What he said.

Matt Yglesias...

This is already dull conventional wisdom, but it seems to me that the rumored new guy at the Justice Department, Michael Mukasey, stands a good chance of rescuing the DOJ from its Gonzalez-era status as a cesspool of depravity and incompetence and bringing us back to the glory days of John Ashcroft when one primarily worried about the Attorney-General's ludicrously wrongheaded ideology.

There's bound, I suppose, to be an Attorney General, and it's certain that any Bush nominee will be unacceptable to patriots for any number of reasons. The promise of competent mechanical administration of DOJ for a year or so seems to be the most we can realistically hope for.

Funny thing. Four years ago, one of John Kerry's most consistent crowd pleasers was the promise to appoint an Attorney General who's name wasn't John Ashcroft. Now the Ashcroft era has morphed into the "glory days."

Only 490 days, folks.