Because if you're a Republican, using the Justice department to game an election is perfectly OK

I'm sure this will be the talk radio meme in the coming week, as Alberto Gonzales prepares to lie through his teeth testify on Capitol Hill. But as the evidence trickles out, the more it looks like the Administration did, in fact, plan to skirt document retention requirements as part of their efforts to use so-called voter fraud prosecutions to game the 2006 AND 2008 elections -- and that George W. Bush was in on it up to his bleary, drunken eyeballs.

Friday's document dump shows that the amount of wingnut activism in which U.S. prosecutors played a role in how they were evaluated by the Justice Department, demonstrating that under George W. Bush, even the Justice Department has become lousy with Mayberry Machiavellis:

The Justice Department weighed political activism and membership in a conservative law group in evaluating the nation's federal prosecutors, documents released in the probe of fired U.S. attorneys show.

The political credentials were listed on a chart of 124 U.S. attorneys nominated since 2001, a document that could bolster Democrats' claims that the traditionally independent Justice Department has become more partisan during the Bush administration.

[snip]

The chart underscores the weight that conservative credentials carried with the Justice Department.

The three-page spreadsheet notes the "political experience" of each prosecutor, which was defined as work at the Justice Department's headquarters in Washington, on Capitol Hill, for state or local officials, and on campaigns or for political parties.

Several of the 124 prosecutors on the list were also members of the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies. The group was founded by conservative law students and now claims 35,000 members, including prominent members of the Bush administration, the federal judiciary and Congress.

Josh Marshall has more.