Seventy-One Failures, Plus One, Equals Seventy-Two

Alberto Gonzales is back on the stand today, once again 'failing to recall' dozens of conversations, emails, meetings and directives that led to the firing of eight U.S. Attorneys for what were, ostensibly, political reasons.

Three weeks ago he couldn't remember much of anything (indeed, he said so no less than seventy-one times) – but you would think that in the intervening time, having reviewed carefully the allegations against him and his department, his memory might have been refreshed to some degree.

Apparently not. “My feelings and recollections about this matter have not changed," Gonzales told a Congressional panel earlier today.

Now this means one of two things. Either he's a lousy attorney, or he's lying.

An attorney doesn't conveniently forget entire tracts of their tenure. And in the unlikely event that they were called to account for claiming exactly that, they would rigorously pursue avenues that would lead them to truth and justice (and especially, exoneration). Mr. Gonzales has failed to do that. In three weeks, he has evidently failed to turn up any new information whatsoever regarding this case. Nothing. Nada.

This is a typical tactic of the Bush administration – fail to recall, and nobody can call you a liar. (Think Karl Rove and Scooter Libby, absent-mindedly dropping Valerie Plame's name into a few conversations here and there. Think Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld forgetting all about the dire warnings George Tenet gave them just a few weeks before 9/11 that Al Qaeda planned a massive attack within the USA.)

However, it's not so easy for an attorney. They are expected to research, to uncover, to discover. They are expected to show some degree of proactivity when it comes to finding the truth. Gonzales has failed dismally in his duty to figure out what he hadn't remembered. A simple investigation should have made it more clear to him what had transpired... but as a lousy attorney, he discovered nothing.

Of course that might not be the case at all. Despite suggesting that the Geneva Conventions were outdated and irrelevant, despite his assertion in January that the U.S. Constitution conveyed no right of Habeas Corpus to our citizens, perhaps he's not a wholly incompetent attorney, but simply a bare-faced liar.

Either way, Bush's intractability and defiance in the face of the will of the people and Congress is once again clearly demonstrating that Bush's priorities lie not with the country, but with his friends.

Mr. Gonzales may be a liar. Or he may be a sub-standard attorney. Either way, he does not deserve to be counsel to the President. Seventy-one failures to recall, plus one of two good reasons to quit, equals seventy-two abject disappointments in our Attorney General.