Gonzales at the Senate Judiciary Committee

Parent Cafe
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<p>You mean, the most qualified person in the entire United States to serve as Chief Justice?</p>

<p>To bad we had to end up with the second-raters.</p>

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<p>“I have heard O’Connor, Kennedy and Breyer speak over the years. They are very, very impressive people with fabulous minds”</p>

<p>If you’ve had the opportunity to work closely with the federal appellate and trial judges, you’ve probably found (as my co-clerks and I have found) that most of them belong in the same company as the Supreme Court justices. Granted, my city has received an especially eminent group of nominees over the decades, but still, I can’t think of another arm of another profession where the dud rate is so low, and that’s true of members appointed by both parties.</p>

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<p>The meeting that Abu Gonzales claims to not recall took place in November 2006, just three months before he stated in a press conference that he had attended no meetings.</p>

<p>The conversations with the President and Karl Rove about firing David Iglaseus, Carol Lamm, and others that Abu Gonzales claims to not recall also took place last fall, within days on either side of the November election. We aren’t talking about ancient history.</p>

<p>More telling is the fact that Abu and other DOJ officials are following the script for “gumming the discussion” that was outlined in the action plan memo for dealing with political fallout from the firings – the action plan memo that was a major agenda item at the November 27th meeting Abu claims to not recall.</p>

<p>That action plan included threatening the fired prosecutors to go quietly or risk getting trashed by DOJ, attributing blame for the decision to “senior department officials”, lists of vague peformance shortcoming talking points for each fired prosecutor so ham-fistedly prepared that they didn’t even change the “she” to “he” when cutting and pasting to the next US Attorney on the list, lying to Senators about a desire for confirmation hearings in order to stall when the real plan was to simply insert replacements without confirmation under the revised Patriot Act, and so forth. Basically, Abu Gonzales is just following the action plan with his Mickey the Dunce routine – all while DOJ officials are taking the Fifth and the White House is in a full-court stonewall on turning over documents and officials for testimony.</p>

<p>We’ve all been down this road before. I think it raises the question: why is there is there such a stonewall? If it’s just hamfisted firing of the attorneys, why doesn’t the administration take its lumps and get on with it? The answer is pretty obvious. It was political – ugly political, potentially criminally political – and it leads to administration officials the White House can’t let it lead to. Hence, Mickey the Dunce. Between them Gonzales and Sampson have said “I don’t recall” more than 200 times in two Senate Hearings, Monica Goodling has refused to testify to avoid self-incrimination, and the White House has lost all relevant e-mails.</p>

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<p>What?! and deprive us of all of this entertainment??</p>

<p>This administration has made an art form of giving jobs and making appointments based on political loyalty to Bush–with sometimes tragic consequences. Who can forget “Brownie” and FEMA?</p>

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<p>Amen, to that. I’m hoping that Abu sticks around as Attorney General, serving as a living, breathing symbol of incompetent hack-dom.</p>

<p>I figure that, if he’s going to fall on his sword like the loyal Bushie that he is, it will tonight, after the news cycle.</p>

<p>And, for the award winner in the “Best Question asked at a Presidential Press Secretary News Briefing” Category, this gem from this afternoon:</p>

<p>**Q Does the President ever get tired of having to express his full confidence in the people around him these days? **</p>

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<p>This is the kiss of death…mob style…think Fredo in Godfather 2.</p>

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<p>IDad–could you send me to an article reference about this Sampson email? I took a quick look but couldn’t find it and I would be interested to read about it more.</p>

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<p><a href=“http://www.c-span.org/pdf/DOJpt2031207.pdf[/url]”>http://www.c-span.org/pdf/DOJpt2031207.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>Page 18 is the firing plan as it existed in mid November. It was revised after that. Page 28 is the go-ahead e-mail with confirmation that White House Legal office (Myers), Political Office (Rove), and Communications have signed off on firing. The plan is to wait until Dec 7th to fire them by phone after all of the US Attorneys have returned home from a meeting in Washington (“to reduce chatter”).</p>

<p>The “gum it to death” e-mail can be found on page 65 of this packet of Monica Goodling correspondence:</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.c-span.org/pdf/DOJpt3031207.pdf[/url]”>http://www.c-span.org/pdf/DOJpt3031207.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>Samson is talking about giving Senator Pryor the run-around regarding the Tim Griffin nomination. This e-mail gives a good sense of the mindset of these two-bit hacks. Samson concludes the paragraph about “gumming it to death” by saying “All of this should be done in ‘good faith’, of course.”</p>

<p>There was a big gap in the e-mails from mid November through the day or so before the firings, including the Gonzales Nov 27 meeting. I haven’t looked through later document dumps to see if this gap was ever filled in. The firings were supposed to be done earlier. The gap starts about the time Harriet Myers says that it hasn’t been determined if Bush needs to sign off, but if he does, he left for a world trip that day, so it might be 10 days.</p>

<p>We never see the answer to that, except confirmation that White House legal, political, and communications have all signed off.</p>

<p>Abu Gonzales doesn’t use e-mail (how convenient), so he is not copied on any of this. We are forced to rely on his recall. Samson says that he just assembled the list from names ‘senior officials’ told to add.</p>

<p>The DOJ documents are just hacks carrying out orders. The real interesting side of this story would require the missing White House and RNC e-mails and if they aren’t missing they wouldn’t be turned over anyway. Obviously, nobody from the White House is going to be allowed to talk to the Congressional inquiries unless it’s over Fred Fielding’s dead body. I think “gum it to death” is pretty much the operative phrase, which is why Gonzales’ job is safe. He’s a world class gummer.</p>

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<p>Thanks, IDad. Did you read this stuff for work or are you just super interested?</p>

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<p>I haven’t read very much of it. I kind of clicked through the pages of the first document dump.</p>

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<p>To the poster who put up this statement (I just forgot your handle): If you represent the views of the Republican Party rank-and-file, then that party has truly lost its soul completely. I used to count myself as a democratically-aligned independent, but no more, or at least not again for a long while. I would side with the Republicans when the Democrats pursued some excess. </p>

<p>This is about much more than the sacking of 8 US Attorneys; this is about the unprecedentedly deep politicization of the justice division of our executive branch. If you can’t see that, then you do truly believe that Bush wants to raise CAFE standards across the board and has wanted to for a long time. In other words, you be toopid and cwazy.</p>

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I did not write the post to which you are referring, but I’d like to understand why it is so difficult for people to discuss anything controversial on CC without resorting to name calling. Can you not just say you disagree with someone’s position without calling them stupid and crazy?</p>

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<p>BTW, there’s another document where Samson lists the “negative” talking points for each fired Attorney. It’s in that mess somewhere. </p>

<p>The most chilling thing is that Bud Collins, the fired prosecutor in Arkansas was called at home and given a veiled threat that he and his fellow fired Attorneys should keep their mouths shut or the DOJ would be forced to disclose performance related reasons for their firings. He e-mailed Lamm, Iglasias, and others to pass along what he perceived as the threat.</p>

<p>I think that was really the straw that broke the camel’s back. Four of the fired prosecutors (Lamm, Iglasias, Cummins, and the guy from Washington state) agreed to testify before a congressional committee on their firings.</p>

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<p>You know, the intrinsic corruption of the DOJ is pretty bad as a story on its own. But over dinner tonight I reflected that there’s the meta-story: this doofus Fredo is one of Bush’s best friends and closest confidants. <insert blasphemous=“” expletive=“” here=“”> I’m not sure which is worse. But it confirms Bush’s knee-jerk preference for loyalty over competence, ethics, or anything else.</insert></p>

<p>The administration is so bad in so many directions it’s unbelievable. One almost doesn’t know where to begin. (Okay, I do…Iraq. But there’s so much more.) It’s an administration that combines the worst elements of Buchanan, Grant’s second, Harding, and Nixon. I can say at least a few good things about Nixon. I’d be hard pressed to say even one about Bush, either a personal quality or an accomplishment.</p>

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<p>It’s a train wreck. The NYTIMES has some interesting quotes. Apparently, the entire Republican Party and the entire White House is desperately trying to get Bush to fire Fredo, but Bush won’t budge. Good. Keep Fredo around. He’ll make fantastic campaign ads in 2008.</p>

<p>I really think Bush is losing it. Gotta put Dr. Strangelove on my Netflix list again. It’s kind of sad, actually. I almost felt bad for Fredo yesterday… I mean, the guy behind him tallying up the “I don’t recalls” with magic marker as he testified was brutal. Some of the slap downs he got from Republican Senators. Wow. Spector demolished him within the first 10 minutes of questioning. But then I remembered Abu Garhib and illegal spying and destroying civil rights enforcement and all the rest.</p>

<p>The funniest blog entry I saw this week was somebody pondering what the conversation must be like when Fredo and W hang out together. The writer opinined that it must be dialog that would rival the movie, “Dude, Where’s My Car?”</p>

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<p>“Gonzo for Gonzo: Maybe Alberto Gonzales was brilliant yesterday—and everybody missed it.”</p>

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<p><a href=“Hmm. Maybe Alberto Gonzales was actually brilliant yesterday.”>Hmm. Maybe Alberto Gonzales was actually brilliant yesterday.;

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<p>I think that is exactly what Gonzo was doing. </p>

<p>The article is also correct…there is nothing that Congress or anyone else can do to stop the Bush administration…until November 2008.</p>

<p>That’s OK. All the “I can’t recalls” and “no proof of wrongoings” and “I plead the Fifths” and “Executive Priviledges, Interests, and Equities” and “Stay the Courses” and “Great Job Brownies” will come home to roost for the Republican Party in November 2008.</p>

<p>Why do you think the Republicans are using Abu Gonzales like a punching bag?</p>

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<p>And this preference filters all the way down through the ranks.</p>

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<p>Following up on the analysis that’s quoted and linked three posts back, the comments today from Bush and others in his camp certainly seem to suggest that they have somewhere between little and no interest in what their “friends . . . on Capitol Hill” may think of the Attorney General.</p>

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<p><a href=“http://www.suntimes.com/news/politics/354096,042307gon.article[/url]”>http://www.suntimes.com/news/politics/354096,042307gon.article&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>A very candid and very scary assessment…</p>