Gonzo Has 'The Fear'

Attorney General Gonzales has been preparing for his Judiciary Committee testimony around the clock for days now, and due to the tragedy in Virginia, he has another few hours to cram. The reports from Justice seem to indicate that he's essentially devolved into a sweaty, unpredictable maniac, exasperating his staffers as he desperately grasps for loopholes through which he can escape the obvious fact that he's lied since the Attorney Firing Scandal began.

I like to imagine a literal interpretation of his "Gonzo" nickname... At this frantic zero hour, it's not difficult to envision Alberto Gonzales locked away in his waterboarding rumpus room thrashing around, fully clothed, in a tub of filthy water -- Dr. Gonzo from Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas.

"I hate to say this," he says through intrusive hiccupping, "but this place is getting to me. I think I'm getting The Fear."

His only friend in this thing, President Bush, fumbles with a cassette of Jefferson Airplane's White Rabbit and urges him not to resign, "Nonsense. We came here to find the American Dream, and now we're right in the vortex you want to quit?"

Then again, in Fear And Loathing, Rauol Duke (Hunter Thompson) and Dr. Gonzo (Oscar Acosta) were significantly more centered, talented, smarter and, this is saying a lot, more lucid than Gonzales and President Bush have ever wished to be. The comparison, however, doesn't end with the nickname. Both Gonzos served as counsel to their respective pals. Both Bush and Duke had issues with illegal chemical substances. And now, Bush/Gonzo are locked in that lonely hotel room, struggling for a way out -- for a way around the human and psychological barriers preventing their escape from this latest scandal.

So now is the time to strike. Gonzo has The Fear, so use it. How can Senators Leahy, Feingold, Durbin and the rest of the Democratic members of the committee trip up Gonzo while he's seized in his present state of dysphoria? If you've ever been around someone whose resistance is low and whose stress is at a boiling point, all it takes is some clever questions -- and some props. Perhaps a solo album by, say, Buckethead. Then sit back and... enjoy.

They can start by mounting the committee dais on a rotating platform. Gonzo, if the metaphor holds, will have a hell of a time dismounting this carousel of revolving senators during a recess. It'll disorient and confuse him. His mental state will be aggravated further when the committee members appear wearing creepy reptile costumes. Committee staffers can festoon the walls with paintings of Barbra Streisand. By the time the questioning is underway, Gonzo will be reduced to psychotic, disheveled salmagundi of twitches and nonsensical outbursts and then, at the peak of this mania, the truth will ooze out; the truth about the political motivations for the firings; the truth that he orchestrated the firings from the beginning "at the pleasure of the president;" the truth that he's lied all along.

In reality, the committee could subpoena the hard drives used by Rove and the rest for those mysterious RNC-based e-mails. Then they can download readily available programs that are designed to recover deleted e-mail messages, like this one, this one or this one. As Senator Leahy said with a surprising amount of tech savvy, e-mails are never truly lost. If they want to freak out Gonzo and Rove, resurrecting those deceased e-mails is a good start.

Or they can cut to the chase and look to this evidence from an e-mail dated June, 2006:

"AG [Attorney General] has given additional thought to the San Diego situation [fired USA Carol Lam] and now believes that we should adopt a plan" that would lead to her removal if she "balks" at immigration reform, [Kyle] Sampson wrote.

That's crazy, since Gonzo said on March 13, 2007, "I was not involved in seeing any memos, was not involved in any discussions about what was going on ... That's basically what I knew as attorney general."

INT. MINT HOTEL SUITE BATHROOM - NIGHT.
DR. GONZO: "I dig my own graves."

The other way to nab Gonzo is to wait for him to mention that George Washington's attorney general, Edmund Randolph, fired US Attorneys and deleted e-mails to cover his tracks. Gonzo tried a similar excuse a year ago in testimony to the Judiciary Committee when he inexplicably alluded to George Washington tapping phone conversations without warrants: "President Washington, President Lincoln, President Wilson, President Roosevelt have all authorized electronic surveillance on a far broader scale." Anyone who can't keep straight the well-known timeline of technological innovation is sure to contradict himself on the timeline of his own involvement in the firings.

Whatever tactic the boys employ, trapping someone so awash in his own self-incriminated pool of crapola should be a slam dunk for the best and brightest of our Senate Democrats. If they orchestrate everything correctly on Thursday, we could finally witness Gonzo walking up that flight of jetway stairs -- waving Nixonian V-for-victory gestures with his hands -- just before flying back to Texas where he can torture small animals (with Rove) instead of continuing on as one of the masterminds behind America's rapidly diminishing credibility and reputation.