Editorials

The picture that emerges from the appearance of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales before the Senate Judiciary Committee is not one of “high crimes and misdemeanors”—unfortunately. “We should have done a better job of communicating,” he says. “I accept responsibility,” he says, “mistakes were made.” Next thing you know, he’ll be going into rehab. 

Gonzales claimed he never liked the plan to replace the U.S. attorney in Arkansas with one of Karl Rove’s flunkies, and that he was sincere when he told Arkansas Sen. Pryor that the Senate would have a chance to vote on whether Rove’s guy would be confirmed. As the bulldog-like Sen. Charles Schumer made very clear, Gonzales was either lying to Pryor, or he was out of the loop on the elaborate plan to evade the confirmation process which was being hatched by his subordinates. He also claimed absolutely no recall of any of the events or conversations surrounding the attempt to remove Patrick Fitzgerald. His level of asserted non-comprehension of what’s been going on in the Justice Department where he’s supposed to be in charge is breathtaking.  

We’ve had plenty of scoundrels in government in this country before. But this time the criticism of Gonzales is not really that he’s a scoundrel, or even that he’s broken any laws per se, but that he’s a fool. This opinion is obviously bi-partisan, though some Republicans do seem to feel that he’s more to be pitied than censured. 

It is sad when a man doesn’t even know when he’s lying—Gonzales seems to be saying that currents of corruption were swirling all around him, but he was just going with the flow, as we say in California. What’s saddest of all is that there seems to be no evidence that he has ever been on the take in any big way—he’s allowed Justice to go to hell in a handcart for no particular reason except his desire to be considered one of the good ol’ boys.  

Now more than ever, where is Molly Ivins when we need her? We’re seeing on the national level the kind of shenanigans she did such a good job of reporting on from the Texas Legislature. When she spoke in Berkeley in 2004, UC’s press service quoted her: “The spin we’re getting from the White House—that everything is just lovely and that we’re going to bring a beacon of democracy to Iraq—is such happy horseshit,” she said. “I can barely stand to listen to it, and I spent years listening to the Texas Legislature.” And now the Bush administration, in the person of Alberto Gonzales, is treating the nation to yet another unsavory whiff of Texas Lege-style politics.  

Payoffs, especially at the level of mutual back-scratching, have been the special province of another Texas transplant, Karl Rove. Slots as U.S. attorney have been horse-traded as political favors to please senators and others whose support was needed to advance some other agenda. Gonzales freely acknowledged that at least one of the attorneys whose job was in play is an excellent lawyer and a fine manager of staff, but was just the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time. Competence and performance had nothing to do with it. 

The way the Iraq war has been handled is another classic example of a situation so messed up you can’t even tell the fools from the knaves. Paul Wolfowitz is a prime case in point. Michael Moore made him look like a stage villain in Fahrenheit 9/11, combing his hair with saliva, but the stories coming out of his short tenure at the World Bank, complete with exotic mistress, make him look more like a buffoon. There’s a faint commedia dell’arte flavor about the whole Bush crowd: Dario Fo does the Texas Legislature perhaps?  

It would even be funny if the consequences weren’t so serious. As many commentators have already pointed out, while the United States. was mourning 32 deaths on a college campus caused by a madman empowered by Virginia’s lax gun control laws, 200 more Iraqis died as a consequence of an invasion which started with an earlier round of the Bush administration’s peculiar signature combination of lies and credulousness.  

One of the key attributes of George W. Bush’s presidency is that he prefers to surround himself in public with weak and incompetent people—what used to be called yes-men, but now includes women like Harriet Miers. The brains behind his regime—and they are certainly there—reside most often in the person of shadowy figures like Karl Rove and Dick Cheney who operate most effectively behind the scenes.  

Do they even know when they’re lying, these Bush stooges? It’s hard to tell.  

When Douglas Feith was peddling the WMD story, did he realize it was faked? When Alberto Gonzales went along with firing U.S. attorneys who were doing their job well, did he realize he was enabling a political purge? His department authorized destructive practices like illegal wiretapping—is he enough of a lawyer to recognize what unconstitutional mischief he was presiding over? 

The profound disgust which is visible on the faces of some of the Republicans on Judiciary as they question Gonzales is striking—they are simply unable to hide their contempt for him. Perhaps even Republicans, for whom there has seldom been a good word in this space, are starting to catch on.