Loyal, Liberated Gonzales Avoids the Noose

How interesting that World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz was being forced to negotiate his resignation, but Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is sailing along like Mark Twain, with rumors of his demise greatly exaggerated.

It's shocking that Gonzales continues to hold down one of the most sensitive jobs in Washington now that his cluelessness has been exposed for all the world to see.

He still rises each morning to run a Justice Department he knows almost nothing about, including how many lawyers work there (it's 10,000, not the "10,000 to 15,000'' he guessed in his Senate testimony last week), nor who decided to get rid of eight U.S. attorneys. He knows just enough to swear that no one at the White House had anything to do with it.

Gonzales holds onto his lease with a political loyalty so blind and unbending as to trump every other instinct, including embarrassment over barely being able to recall his own name before Congress.

We got another example of just how far he would go to please the president from the testimony of former Deputy Attorney General James Comey before the Senate two days ago. Comey described an almost farcical race, sirens blaring, to the bedside of then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, who lay in intensive care after gallbladder surgery in 2004.

Comey was trying to get there before Gonzales, who was then White House counsel, could get a weakened Ashcroft to sign a paper to override a declaration that President George W. Bush's domestic-surveillance program was illegal.

Read the whole column here.