We knew it was coming, but now that John McCain is plummeting in the polls, we’re seeing a renewed attack on Barack Obama and his “associations.”

It’s amazing that in these tough times John McCain is unable to engage in a principled debate on the economy. Commentators on this blog have put up conservative arguments, yet McCain seems to be completely unable to offer a coherent argument as to why he is the better choice when it comes to the economy. Sarah Palin can barely utter a coherent sentence at all. Instead, McCain sends out Palin to make personal attacks on Barack Obama. The strategy is clear - change the subject and hope that the fickle electorate will turn on Obama.

It doesn’t help, of course, that Obama has been calm and steady thoughout this crisis while McCain has acted like a desperate fool. It also doesn’t help that these disgraceful attacks will now give the press an excuse to look at John McCain’s past and Sarah Palin’s past. They each have their own questionable associations, and we will be hearing more about them.

We’re also seeing the fruits of McCain’s ugly campaign, as taunts like “kill him” and “sit down boy” come from their frenzied audiences. I guess this is what happens when you whip up fear and hatred.

Further, these allegations are not brought up in news conferences or in interviews, where McCain or Palin would be forced to answer tough questions about their allegations or about their own records. Palin has yet to conduct a single news conference. Yesterday, the press was also prevented from speaking with Palin supporters at a campaign event. Unbelievable.

Conservatives need to look in the mirror. Is this what you want from your candidates? Is winning at all costs worth it? Can you defend candidates who can’t even enunciate or defend conservative principles?

If this doesn’t work, this will be a fitting end to the Reagan conservative movement. By embracing a mediocre intellect like Sarah Palin, following the disaster of the George W. Bush presidency, conservatives will have proven that identity politics, cronyism and the politics of personal destruction have replaced conservative principles as the driving force of the movement. In many ways, today’s conservatives are the mirror opposite of Ronald Reagan, who relied on ideas and a sunny optimism to lead our country.

Historians will have a field day trying to rank the failures of the Bush administration. Iraq will likely top the list, but the disgraceful politicization of the Department of Justice has to be in the top 5.

Our justice system isn’t perfect, but it’s still the envy of the world. Keeping politics out of the decision to prosecute is critical to the health of our republic.

Last year, we saw how Alberto Gonzales and the other political hacks appointed by President Bush fired nine United States attorneys for not towing the line. Now more information is coming to light about how hiring practices for the Honors Program and other staff positions were influenced by politcal considerations, which is unlawful.

Justice Department officials over the last six years illegally used “political or ideological” factors to hire new lawyers into an elite recruitment program, tapping law school graduates with conservative credentials over those with liberal-sounding resumes, a new report found Tuesday.

The blistering report, prepared by the Justice Department’s inspector general, is the first in what will be a series of investigations growing out of last year’s scandal over the firings of nine United States attorneys. It appeared to confirm for the first time in an official examination many of the allegations from critics who charged that the Justice Department had become overly politicized during the Bush administration.

“Many qualified candidates” were rejected for the department’s honors program because of what was perceived as a liberal bias, the report found. Those practices, the report concluded, “constituted misconduct and also violated the department’s policies and civil service law that prohibit discrimination in hiring based on political or ideological affiliations.”

The shift began in 2002, when advisers to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft restructured the honors program in response to what some officials saw as a liberal tilt in recruiting young lawyers from elite law schools like Harvard and Yale. While the recruitment was once controlled largely by career officials in each section who would review applications, political officials in the department began to assume more control, rejecting candidates with liberal or Democratic affiliations “at a significantly higher rate” than those with Republican or conservative credentials, the report said.

The shift appeared to accelerate in 2006, under then-Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, with two aides on the screening committee — Michael Elston and Esther Slater McDonald — singled out for particular criticism. The blocking of applicants with liberal credentials appeared to be a particular problem in the Justice Department’s civil rights division, which has seen an exodus of career employees in recent years as the department has pursued a more conservative agenda in deciding what types of cases to bring.

It will be interesting to see if Gonzales is directly implicated in this scandal.