We tend to forget that destroying our hard-won democratic system is hard work, and requires a shitload of team players. Meet Monica M. Goodling!

"I knew she must think that everything was unraveling. And, you know, she was right about that."
--David Margolis, an official in the Justice Department, telling the Washington Post that Monica Goodling "was 'shaken to her core' by the [U.S. attorney purge] controversy and sobbed for '30 to 45 minutes' during a meeting in his office shortly before she resigned"

Let's play make-believe. Let's say you're the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia--and thus a pretty darned important person, right? Let's say it's the fall of 2006, and you need to hire a staff prosecutor. You've got an excellent candidate, a career prosecutor who has in fact worked in your office as a special assistant prosecutor. He also has federal government experience at EPA, working on civil rights cases.

The only problem is that the appointment requires the approval of a 33-year-old nonentity whose legal background is based on a worthless degree from a law school that graduates highly trained ideological attack dogs who are legal ignoramuses, and who has spent her career, such as it is, working tirelessly to turn our judicial system into a tool of far-right-wing ideologues and society's overprivileged.

As you guessed, the situation isn't hypothetical. "You" are Jeffrey A. Taylor [above]; the prosecutor you want to hire is Seth Adam Meinero; and it turns out that the blitheringly, caustically incompetent sociopath in question, one Monica M. Goodling, actually has the power to block your appointment, at least for a while (as Dan Eggen and Carol D. Leonnig report in the Post article)--

saying that Meinero was too "liberal" for the nonpolitical position, according to two sources familiar with the dispute.

The tussle over Meinero, who was eventually hired at Taylor's insistence [involving his execution of an end around through an even more powerful DoJ legal nonentity], led to a Justice Department investigation of whether Goodling improperly weighed political affiliation when reviewing applicants for rank-and-file prosecutor jobs, the sources said.

Goodling, of course, has been testifying today before the House Judiciary Committee, equipped with legal immunity--because, you'll recall, she originally refused to testify on Fifth Amendment grounds (and didn't even have the simple decency to show up to do it, the way it's normally done). She took the Fifth, you'll recall again, because she was fraidy-scared of the hostile environment in the committees. Those meanies function in the reality-based world, which is so different from the intergalactic world of outer-space thugs, megalomanical sociopaths, and full-blown psychopaths that she's accustomed to. Why, the meanies might, you know, hold her to account for her behavior!

According to the Post account, everyone seems to agree that Monica was a tireless (if sharp-tongued and domineering) worker. But tireless work in the cause of implacable evil, willfully advancing the ideological smithereening of the most fundamental fairness of the U.S. justice system, isn't admirable, not the tiniest bit. It merely compounds the evil--and in all likelihood it has also been, along the way, multifariously illegal. It is, in other words, something that a competent and fair-minded team of prosecutors should be scrutinizing for appropriate indictments.

Unfortunately, it looks as if she has to be given a "Get Out of Jail Free" card in the hope of getting even a tiny bit of truth out of her about the people she serviced so zealously.

Goodling had been a divisive figure at the Justice Department since she arrived in early 2002, gaining a reputation for having a mercurial temperament and being prickly toward career employees, said numerous current and former officials who worked with her.

Goodling and [D. Kyle] Sampson [above, then chief of staff to Attorney General Idiot Al "The Torture Guy" Gonzales] "knew politics, not law," said Bruce Fein, a senior Justice official during the Reagan administration. "This extent [of] neophytes running the department is highly irregular."

[Note, for the benefit of young folk with no memory of Bruce Fein [left]: Back in the Nixon-Reagan years he was known as a whiny little snot whom the media turned to to represent the most extreme right-wing legal position then expressable outside mental institutions. Cultural and legal historians will note the galactic distance our society has traveled in the intervening decades.]

Of course, what we know so far about our Monica's shenanigans is surely only the tip of the iceberg.

E-mails and other documents show that Goodling, who was also Justice's liaison to the White House, played a central role in arranging for the appointment of Tim Griffin, a former Republican National Committee official and aide to presidential adviser Karl Rove, as the U.S. attorney in Little Rock.

Goodling also met last summer with two New Mexico Republicans who complained about then-U.S. Attorney David C. Iglesias, who was later fired. In another case, she single-handedly blocked the dismissal of a North Carolina prosecutor who for more than a year had been on the list of candidates to be fired.

The dispute with Taylor came last fall, when Taylor heard that Goodling was thwarting his effort to hire Meinero, sources said.

Taylor complained to Goodling directly, according to two sources who were told about the conversation, saying that a U.S. attorney's office hires all kinds of people. Taylor also complained to Sampson, who was a friend and eventually gave Taylor the authority to bypass Goodling.

Taylor mentioned the experience to U.S. Attorney Chuck Rosenberg of Alexandria, the sources said. After Rosenberg became Gonzales's temporary chief of staff following Sampson's resignation, he asked the department's inspector general to look into Taylor's allegations, they added.

You wonder whether a hack like Monica, so desperate to devote body and soul to the bidding of the slimiest of ideological hooligans, is even capable of identifying "truth." What little she has already said publicly appears to be either barefaced lies or delusions--like the notion that the purged U.S. attorneys were fired for poor performance, notwithstanding the stellar reviews many of them had in their files. (Is it possible to imagine such a person having any say at all in such decisions, let alone the quite considerable say she seems to have had?)

As often happens, people who devote their lives to the service of lies and delusions wind up playing the "unfairness" card. Eggen and Leonnig note: "Goodling's attorney, who has accused Democratic lawmakers of having already made up their minds about his client's role, did not return e-mail and telephone messages left at his office yesterday." A quick skim of the firedoglake live bloggings of Monica's testimony in this morning's session (they resume at 2), it doesn't appear as if she has a whole lot more to say.