Gonzo Goes Home

AG Gonzales has resigned. Or was fired. Or resigned. Or...

It's amusing to hear the news clip of Bush inferring that Gonzo was the victim of politics. "His good name was dragged through the mud for political reasons." It's funny; I chuckle.

Now it's true that there are reasons I don't like Gonzales that don't actually merit his removal from office. But there are also other valid - very valid - reasons that he is unworthy of the office he has just exited.

Reasons I don't like him that do not actually merit his removal:

• His head is eternally stuck up George Bush's ass (their friendship spans back to Texas, where Gonzales helped Bush avoid a call for Jury Duty that would have revealed Bush's prior DUI). I think of Bush as the Michael Jackson of politics: he really, really needs someone to quit feeding the god complex and just start telling him the truth. "No, you cannot invite 9 year old boys to sleep in your bed." "No, you cannot subvert the constitution." Gonzo should have been that guy... He wasn't.
  
• He dismissed the Geneva convention as 'quaint' and essentially set the stage for all that transpired at Abu Ghraib, which set back our progress immeasurably during the time we were still seeking to capture Iraqi "heart and minds". Poor Colin Powell... the smartest man ever to be ignored in the Bush Administration.
  

Reasons I don't like him that also happen to be reasons he is not fit to serve the office of the AG.

• He has lied under oath... multiple times... and got caught. One might argue that lying under oath is all the rage in Washington these days, but YO - he's the freaking Attorney General. Death of Outrage, anyone? And if that's not bad enough, he lied about the abuses of the freaking Patriot Act. The same Patriot Act we just had to trust the government would never ever abuse and if the Patriot Act didn't get passed we were all gonna die and anyone who opposed it was a treasonous asshole.
• He attempted to pressure Ashcroft (while Ashcroft was in intensive care) to support illegal warrentless wiretapping against the advisement of, well, just about everybody else involved. When Bush removed Ashcroft for refusing to bless his unconstitutional activities, Gonzales stepped in as AG and did it himself.
  
• He abused the office of the AG, not just to make political appointments (which is not uncommon) but to ensure that specific political appointments supported very specific partisan political activities in key congressional districts. A distinction that seems lost on the Fox News crowd.

Bush's insistence - and Gonzales's, by proxy - that it's A-OK to piss on the constitution with good intentions is seriously wrong. It's wrong to claim power you were very deliberately not given. It's wrong for the servants of the highest offices in the land to break laws "for our own good." It's wrong to use a public office to help implement a Rovian plan to wreck havoc with our democratic processes. If ever the term "abuse of office" was meant to apply to anything, this is it. And it's wrong for the citizens of this country to excuse it just because the guy they voted for hired him.