Here Comes the New Republican Talking Point

Just watch: the Republicans are going to blame the Democrats for fouling up the Justice Department. From U.S. News:

"You have no idea," said one Justice official, "how bad it is here."

The fear that virtually any piece of communication will have to be turned over has paralyzed department officials' ability to communicate effectively and respond in unison to the crisis, as has the fact that senior Justice officials themselves say they still don't know the entire story about what happened that led to the crisis. So they are afraid that anything they put down on paper could be viewed as lies or obfuscation, when in fact, the story is changing daily as new documents are found and as the Office of Legal Counsel conducts its own internal probe into the matter.

The paralysis will affect the calculations that [Attorney General] Gonzales must make this week as to whether he should stay or go. If Gonzales doesn't resign, there's little doubt that he will get few of his initiatives through for the rest of his tenure and that his people will spend months churning out documents at the behest of angry Democrats who will be investigating virtually anything that moves.

No doubt the various cogs and gears of the Mighty Conservative Wurlitzer will be on television complaining about how the Democrats are preventing the DOJ from doing its job. What will go unspoken, of course, is that Gonzalez's screw ups, incompetence, and possible illegal behavior is what brought us to this point...