Gonzales Brilliant?

A couple of days ago I thought Al Gonzales was toasted during his Senate testimony. Conventional wisdom suggests that, with even GOP senators calling for his resignation, he will be gone soon. Bush continues to profess confidence in Gonzales. Maybe Gonzales is smarter than we think:

This record reflects either a Harvard-trained lawyer—and former state Supreme Court judge—with absolutely no command of the facts or the law, or it reveals a proponent of the unitary executive theory with absolutely nothing to prove. Gonzales' failure to even mount a defense; his posture of barely tolerating congressional inquiries; his refusal to concede that he owed the Senate any explanation or any evidence; his refusal to even accept that he bore some burden of proof—all of it tots up to a masterful display of the perfect contempt felt by the Bush executive branch for this Congress and its pretensions of oversight. In the plainest sense, Gonzales elevated the Bush legal doctrine of "Because I said so" into a public spectacle. MORE

From this perspective, Gonzales was being perfectly consistent with the main theme of the entire Bush Administration: unrestricted executive power and total disregard for the other two branches. It seems foolish at this point for Bush to stand by somebody so weakened as Gonzales. But it wouldn't be the craziest thing this president has done.

Meanwhile, Steven Taylor points out an absurd statement by Rush Limbaugh yesterday. Rush said: Everybody on the Republican side now, along with the Democrats, wants to throw Alberto Gonzales overboard. He may be an idiot, I don’t know. He may be a weak attorney general. … It seems, every time there’s a public demand for somebody to resign in Washington, it’s always a Republican!

Well duh. People can't resign unless they are already in office. We’ve had a Republican administration for the last six years. The prior eight years we had a Democratic administration, and there were plenty of calls for its appointees to resign or be fired.