On a Very Hot Seat With Little Cover and Less Support

It was not a nice day for Gonzales.



Nor did it matter what side of the aisle his tormentors came from, with Republicans also calling for him to stand down.



Indeed, the most lethal question came from his own side of the aisle.

“I don’t believe that you’re involved in a conspiracy to fire somebody because they wouldn’t prosecute a particular enemy of a politician or a friend of a politician,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina. “But at the end of the day, you said something that struck me: that sometimes it just came down to these were not the right people at the right time. If I applied that standard to you, what would you say?”

It was a devastating question — one reflecting pent-up Republican anger not only at the attorney general, but at President Bush as well.

Devastating, indeed. If people can be fired on such a sloppy standard as "these were not the right people at the right time", then there is no standard in place at all. You could ostensibly fire people simply because you didn't like them.

Bear in mind, this is the Attorney General we are talking about here. The highest law officer in the land and a man who we are told has been preparing for weeks to face this panel. And he comes out with a response like that?

Even over at the super Conservative National Review Online, Gonzales' performance is being written off as a disaster:

It has been a disastrous morning for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. The major problem with his testimony is that Gonzales maintains, in essence, that he doesn’t know why he fired at least some of the eight dismissed U.S. attorneys. When, under questioning by Republican Sen. Sam Brownback, Gonzales listed the reasons for each firing, it was clear that in a number of cases, he had reconstructed the reason for the dismissal after the fact. He didn’t know why he fired them at the time, other than the action was recommended by senior Justice Department staff.

Later, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham returned to the subject. “Mr. Attorney General, most of this is a stretch,” Graham told Gonzales. “I think most of them [the U.S. attorneys] had personality disagreements with the White House, and you made up reasons to fire them.” Gonzales disagreed but had nothing to support his position. Throughout the morning, Gonzales insisted that he is the man in charge of the Justice Department, and accepted responsibility for the firings, but his testimony suggests he had little idea what was going on.

The problem according to Andy McCarthy, also at National Review Online, is that Gonzales has been prepped to face the panel combatively, which is not in his nature:

He tried a combative interjection with Sen. Specter, saying with an edge, "I prepare for every hearing" when Specter said, offhandedly, "I know you have been preparing for this hearing." The result: the AG got clobbered: Specter — eyebrows raised and a dripping "Oh yeah?" tone — replied, "Do you prepare for every press conference?" — patently referring to Gonzales' presser when he denied any involvement in deliberation over the firings.

Gonzales ended up apologizing and adding something like, "Senator I don't want to fight with you."

The exchange with Specter ended with Specter pointedly not calling for his resignation, but only because he felt that such a decision was down to the Attorney General himself and, ultimately, the President.



As far as endorsements go, it's almost impossible to imagine a more lukewarm one. Indeed, things got so bad that Gonzales at one point seemed to give up even defending himself:



Even Republicans appeared to be in a state of dismay:

“It sounds like he walked into a firing squad without a gun,” said Charlie Black, a strategist close to the White House, after discussing the testimony with several other Republicans. Of the Republican senators, Mr. Black said, “They just think this was amateur hour, and they should not be expected to defend it.”

“I think anyone who’s watched this would say we could do better for attorney general,” Mr. Schumer said during a break. “He seems to be far less qualified than the U.S. attorneys that he’s fired.”

And therein lies the rub. This man, this supremely unqualified man, was hired because he was Bush's general counsel in Texas and, indeed, every subsequent promotion he was given - including being named to the Texas Supreme Court in 1999 - has been given to him by George Bush.

There can be very few who witnessed yesterday's performance and did not realise that they were looking at an incompetent. A man who simply should not be holding the office that he currently holds.

This is not Gonzales' fault. The fault lies with the man who hired him, repeatedly, to positions that he was simply not qualified to hold.

Bush has expressed his confidence in Gonzales, just as he expressed his confidence in Donald Rumsfeld long after it became clear that Rumsfeld's tenure as Defence Secretary was a disaster.

The problem here won't be rectified by the firing of the Attorney General, though fired he must be, the problem lies much higher up the food chain. His replacement will be chosen by the same incompetent who chose Gonzales in the first place.

And the greatest incompetent here is the present incumbent of the White House.

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Tags: Gonzales, hearings, fired US Attorney's, Bush