Middle-Aged Mutant Ninja Liar?

That Alberto Gonzales is not very popular among Democrats in the Senate and other Democratic-held environs is not news, nor even unusual for any administration after almost seven years in power.

But the fact that 48 percent of the public in an recent poll think he should flat-out resign, like yesterday, and even GOP Senator Arlen Specter has all but called him untruthful in his testimony, well that's unusual.

Other GOP would-be defenders seem to be more likely to castigate the Democrats for asking tough questions of the guy rather than back the Attorney General up. I suspect many in his own party can smell "the powerful odor of mendacity" as Tennessee Williams put it coming from the Gonzales camp.

A lot of this recent Capitol Hill strum and drang is in regards to his testimony about the level of disagreement within the Bush White House over domestic surveillance practices and between what exactly went down at a 2004 hospital meeting when a post-operative and sedated John Ashcroft was "visited" by Gonzales (then White House Counsel) and asked the Justice Department to sign on to a more "liberal" take on complying with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a law that requires wiretapping to be reported to a special judicial committee after 48 hours for continued surveillance.

You can agree or disagree about the 1978 FISA Act and its relevance to today's threats from AL-Queda, but what I don't think too many non-hardcore GOP elected officials can swallow the fact that Gonzales can't get his specific "facts" straight under oath on who said what and when. The FBI Director, Robert Mueller, and a former deputy AG at Justice, may prove in testimony coming up that somebody is pulling the collective leg on the Judicial Committee and it ain't Mueller. So do you ask the FBI Director to resign if its your Attorney General who has a credibility problem?

The fact that the friendly media at "The Weekly Standard" and "National Review" doesn't seem to be defending Alberto very vigorously is a sign that maybe the guy isn't really worth defending to their editorial staffs. (Except to say Senator Leahy and the other Democrats are going after him too harshly, which is not so much a defense of the guy as a shout-out against the opposition.) National Review On line has used the "we're at war" card to try and stave off the assaults on the Attorney General's crumbling credibility. That's a bit desperate from where I sit. Unless you consider the chief cop of one branch of the government being deceptive to the other co-equal branch a sign of strength in Our System , I doubt the "war effort" argument will fly.

The NRO Editorial:

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=N2Y5NzMzNGQxNTVmNzFmMDFiOTVkYjZhMWJhMzlhNmM=

Part of me hopes Bush keeps Gonzales around. He's shaping up as a good talking point for Democratic candidates. But how well that serves the country as a whole is unclear. I suspect high-level members of Bush's own party might be calling for his resignation soon, or may already have through private channels, I don't know. But I do know it's not going to be the Democratic Senators whom Gonzales has to worry about. It's the Republicans on his side of the aisle who will or won't undo him.