Former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell began his higher education in an admirable way. He received a B.B.A. in management from Notre Dame University and an M.B.A. from Boston University. In between he worked in the Army. Something went a little screwy, however, when he sought a joint M.A./J.D. degree from the Christian Broadcasting Network University. That school is now known as Regent University. It became a feeder school for the Bush administration, with predictably disastrous results. You can probably blame Kay Coles James or, I don’t know, her pal Duke Cunningham.

But, I digress. We were talking about Bob McDonnell and his Regent University law degree. How is that tied to the other Republican governor who was elected in 2009?

Regent University School of Law, founded by televangelist Pat Robertson to provide “Christian leadership to change the world,” has worked hard in its two-decade history to upgrade its reputation, fighting past years when a majority of its graduates couldn’t pass the bar exam and leading up to recent victories over Ivy League teams in national law student competitions.

But even in its darker days, Regent has had no better friend than the Bush administration. Graduates of the law school have been among the most influential of the more than 150 Regent University alumni hired to federal government positions since President Bush took office in 2001, according to a university website.

One of those graduates is Monica Goodling , the former top aide to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales who is at the center of the storm over the firing of US attorneys. Goodling, who resigned on Friday, has become the face of Regent overnight — and drawn a harsh spotlight to the administration’s hiring of officials educated at smaller, conservative schools with sometimes marginal academic reputations.

Documents show that Goodling, who has asserted her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination to avoid testifying before Congress, was one of a handful of officials overseeing the firings. She helped install Timothy Griffin , the Karl Rove aide and her former boss at the Republican National Committee, as a replacement US attorney in Arkansas.

Because Goodling graduated from Regent in 1999 and has scant prosecutorial experience, her qualifications to evaluate the performance of US attorneys have come under fire.

Ah, yes. At the time of the U.S. Attorney’s dismissal scandal, Chris Christie was the U.S. Attorney for New Jersey. Monica Goodling thought that he was doing a good job. I wonder why?

In November 2009, the voters of Virginia and New Jersey went to the polls to elect a new governor. A year earlier, they had both elected Barack Obama after witnessing the most criminally corrupt and incompetent administration in modern American history fuck things up for eight straight years.

And they forgot everything they had learned and voted for Bob McDonnell and Chris Christie, one of whom is going to jail and the other of whom could be headed that way shortly.

It should take longer than a year to forget an example like the Bush administration, but that’s what happened.