It's how the media report it, and it's the same political bullshit I am tired of, the same inside baseball shit.
The important things, as usual, are superficially covered in the typical glossed-over way.
"A Dogged Advocate of Wartime Authority" by ERIC LICHTBLAU and SCOTT SHANE
WASHINGTON, Aug. 27 — Days after President Bush’s secret eavesdropping program was publicly revealed in December 2005, a battle-weary Alberto R. Gonzales stood before a room of reporters at the White House and asserted that “the president has the inherent authority under the Constitution, as commander in chief, to engage in this kind of activity.”
Time and again, as both White House counsel and attorney general, Mr. Gonzales would return to that theme: in a time of war, the president has broad powers to protect the country. It would become Mr. Gonzales’s mantra and, ultimately, by alienating lawmakers who accused the administration of overreaching, it would contribute to his undoing.
Daniel Marcus, a professor of constitutional law at American University who was a top official at the Justice Department under President Bill Clinton:
“He was not the intellectual father of those positions, but he shaped and articulated them at the White House, and he continued to take a very strong position on executive power as attorney general.”
It was Vice President Dick Cheney and his top legal adviser, David S. Addington, who, by most accounts, provided the intellectual framework for building up the power of an executive branch that they believed had been badly weakened by restrictions imposed after Vietnam and Watergate. They pushed for a radical rewriting of American policies on such critical issues as surveillance and detention of terrorism suspects after the Sept. 11 attacks, with virtually no oversight or input from Congress or the courts.
But as a longtime loyal adviser to Mr. Bush, Mr. Gonzales was often left to carry out those policies and put his stamp on them. But his dogged and sometimes robotic defense of the president’s wartime powers — in the face of Congressional pressure, adverse court rulings and public scorn — often proved ineffectual or counterproductive. Even after leaving the White House for the Justice Department in 2005, Mr. Gonzales was seen both by insiders and outsiders less as an independent legal thinker than as the president’s loyal retainer.
[When I got to this point, I realized that the web version (where they are driving us all, right) CENSORED THIS:]
After the NSA program was publicly disclosed in December 2005, Mr. Gonzales’s handling of the controversy exacerbated those concerns. When officials in the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility were denied security clearances last year to investigate ethics issues surrounding the program, they turned to Mr. Gonzales for help. He shut them down, telling a Senate committee last year that Mr. Bush had personally refused to grant the ethics office clearance to review the program. The disclosure prompted charges of a cover-up.
As White House counsel until 2005, Mr. Gonzales played a central role in giving legal approval for the National Security Agency’s wiretapping program and detention practices.
In close consultation with Mr. Addington and John Yoo, a conservative legal scholar in the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel,
[At this point, I notice the article is a complete rewrite in favor of Gonzales. Go read the web version.
And this is where we are supposed to headed, huh? Because it is easier for the Times to LIE, OMIT, EDIT, and OBFUSCATE?
This is why I'm sick of doing this, reader!
Why can't they just tell us the truth, instead of PUSHING an AGENDA?]
Mr. Gonzales gave the administration's legal imprimatur to secret detention centers, interrogation tactics bordering on torture and eavesdropping without warrants inside the United States for the first time since 1978. While Mr. Addington was viewed as the intellectual force behind the new policies, Mr. Gonzales wholehearted cooperation was indispensable in carrying them out.
David R. Gergen, professor of public service at Harvard University and an adviser to Presidents Nixon, Gerald R. Ford, Ronald Reagan and Clinton, said Mr. Gonzales “will be remembered as riding shotgun with Dick Cheney on the expansion of presidential power.”
Mr. Gonzales's role -- and particularly his derision of some provisions of the Geneva Conventions as "quaint" in one memo -- led to a bruising confirmation battle in 2005 after Mr. Bush had tapped him to become the first Hispanic attorney general in history. Even then, Mr. Gonzalez and his senior aides were well aware of the perception, unfair though they thought it was, that his first loyalty was to the president, not to his position as the nation's chief law enforcement officer.
[Gonzales] told skeptical members of the Senate Judiciary Committee at his confirmation hearing in January 2005:
"I will no longer represent only the White House, I will repreesent the United States of America and its people. I understand the differences between the two roles."
He survived the confirmation fight by a closer-than-expected vote of 60 to 36."
[Why is the "nemesis" of the Bush administration censoring and rewriting the news in favor of the criminals?]
And how about this example of these lying criminals Gonzales and Bush?
No censorship this time, just my highlighting:
"A Defender of Bush’s Power, Gonzales Resigns" by PHILIP SHENON and DAVID JOHNSTON
WASHINGTON, Aug. 27 — On Monday, White House and Justice Department officials said it was Mr. Gonzales who took the initiative to step down after he returned to Washington last week from vacation in Texas. The officials said that during his time off, Mr. Gonzales and his wife, Rebecca, realized how weary they had grown of the constant criticism and concluded that he was unlikely to restore his credibility and faced a continued battering by lawmakers in both parties.
The officials said he offered his resignation on Friday in a brief telephone conversation with Mr. Bush, who was at his ranch in Crawford, and that the president immediately accepted the resignation. On Sunday, Mr. Gonzales and his wife flew to the ranch for a consoling lunch where the resignation was confirmed.
But other Republicans close to the White House and Mr. Gonzales offered a different account, suggesting that the attorney general was eased out and that the process leading to his departure unfolded over several months as Joshua B. Bolten, the White House chief of staff, and Fred F. Fielding, the White House counsel, concluded that Mr. Gonzales had become a liability and quietly pushed for him to step down.
Mr. Gonzales had his defenders at the White House, chiefly Karl Rove, the senior White House adviser. The officials said that when Mr. Rove announced that he was leaving, Mr. Gonzales lost a protector.
A Republican close to the White House: “He was being protected, in large measure by Karl. [When Mr. Rove left], it further exposed that the only thing that was standing with him was the president of the United States.”
White House spokespeople said Monday that Mr. Bolten had not orchestrated Mr. Gonzales’s resignation.
The likelihood that Mr. Gonzales was pressed to leave was strengthened by the shock the announcement caused at the Justice Department. Mr. Gonzales had told no one he was thinking about stepping aside and did not inform his chief of staff, Kevin O’Connor, until Sunday afternoon.
Mr. Gonzales had recently discussed with subordinates his plans for staying on through the remainder of the administration. He had planned his travel schedule through the fall.
Throughout the weekend, White House aides and Mr. Gonzales’s spokesman denied that there were any plans for Mr. Gonzales to resign. On Sunday, Mr. Gonzales said through his chief press spokesman that he had no plans to resign.
The spokesman, Brian Roehrkasse, said Sunday afternoon that he called the attorney general about the reports of his imminent resignation, “and he said it wasn’t true — so I don’t know what more I can say.”
[They can't tell the truth about ANYTHING, can they, not even about a resignation!
See, Amurka? EVERY SINGLE THING THEY SAY IS A LIE!!!!!!]
"New confirmation hearings could shine light on secrets" by Peter S. Canellos/Boston Globe August 28, 2007
WASHINGTON -- Bush, who yesterday declared that Gonzales was the victim of a political vendetta, is clearly unhappy to be facing an opening at the top of the Justice Department with only a year and a half left in his tenure.
The precise boundaries of Bush's wartime authority -- and how he's using it -- remain unknown except to a circle of administration lawyers. That's the information Democrats want to get from any new attorney general.
Boston University Law School Dean Maureen O'Rourke:
"At the end of the day, the fear [for the administration] would be exposure of something that's potentially embarrassing or, in the worst case, potentially illegal."
The president has long maintained that his policies are not only legal, but also essential to protect the nation from terrorism. And for 6 1/2 years, Alberto Gonzales provided the legal cover necessary to pursue them.
Now, Gonzales is leaving, and the cover is in danger of coming off."
[Yeah, right. On what? The corruption and torture, the 9/11 and Iraq lies?
It all continues under this corrupt and complicit media! Pffffftttt!]
This is why I have trouble taking the shit MSM editorials seriously:
The House Lawyer Departs
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has finally done something important to advance the cause of justice. He has resigned. But his departure alone cannot remove the dark cloud that hangs over the Justice Department. President Bush needs to choose a new attorney general of unquestioned integrity who would work to make the department worthy of its name again — and provide the mandate to do it. Congress needs to continue to investigate the many scandals Mr. Gonzales leaves behind.
When Mr. Gonzales was appointed, it seemed doubtful that he would be able to put aside his years as Mr. Bush’s personal lawyer, which stretched back to the Texas governor’s office, and represent the interests of the American people. He never did.
In many ways, Mr. Gonzales turned out to be the ultimate “loyal Bushie,” a term his Justice Department chief of staff used so incredibly inappropriately to describe what his department was looking for in its top prosecutors.
It was just that kind of craven politics — the desire to co-opt the power of the government to win elections — that was the driving force in Mr. Gonzales’s Justice Department. Dedicated and capable United States attorneys were fired for insisting on doing their jobs with integrity — for refusing to put people in jail, or shield them from prosecution, simply to help Republicans win elections. Lawyers were hired for nonpolitical jobs based on party enrollment and campaign contributions, and top members of Mr. Gonzales’s staff attended pre-election political briefings at the White House led by Karl Rove and his aides.
When Mr. Gonzales testified before Congress, his misstatements and memory lapses were so frequent that it was hard to believe they were not intentional. He told Congress many things about the prosecutors’ firings that were contradicted by his top aides and by documents. His testimony about the Bush administration’s warrantless domestic surveillance program also ran counter to many credible sources, including the account of Robert Mueller, director of the F.B.I.
There was a more basic problem with Mr. Gonzales’s tenure: he did not stand up for the Constitution and the rule of law, as an attorney general must. This administration has illegally spied on Americans, detained suspects indefinitely as “enemy combatants,” run roughshod over the Geneva Conventions, violated the Hatch Act prohibitions on injecting politics into government and defied Congressional subpoenas. In each case, Mr. Gonzales gave every indication of being on the side of the lawbreakers, not the law.
[An IMPEACHABLE OFFENSE, Times!!!
Yet you scoff with disdain and scorn at that idea!
FALSE CRITICISM by those who are with him!!!
What a GREAT GAME you stinkfucks got going!]
Mr. Gonzales signed off on the administration’s repugnant, and disastrous, torture policy when he was the White House counsel. He later helped stampede Congress into passing the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which endorsed illegal C.I.A. prisons where detainees may be tortured and established kangaroo courts in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to keep detained foreigners in custody essentially for life. He helped cover up and perpetuate Mr. Bush’s illegal wiretapping programs, both in the counsel’s job and as attorney general. The F.B.I. under his stewardship abused powers it was given after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the name of enhanced national security.
Mr. Gonzales will hardly be a tough act to follow, but the standard for the next attorney general should not be set that low.
[Yeah, the Times knows about all this, and? And?]
President Bush needs to appoint someone who does not come out of the world of electoral politics or the White House, and is not a “loyal Bushie.” He should consult with leaders of Congress in making the decision and choose someone with bipartisan support.
There is talk that the president might make a recess appointment, taking advantage of Congress’s vacation to name someone who would not need to be confirmed by the Senate. That would be a major mistake, and it would ensure the next attorney general a bitterly antagonistic relationship with Congress for the next 17 months.
[Really? I haven't heard any (except from me yesterday to my mother) about that on tv or anywhere else.
You the first to mention, Times.]
The next attorney general will have two critical tasks. First, he or she must get to the bottom of the scandals hovering over the department. Mr. Gonzales played defense, as if it were Congress’s job to discover what laws his department may have broken, and his job to thwart it. The next attorney general should appoint a credible, independent investigator to look into the prosecutors’ firings and likely Hatch Act violations and make clear that the investigation will be permitted to follow the facts where they lead — including, as appears likely, to the White House.
Second, the next attorney general will have to fix a badly broken department. Many of the top positions are now empty, vacated by aides to Mr. Gonzales who came under Congressional scrutiny. They need to be replaced with qualified, nonpolitical professionals. The “loyal Bushies” who are still on staff need to be removed.
Congress — in particular, Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont; Senator Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York; and Representative John Conyers, Democrat of Michigan — deserve credit for keeping the pressure on, even when critics were saying there was nothing to the scandals. But many questions remain to be answered. High on the list: what role politics played in dubious prosecutions, like those of former Gov. Don Siegelman of Alabama, and Georgia Thompson, a Wisconsin civil servant.
[Congress keeping the pressure on?
Until shithead demands passage of the FISA annihilation, then it's ok?
Pfffffttttt!!!]
Mr. Gonzales, for all of his undeniable deficiencies, merely reflected the principles of this administration. His resignation is a necessary but hardly sufficient step in restoring the nation’s commitment to the rule of law (New York Times August 28, 2007)."
[Which means we don't have it now, and the Times is just blowing more HOT FART MIST!!]
