE: NOR IS SENATOR SCHUMER

Crooks and Liars has it in black and white living color: Chuck Schumer says he has evidence that Gonzales lied under oath. The "under oath" part is what differentiates him from some of the other top dogs-- not Barney-- inside the Regime, who have been very careful to never swear to tell the whole-- or any part of-- the truth about anything. Schumer, in fact, told Meet the Press that the evidence is "overwhelming." So, while the Regime has been busy trying to smear the U.S. attorneys they fired for political expediency, Speaker Pelosi speaks for the majority of Americans when she announced today that "we need a new attorney general."

Now, back to Ken's point... what about Rove?

Update by Howie (And that was even before Schumer got Sampson to roll over on Gonzales.)