KYLE SAMPSON GETS HIS FIFTEEN MINUTES OF FAME-- MORMON MAFIOSO SHUN THE SPOTLIGHT BUT HE DIDN'T HAVE MUCH CHOICE

I have to ask my friend Jimmy how to spell the Yiddish word hegdish, since my grandma passed away and he's the only person I know who's fluent in Yiddish. And it's the perfect description for what the whole U.S. Attorneys scandal has degenerated into-- between kilograms of contradictory e-mails, lies from every direction-- well, actually all the lies are from one direction-- to Bush scheduling a snap press conference to get the media's attention off Sampson's testimony, and the wingnuts demanding the Senate hearings stop for no reason that even they were able to communicate... A hegdish Jimmy has confirmed is "a disorganized mess."

So let's see what I can make out of this whole... hegdish today. Fox "News" had a cute quote from Kyle Sampson (one of the Rove-controlled Mormon Mafia guys who used to be Gonzo's chief of staff and is the designated fall guy for this and was testifying today): "The decision makers in this case were the attorney general and the president." Ummpphh... that must've hurt but, did you notice, no Rove?

Roll Call says Sampson's testimony, when it wasn't being systematically interrupted by Republicans, is "likely to ratchet up the pressure" on Abu Gonzo to resign. "His former top aide, directly contradicted his old boss in testimony Thursday before the Senate Judiciary Committee." Questioned by Schumer about Gonzo's assertions that he wasn't involved in any of the discussions about the firings, Sampson said "I don't think it's entirely accurate what he said... I remember discussing with him this process of asking certain U.S. attorneys to resign." Schumer nailed him and John Cornyn's (R-TX) pathetic attempts at a whitewash were laughable and sounded rehearsed.

Oops! Dana Bash on CNN's American Morning thinks those... um.. Inaccuracies are at the root of all the fuss the senators are making. "That is really what is making Democrats and even many Republicans very upset here... the fact that they feel that they got misleading, even flat-out wrong information from top Justice officials about what went on." Well, everyone is supposed to tell the truth to make a democracy work right, right? Especially like the chief law enforcement officer.

CNN had David Igelsias, the fired U.S. Attorney from New Mexico on the air doing commentary. He was excellent and didn't agree at all with Sampson's assertion that "the distinction between 'political' and 'performance-related' reasons for removing a U.S. Attorney is, in my view, largely artificial. A U.S. Attorney who is unsuccessful from a political perspective, either because he or she has alienated the leadership of the Department in Washington or cannot work constructively with law enforcement or other governmental constituencies in the district important to effective leadership of the office, is unsuccessful." Iglesias pointed out that he's never been a U.S. Attorney and that, basically, he didn't have any idea what he was talking about."

I don't think Sampson wanted to come on and say that "the decision makers in this case were the attorney general and the president." He wanted to say-- and this was what was in his prepared remarks distributed to the press in advance: "The decision to ask [the U.S. attys to resign] was the result of an internal process that aggregated the considered, collective judgment of a number of senior Justice Department officials [groupthink]. I would be the first to concede that this process was not scientific, nor was it extensively documented. ... But neither was the process random or arbitrary. Instead, it was a consensus-based process based on input from senior Justice Department officials who were in the best position to develop informed opinions about U.S. Attorney performance."

Republican Senator George Voinovich told the Columbus Dispatch that Gonzales should resign "if politics had a role" in any of this. "This is a serious issue. We need to get to the bottom of it. If what some people say is true, then Gonzales should go." The Regime seems to have two related goals here-- making believe politics wasn't at play and shielding Rove (which is really just one thing, actually). So why, exactly, did Sampson want to fire Patrick Fitzgerald? He says he doesn't know why and that when he suggested it he may have been playing a joke on Harriet Miers. Ha Ha Ha.