It’s March in Washington, D.C.

That means it’s raining… fall guys.

It wasn’t always the case. During George W. Bush’s first term, Slate notes, you couldn’t oust a political appointee to save your life.

We Democrats know this, having predicted Donald Rumsfeld would go down long before he was finally, finally forced out.

Same with Paul O’Neill and Karl Rove (the latter of whom never left, although he has been tied to yet another recent scandal).

But nowadays, with Bush’s approval rating stuck in the 30-40-percent range, he’s a little more attentive to criticism. The replacement of White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card with the smarter, tougher Josh Bolton is likely another reason so many bodies are being thrown under the bus.

Who are the fall guys?

The most famous right now is Scooter Libby, former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. Libby is shouldering the blame for Plamegate, even though Rove, Richard Armitage, and possibly Ari Fleischer were just as guilty of the underlying offense of outing a CIA employee.

Army Gen. George Weightman, who appears to have had very little to do with creating the outpatient scandal at Walter Reed Army Hospital, nonetheless was the first to go when news of the scandal hit the Washington Post. The seemingly more-culpable personnel soon followed.

Then there’s the scandal swirling around the dubious, politically motivated firings of eight U.S. attorneys, leading to the resignation of D. Kyle Sampson, chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Sampson allegedly failed to inform the higher-ups about his contacts with the White House about the firings. That same day, the Bush administration released e-mails identifying former White House Counsel Harriet Miers (the one-time Supreme Court nominee, who resigned two months earlier) as the person who first proposed wholesale firings of U.S. attorneys.

This is Miers’ second tour as fall guy (gal), recalling the days in 2005 when Bush was criticized for promoting an unqualified crony to the bench.

Bush “reluctantly” accepted Miers’ withdrawal. It’s widely expected that Bush, with equal reluctance, will accept Gonzales’ resignation. The fall guy, after all, represents a particular social type in Washington, and Gonzales fits it to a T. Here’s why:

1. The ideal fall guy is fervently loyal and not particularly bright.
2. Loyalty is required because a good fall guy must accept blame or at least not assign it to higher-ups.
3. Dimness is helpful because the more plausibly incompetent a fall guy is, the more willingly the press and the public will believe that the scandal is his fault.

FEMA administrator Michael “Heck of a Job” Brown, for one example, was so clearly in over his head during Hurricane Katrina that his departure took the heat off Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff, who subsequently shared in much of the blame.

If a loyal and dim fall guy is unavailable, a loyal, conspicuously zealous fall guy is second-best. Libby, for instance, was great. Appropriate, as a pair of Libby-like henchmen - domestic advisor John Ehrlichman and Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman - once handed in resignations that Richard M. Nixon accepted reluctantly in April 1973.

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