I’m not sure anyone really needed this one pointed out, but here it is anyway. As is par for the course, the right’s immediate response to the furor over the abrupt attorney dismissals was to say that Clinton did it too. It’s a knee jerk reaction, I swear. So the good people over at ThinkProgress decided to take a look and as it turns out, that assertion is disastrously false.

– Of the 468 confirmations made by the Senate over the 25-year period, only 10 left office involuntarily for reasons other than a change in administration prior to the firings that took place in December.

– In virtually all of those 10 previous cases, serious issues of personal or professional conduct appeared to be the driving issue. Prior to December, for example, only two U.S. Attorneys were outright fired for improper, and in one case criminal, behavior. The CRS report identifies six other U.S. Attorneys who resigned during the 25-year period who were implicated in news reports of “questionable conduct.” For two others, the CRS was unable to determine the cause.

That’s 10 over the course of a quarter of a decade, versus 8 that all got purged last December. It seems like when Bush goes, he goes big. Other presidents ask for a few wiretaps, he asks for tens of thousands (or more). His dad does a little invasion into Iraq, Dubya goes full-scale. Other presidents use a few signing statements, Bush Deux goes for around 800. When attorneys get fired at a rate of one every two and a half years, Bush shoves out a whole group of them all at once.

But there’s an interesting wrinkle. If it turns out that any of these attorneys were fired due to a lack of cooperation with the White House, there’s a good chance that their termination was downright illegal.

In law schools, it is common to give an exam called the “issue spotter,” in which students are given a set of facts and asked to identify all the legal issues and possible crimes. The facts about the purge are still emerging. But based on what is known — and with some help from Congressional staff members and Stephen Gillers, a law professor at New York University — it was not hard to spot that White House and Justice Department officials, and members of Congress, may have violated 18 U.S.C. §§ 1501-1520, the federal obstruction of justice statute.

And you can look through the individual issues at your leisure.

What worries me the most, though, is that we’ll end up with a Rumsfeld-type situation where Alberto Gonzales will get ousted and the issue will simply fall away. There’s a lot of discussion concerning Berty’s potential dismissal, but how is that any kind of resolution? It isn’t, it’s a token gesture and it will likely change very little, certainly not rectifying the problem.

Congress had better remember where their balls are, because I’m getting sick and tired of waiting for them to do what they were voted in to do. We didn’t campaign and rally and do all this work so they could sit on their asses and reflect on how great it is to finally be in power. We want to see results and the high has worn off after the first 100 hours. It’s time for the big guns.