Kevin Drum has the short version you've been looking for:
[T]he only serious argument that Purgegate is a scandal is related to the reason for the Pearl Harbor Day massacre. If seven U.S. Attorneys were fired that day for poor performance, that would be fine. If they were fired for insufficient commitment to Bush administration policies, that would be fine too. But there's considerable reason to believe that at least some of them were fired because either (a) they were too aggressive about investigating Republican corruption or (b) they weren't aggressive enough about investigating Democrats.That's it. That's the argument. David Iglesias: Didn't bring indictments against some local Democrats prior to the 2006 election. John McKay: Failed to invent voter fraud cases that might have prevented a Democrat from winning the 2004 governor's race in Washington. Carol Lam: Doing too good a job prosecuting trainloads of Republicans in the wake of the Duke Cunningham scandal. Daniel Bogden and Paul Charlton: In the midst of investigations targeting current or former Republican members of Congress when they were fired. And this all comes against a background that suggests the Bush Justice Department has initiated fantastically more investigations of Democrats than Republicans over the past five years.
Meanwhile, Matthew Yglesias dispatches, hopefully once and for all, the stupid "Clinton did it too" talking point:
Bill Clinton beat George H.W. Bush in an election, took office a few months later, and swiftly fired all of Bush's appointees for US Attorney jobs. He then replaced them with people chosen, in practice, by the relevant local political stakeholders -- that state's Democratic Senators, if any, and a more complicated process in states represented by two Republicans. The message this sends to people working in US Attorney's offices throughout the country is that . . . US Attorneys will lose their jobs if the partisan control of the White House switched. George W. Bush, by contrast, fired a handful of US Attorneys who had displeased the Bush team's political fixers, under circumstances where (contrary to historic practice) the White House got to hand pick their successor. The message this sends to federal prosecutors throughout the land is that US Attorneys' are now considered part-and-parcel of George W. Bush's political team and that those who fail to act accordingly will be sacked.
The implications of the two actions are entirely different. There's no indication what Bush did was illegal. Rather, he operated within his legal discretion. We grant the president a certain amount of discretion, however, primarily on the theory that if he uses that discretion in an abusive or unwise manner, his opponents will make political hay out of it.
I've highlighted that last bit because it points out something about our constitutional system that is far too often overlooked. The separation of powers built into our constitution is premised on the very basic idea and realistic idea that when a politician screws up, their political opponents are going to use that mistake to their advantage. At its core, that's what Madison's "faction v. faction" argument in Federalist 10 is really about.
In politics, everything is political. Rather than decry that, however, the framers of our constitution built a system that would put what some saw as a fault of all systems of government to good use. Their hope was to channel political conflict in such a way that it checked governmental power. Reasoned argument was one approach they favored, but embarrassment and ridicule were right at the top of their list as well.
So please, no more of this "the Democrats are playing politics with this issue" nonsense. The Bush White House fired these people for political reasons. Their Democratic opponents are now going to use that political action to score political gains. Madison might have hoped for better, but he planned for much worse.
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