Matt Gaetz falls on his sword.

Trump's nominee for Attorney General drops out.

Former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) has withdrawn from consideration as Donald Trump’s Attorney General:

While the momentum was strong, it is clear that my confirmation was unfairly becoming a distraction to the critical work of the Trump/Vance Transition. There is no time to waste on a needlessly protracted Washington scuffle, thus I'll be withdrawing my name from consideration to serve as Attorney General. Trump's DOJ must be in place and ready on Day 1.

While Gaetz is an interesting guy and I wish him well in his future career, even I, living 3,000 miles from D.C., had long had the sense that his complicated private life, whatever it was, left him a curious choice for one of the Big Four cabinet jobs — the original four in George Washington’s cabinet: State, Treasury, War, and Attorney General.

On the other hand, Gaetz did get married three years ago (to techster Palmer Luckey’s pretty sister Ginger), so he deserves a second chance at some point if he keeps his life turned around.

Why did Donald Trump, a worldly man, not sense that Gaetz came with baggage that would make him unlikely to be approved by the Senate?

The whole story reminds me that even The Real Insiders sometimes appear to be surprisingly clueless.

For example, I’m constantly being apprised of various new creative theories generated by outsiders about putative complex child sex scandals involving politicians. But my recollection is that the best documented gay sex abuse scandal, the one that sent Speaker of the House Denny Hastert to prison, was on the bingo card of practically nobody, insider or outsider, when it emerged, and it is almost never cited today as evidence by theorists of new scandals. Hastert was just too boring.

But the most jaw-dropping example of a Real Insider being clueless remains when outgoing President Barack Obama arranged for his darling daughter to get an internship working for Democratic donor … Harvey Weinstein.