Alberto Gonzales’s mantra when he testifies before Congress is “I don’t recall.” Monica Goodling, his former aide, the person who held the lives and careers of the top lawyers in the country and the Justice Department, admits that she “crossed the line” when considering the political beliefs of job applicants, but her excuse was that she didn’t mean to.

“I may have gone too far in asking political questions of applicants for career positions and I may have taken inappropriate political considerations into account,” Ms. Goodling said. “And I regret those mistakes.”

That’s a lot like, “Gee, Officer, I know I was going 75 in a 35 zone, but I didn’t mean to.” Since when did the Department of Justice decide that Lindsay Lohan was the role model for their senior officials?

Of course, this heart-felt confession, said with all the contriteness that a use-immunity-protected witness can muster, doesn’t really mean a whole lot. Nothing’s going to happen to her other than become a punch-line on late-night TV monologues and The Daily Show as “the other Monica.” But a fat lot of good that does for the fired U.S. attorneys who had their reputation trashed by a 33-year-old graduate of Pat Robertson’s Regent University, a law school that makes the University of Phoenix look like Cambridge. She has never tried a case in her life, and her sole qualification for her job was that she conducted opposition research for the Republican Party. Look, folks: this is the best and the brightest of this administration.

Ms. Goodling downplayed her role in the whole firing scenario, and in the process denied ever speaking to Karl Rove about it, and in true loyal Bushie fashion, found someone else to blame; Kyle Sampson, and she impled that Deputy A.G. Paul McNulty “was not fully candid” in his testimony before Congress. Mr. McNulty naturally disagrees:

“I testified truthfully at the Feb. 6, 2007, hearing based on what I knew at that time. Ms. Goodling’s characterization of my testimony is wrong and not supported by the extensive record of documents and testimony already provided to Congress.”

And throughout the entire episode, we never got the answer to the question posed here yesterday: who came up with the list of the attorneys to be fired? The closest we got was that it came from the White House. And who could that have been?

What was even more ridiculous was the Republican members of the panel who acted as if there was nothing at all to see here and that no crimes had been committed. Gee, the last time there was a Monica in the news, you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting a Republican who was outraged at the blantant criminality and lawlessness at the Department of Justice and the White House. Isn’t it amazing how liberal and immoral these Republicans have become in the last seven years?