How's the Weather on Planet Wingnut?

I'm sure most of you saw the Wall Stree Journal article connecting U.S. Attorney Paul Charlton's firing to the investigation of Rick Renzi:

As midterm elections approached last November, federal investigators in Arizona faced unexpected obstacles in getting needed Justice Department approvals to advance a corruption investigation of Republican Rep. Rick Renzi, people close to the case said.

The delays, which postponed key approvals in the case until after the election, raise new questions about whether Attorney General Alberto Gonzales or other officials may have weighed political issues in some investigations. The Arizona U.S. attorney then overseeing the case, Paul Charlton, was told he was being fired in December, one of eight federal prosecutors dismissed in the past year.

It's a damning story, and Josh Marshall has more damning details. It's one more solid indication that the DOJ leadership (or Rove, via the DOJ leadership) was interfering in political investigations.

Over at the Corner, Byron York saw it too, and came to a conclusion that is somewhat...counter-intuitive:

In light of that, one might think that it might be a good idea to investigate whether someone inside the Justice Department was out to get Renzi, rather than protect him.

Seriously. I can't make this shit up. I mean, this is really just kind of sad and desperate.

Nutty as it is, though, it's a useful illustration of how the game is played. If you cherrypick every seemingly exculpatory detail ("It's a complicated case, and complicated cases take a long time....It was an unusual case, with unusual timing....the Justice Department approved the investigative tactics...before the election.") while dismissing the broader story, you can build a bogus case for the innocence of the thing. If you also focus obsessively on the one detail that suggests unethical behavior by somebody else (" The supposedly super-secret investigation was made public shortly before the election in an ugly, aggressively timed, and probably politically motivated leak."), you can spin a story into its exact opposite: Renzi is the victim here, and Charlton is the villain.

And the thing is, I'm convinced that most of them don't even do this consciously; this is just how they perceive the world. They really do live on another planet.