Say, didja hear the news? A former U.S. attorney says the Bush White House tried to politicize the way he did his job--before taking it away. Ho-hum.

So now Washington State's John McKay has told his story of wildly inappropriate if not outright illegal political pressure being put on him in his job as a U.S. attorney--before the job was taken away from him in the Bush purge.

So what else is new?

For anyone with a grain of sense, the pattern has been obvious for some time: Flush with hubris from the 2004 election, the administration decided to take to the next level its already-aggressive program of politicizing previously nonpolitical--or at least minimally political--functions of government.

Now, as an avowed nuts-'n'-bolts kinda guy, I enjoy the details, but in the big picture, it merely confirms what we already knew. Sure, it weakens Idiot Al "The Torture Guy" Gonzales's already-shaky hold on his job as U.S. attorney general. But Idiot Al has never been the issue. The issue is the administration's wholesale corruption of the federal justice system.

Of course, over on the other side of the political spectrum, where truth is for suckers and all that matters is the whacked-out far-right ideologies of the assorted sociopaths gathered under the GOP's Big Money tent, the assembled liars and nincompoops, thugs and megalomaniacs burble on as if nothing had happened. It's much ado about nothing, they say, just those damn Dems once again trying to make political hay out of nothing. Okay, maybe mistakes were made, and come to think of it, maybe they were made by that incompetent Idiot Al "The Torture Guy."

What it is, of course, is systematic and obviously deliberate perversion of our entire system of government in pursuit of power and profit for the people who have bought, or at least rented, that government. Just to put it in context: Imagine if the right-wing noise machine had been able to manufacture even a wisp of suspicion of Democratic political interference with a federal prosecutor. We would be hearing about it 24/7 from all the noise-machine outlets, and probably from the "mainstream" media as well, with demands for the president's resignation or impeachment.

In what Howie has taken to calling Purge-Gate, we have "smoking guns" all over the damned place, all still loaded, so that you barely know where to step in the justice-killing fields of the Bush administration. And the wingut deniers just go on denying.

So what else is new?