The Cap'n vs. The Great One

I'll put these missives on "embattled" Attorney-General Alberto Gonzales side by side, let you digest them, and then conclude with what I think.

Ed Morrissey:

Several commenters have called me and the Senators criticizing Gonzales "fair-weather Republicans." In my opinion, that's ridiculous. I support Republicans because they usually represent competence and smaller government, not because I belong to the Republican Tribe. I'm not going to support or defend obvious incompetence on the part of Republicans, and Gonzales has been an incompetent in this matter, as Tom Coburn rightly points out. I've said it before - if people want to read GOP apologetics, they can be found at http://www.gop.com/. Here, you get my honest opinion, and not just a dose of tribalism.

Four months after the firings and after a month of preparation, Gonzales still couldn't completely answer Brownback on why each attorney got fired. He testified that he hadn't even met with most of them about those reasons he could recite. He admitted that he wrongly accused them of poor performance in his public statements. He told the Senate yesterday that he objected to the plan Kyle Sampson presented him in November about rolling out the terminations, and then could not answer why that plan got followed over his objections by his aide.

Is that competence? Is this our argument for 2008 in asking the American public to trust Republicans with power? If it is, and we cannot bring ourselves to demand better from this Administration, be prepared for a very disappointing 2008.

Rush Limbaugh:

I have to tell you something, folks. I'm embarrassed, once again, by our side, some of the Republicans up in Washington. It just appears that they cannot think strategically. They have no idea how to circle the wagons around their own. Everybody on the Republican side now, along with the Democrats, wants to throw Alberto Gonzales overboard. He may be an idiot, I don't know. He may be a weak attorney general. I think that's why they - You know, Ashcroft was strong and Bush had to get rid of him, and now Gonzales is weak. We have to get rid of him! All this concocted stuff over the US attorneys? There's no crime. There really isn't even any incompetence here in the process of getting rid of the attorneys. What this is about is that Gonzales may have not remembered what happened when or where. But whatever the status of Gonzales, it's beside the point. Why in the world is it only...? It seems, every time there's a public demand for somebody to resign in Washington, it's always a Republican!...

Now, everybody is out demanding Gonzales' head, and a bunch of Republicans who don't seem to understand what's going on here, rather than circle the wagons, go along. Look at Janet Reno. Janet Reno, the Waco invasion? Talk about an incompetent boob of an attorney general! She was not only incompetent, everybody knew it - her incompetence actually cost lives. But nobody on our side said she ought to go. They circled the wagons around her after some show trial hearings. The Democrats in Congress, John Conyers, made a show of really excoriating her, but she hung in there. The notion that Pat Leahy and Senator Schumer could defend Janet Reno, but find Alberto Gonzales lacking is the joke of the century! I was trying to think this morning, can you think of any Democrat cabinet members that have been forced to resign under Republican pressure? They may have been forced to resign because of this or that, but I couldn't think of any. Can you think of any Clinton cabinet members, for example, who had to go [at GOP demand]?

Remember a year and a half ago when the Bush White House came under criticism for cronyism when they put up long-time Dubya fan Harriet Miers to succeed Sandra Day O'Connor on the SCOTUS? There were a couple of others as well, Bush associates who had been appointed to plush jobs for which their qualifications were questionable at best. Well, it certainly looks as if Alberto Gonzales (former Bush-appointed Texas supreme court justice and close first-friend) fits in that category, doesn't it? In his Senate testimony, for which he had, what, a month to prepare, he came across as so far out of his league that even Tom Coburn couldn't bring himself to defend Speedy.

In ordinary circumstances - let me rephrase that. In times long past when there was still a place for honor in public service - or, at least, when you didn't get actively punished for it - criticism of Bush's A-G could be tolerated, if not concurred with. It would not, in other words, be unreasonable, even if one did not agree with it (and let me stentorianly reiterate that I do not). And Gonzales' resignation would not be the next step down the slippery slope of complete Republican electoral destruction.

But these aren't those times. In the times in which we live, there is no reward for launching "friendly fire," no gain to be had from carpet-bombing one's own political lines, even if it is at all justified. Now least of all, with the national political momentum completely at the Democrats' backs, and Republicans already in pell-mell retreat and disarray.

Cap'n Ed, in other words, is confusing virtue with good politics. Throwing Alberto Gonzales under the bus may or may not be the former, but it sure as hell is not the latter. It would, to the contrary, be another scalp hung on the Donk belt, another notch on their (ahem) bedpost, another severed Pachyderm head on the spikes outside DNC headquarters. And it would simply whet their appetite for more, since if trumping up a lynching campaign over something - the dismissal of eight U.S. attorneys - that was neither illegal nor unethical yielded them the buns of the attorney-f'ing-general on a White House platter, ye gods, the sky would be the limit. John Conyers would have his House Judiciary Committee kicking off double impeachment hearings as fast as you can say "President Pelosi". And something tells me that Mr. Morrissey would be right there, rationalizing why we center-righters had to bite the bullet and admit that purging George Bush and Dick Cheney "is the right thing to do".

Ed can call that "tribalism" if he wants, but whether he likes it or not, he's a member of that tribe. If the "tribe" heaves its leading members overboard one after the other at the slightest opposition agitation, the rank & file of braves and squaws are liable to see that not as virtuous, but as weak, craven, cowardly, and disloyal. And no amount of Morrisseyan rationalizing or high-horse riding will make that heap bad medicine go down.

Rush sees the forest. Ed - and, regrettably, most of the congressional GOP remnant - is lost in the trees.