To be this dumb.

Ruth Marcus has at it regarding the on-going saga of our Attorney-General, and if I tell you that she carves out a idiosyncratic place for herself from the rocky heights of beltway profundity, (using a tooth pick because this is the only experience of tool-using folks like Marcus ever get), you could probably come pretty close to sketching out the column without ever reading it.

Here's her opening:

I find myself in an unaccustomed and unexpected position: defending Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Gonzales fans, if there are Gonzales fans left, except for the only fan who counts: Don't take any comfort from my assessment.

Unaccustomed and unexpected only because she doesn't remember any of her previous columns; that's part of the curriculum in that secret class, "How to Become A Consumate Media Asshole," I am now convinced has to exist out there somewhere.

Her caution to Gonzales fans is given because Marcus is willing to concede the undeniable; that Gonzales is a fool and a knave, a deceiver and a dissembler in his sworn testimony before the Senate, and he deserved the brutal treatment he got from both sides of the aisle.

However, ah, yes, the inevitable "however," the inescapable "but,"...you knew it was coming, but can you guess what "the but" is?

But, says Ms. Marcus, she doubts that it's fair or fruitful to insist that AG Gonzales actually lied in his testimony.

"Perjury," after all, she rightly points out, is a very specific crime that is meant to be parsed with precision. You know, the way it wasn't parsed by Republicans and the Beltway 500 in the case of President's Clinton's testimony televised from the White House directly to the Grand Jury and then all of America, in which he admitted the true nature of his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, and was then asked a series a outrageously detailed questions about what they did to one another physically, so that his description could be compared later with hers, a perjury trap if there ever was one, and the Beltway 500 all agreed that evening that the President had clearly perjured himself...about something.

Marcus proceeds to parse away, in tedious detail, and concludes that Gonzales didn't technically lie; yes he obfuscated, couldn't remember, and chose to hide behind literalism, and congress is so cute when it gets really mad.

Congress deserves better than technically correct linguistic parsing. So the bipartisan fury at Gonzales is understandable. Lawmakers are in full Howard Beale mode, mad as hell at Gonzales and not wanting to take it anymore.

Marcus is now ready to get to the heart of the matter, her true subject - can you guess who it is that Marcus is about to finger as more problematic than the Bush administration and its utterly corrupt and utterly incompetent chief legal officer of these United States of America.

The Supreme Court could have been writing about Gonzales when it ruled that "the perjury statute is not to be loosely construed, nor the statute invoked simply because a wily witness succeeds in derailing the questioner -- so long as the witness speaks the literal truth" -- even if the answers "were not guileless but were shrewdly calculated to evade."

Consequently, the calls by some Democrats for a special prosecutor to consider whether Gonzales committed perjury have more than a hint of maneuvering for political advantage. What else is to be gained by engaging in endless Clintonian debates about what the meaning of "program" is?

And you thought I was just being obsessive when I dragged in Clinton, right?

Marcus isn't proposing that Democratic controlled congress do nothing...and here is where Teh Stupid comes in:

Rather, lawmakers need to concentrate on determining what the administration did -- and under what claimed legal authority -- that produced the hospital room showdown. They need to satisfy themselves that the administration has since been operating within the law; to see what changes might guard against a repetition of the early, apparently unlawful activities; and to determine where the foreign intelligence wiretapping statute might need fixes.

That's where Congress's focus should be -- not on trying to incite criminal a prosecution that won't happen of an attorney general who should have been gone long ago.

Of course those two objectives are mutually exclusive, and special prosecutors are never appointed to try and get to the bottom of what went on, so that information which belongs to the people of this country gets to them, and if anyone broke an actual law, they can be prosecuted.

What does Ruth Marcus think the Senate and the House have been trying to do in the multitude of hearings they've been holding about the operation of this DOJ? She hasn't noticed that the Bush administration's position is that they will not share crucial documents, and that presidential privilege can be appropriated to anyone who ever worked for GW Bush.

How is it possible that she seems so unaware of the fact the appointment of a special prosecutor is one way to find out what happened, and that such a person, except when appointed by Republicans, is generally understood to be one way of taking politics out of an inquiry. Who knows; maybe a special prosecutor could find out whether or not it was VP Cheney who sent Gonzales to that hospital room where lay a near-comatose Ashcrosft? The ugly truth is that someone like Marcus doesn't much care what happened, and if she doesn't, why should the non-opinion makers, voters and congress critters, dare to give a damn?

The shameless politicizing of congressional inquiries and special prosecutors that took place on the Republican side of the aisle during the Clinton administration is being continued in the shameless politicizing of the entirety of the Federal Government by this Bush administration, although there are still some brave, patriotic souls, like those fired Assistant US Attorneys, and Mr. Fitzgerald, who take seriously the oaths they take as they assume office.

To her eternal shame, Ruth Marcus, yet another superb specimen of beltway self-imposed stupidity, is as blind to the former, as her soul is dead to the genuine patriotism of the later, both byproducts of that compulsive need for our opinion makers to display in their own opinions an unconsidered bipartisanship that always assumes culpability must always be apportioned equally along the political faultline, no matter the actual facts of the case.

You can find the entire op ed here.