Gonzales The Stone Golem

My guess is that Monica Goodling's testimony will bring the US Attorney scandal right back to the front pages. There are certainly enough threads that deserve to be pulled out there. There's the continued absence of any explanation for how those fired attorneys ended up on a target list. (my favorite part of yesterday's Abu G hearing was when Wexler was grilling him on this question, and Abu G says "You'd know that better than I would," and Wexler asks "Are you the Attorney General? Do you run the Justice Department?" Priceless.) There's the emergence of a 9th fired prosecutor, Todd Graves in Missouri. There's the continuing revelations that this all goes back to electing Republicans in 2006 (sorry, but you F'ed up so bad not even a bunch of lawyers could fix it for you):

Only weeks before last year's pivotal midterm elections, the White House urged the Justice Department to pursue voter-fraud allegations against Democrats in three battleground states, a high-ranking Justice official has told congressional investigators.

In two instances in October 2006, President Bush's political adviser, Karl Rove, or his deputies passed the allegations on to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' then-chief of staff, Kyle Sampson.

Sampson tapped Gonzales aide Matthew Friedrich, who'd just left his post as chief of staff of the criminal division. In the first case, Friedrich agreed to find out whether Justice officials knew of "rampant" voter fraud or "lax" enforcement in parts of New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and report back.

So there's a lot going on, and Goodling may advertently or inadvertently plug some holes and reveal some more. What's clear is that talking to Alberto Gonzales is like talking to a stone wall, and it's something of a practiced art:

Alberto Gonzales is in his happy place. He enters the hearing room in the Rayburn Building for his testimony before the House judiciary committee smiling the smile of a man who sleeps well each night, in the warm glow of the president's love. Gone is the testy, defensive Gonzales who testified last month before the Senate. Today's attorney general breezes into the chamber with the certain knowledge that having bottomed out in April, he has nothing left to prove. His only role in this scandal is as decoy: He's the guy who runs out in front of the hunters and draws their fire so nobody pays any attention to what's happening at the White House.

Gonzales seems to have made his peace with this. No more angry outbursts, no bitter attempts at self-justification. Instead, the AG answers some questions with a giggle and most others with the same old catchphrases we've heard so often: He has consistently failed to investigate any wrongdoing at the Justice Department out of "deference to the integrity of the ongoing investigations." The decisions about which U.S. attorneys made Kyle Sampson's magic list were the "consensus recommendations of the senior leadership of the department." Over and again, ever in identical language, Gonzales "accepts full responsibility for the decision" just as he insists that he played only a "limited role" in the decision-making. The fact that the attorney general can't even be bothered to pull out a thesaurus after all these weeks—even if only to create the illusion that these nonanswers come from him as opposed to a list of pre-approved talking points—reveals just how little he cares about what Congress and the public think of him anymore.

Many have made this point recently, that it used to be that when a cabinet official failed this badly, he'd simply have to resign to protect the President. But the unwritten rules simply don't apply to the Bush Administration. They're quaint traditions which are made to be broken. Like I've said, Gonzales is nothing but a firewall. He should be shunned at this point. There are others, like Goodling, and Brad Schlozman (testifying next Tuesday, I think), who can shed some more light on the situation and get at the ultimate source of this politicization.

UPDATE: Shorter LA Times - "US Attorneys don't actually DO anything, what did you think that they were in charge or something? Honest! Unnamed sources told us so!"