Our US Deputy Attorney General, who lied to Congress about White House involvement in the attorney general firing scandal, says he submitted his resignation today not because he has been exposed as a crony and/or an incompetent. No, the reason for his quitting is that he has two kids going to college and he needs to make more money because he only makes, like, $200,000 a year.

Washington!

When the Deputy Attorney General of the country is crying poor, whining for all the world about how he can’t afford to send his kids to school, I guess it’s safe to say we’ve hit some new level of beltway cluelessness. Would some reporter ask that guy where the hell the rest of us are supposed to get the money for an education? Oh, I know… tax breaks!

Given his performance and contempt for the law, McNulty should be unhirable. He should be made to suffer the humiliation of having to tell his children to take out loans from corrupt university lenders like the rest of us have had to do.

Note: Okay, maybe McNulty didn’t lie. As Salon puts it, he was “informed only in outline [by fallguy D. Kyle Sampson] and briefed to give false testimony about the reasons for the firings…” But Paul Kiel says, McNulty is far from blameless and worse than an incompetent: “He allowed himself to be steamrolled by his inferiors to fire eight U.S. attorneys for, in most cases, no apparent reason. And then after that was done, he helped smear their reputations in order to cover for the Department and the administration.”