New Dream Team?!

At first glance, I thought my cartoonist friend, Mr. Dennehy, had come up with a good idea as to how the subjects of these two bad news stories could make lemonade out of the lemons recently handed them. The timing's perfect for Alberto Gonzales, who was the top lawyer in the country but who just lost his job, to start his legal comeback by snapping up the relatively easy case of defending Senator Larry Craig. Researchers haven't apparently been able to find anything in the Senate's Code of Conduct that begins to address Craig's foot tapping conduct. And, although Craig should have perhaps retained a good lawyer from the start, all he says he did was overreact and make a poor decision to plead guilty in hopes of making the incident go away quickly.

Just think about the attorney-client relationship Gonzales and Craig could have! I mean what attorney in the country would better understand his client's loss of credibility with his own peers than an attorney who's recently experienced the exact same thing? And how could Gonzales not appreciate how nice it's been of Craig to take the national news spotlight off himself (Gonzales) for awhile?! It's like they've already been working in tandem.

All in all, it could be a dream team comeback for both disgraced Republicans if it wasn't for those old legal rules about conflicts of interest. It's quite the tangled web we weave when first we seek to deceive involving "Senate Ethics" these days. For starters, there's Senator Pete Domenici who supports the investigation of Craig but who allegedly got Gonzales into trouble for firing a U.S. Attorney because that U.S. Attorney was not prosecuting someone Domenici wanted prosecuted. Despite their show of indignancy, foot tapping seems the least of the problems in this tangled web of Republican corruption.