Abandoning Alberto Gonzales

What is wrong with the Republicans?

I don't get it. I really don't.

Why are Democrats, and now a Republican, calling for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to resign?

It's nuts.

Why aren't Republicans exposing the Democrats as the deceivers and complete frauds that they are?

WASHINGTON -- Sen. John Sununu of New Hampshire on Wednesday became the first Republican in Congress to call for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' dismissal, hours after President Bush expressed confidence in his embattled Cabinet officer.

Gonzales has been fending off Democratic demands for his firing in the wake of disclosures surrounding the ousters of eight U.S. attorneys — dismissals Democrats have characterized as a politically motivated purge.

Support from many Republicans had been muted, but there was no outright GOP call for his dismissal until now.

"I think the president should replace him," Sununu said in an interview with The Associated Press. "I think the attorney general should be fired."

I don't understand why support for Gonzales from members of his party has been muted; and I certainly don't understand why Sununu would call for him to be fired.

It's absolutely ludicrous.

This editorial from The Washington Times brings some perspective to the insanity.

The only thing stranger than watching congressional Democrats scold the Bush administration for firing eight U.S. attorneys is the response from Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. He's now "accepting responsibility" for a Democratic campaign to paint Republicans as unfriendly to civil rights. We rarely criticize the Bush administration for failing to stand up for its executive prerogatives (except on immigration). But Mr. Gonzales is enabling Congress to walk all over the president's agenda at the Department of Justice for reasons we can't fathom.

U.S. attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president who appoints them. President Bush, like Republican and Democratic presidents before him have done, can hire, fire or rehire when he chooses. This includes firing attorneys who fail to fit within the president's policy agenda. If he decides to hire prosecutors who vigorously pursue voting fraud, and fire others whom he believes spend too much time on civil-rights litigation, that's his prerogative. His judgment can be properly assessed at a subsequent election. Congress confirms U.S. attorney nominees, but for Congress to act as if appointments and firings are a congressional prerogative is an attempt to intimidate the executive.

...Democratic and Republican administrations alike use U.S. attorney appointments to groom top political and legal talent. These are appointed positions whose work bears directly on a president's effectiveness. The Clinton administration pink-slipped every U.S. attorney except one in its first term -- including one attorney investigating Dan Rostenkowski, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee and a powerful Clinton ally. The "political" nature of these current firings doesn't come close to those of Bill Clinton. The point of this Democratic exercise is less to seize an executive prerogative than to paint Republicans as hostile to civil rights and to attempt to paint every act of the Bush administration as scandalous. Based on the administration response, this has not been difficult.

The firings are not a scandal.

THERE'S NO SCANDAL HERE THAT BEGINS TO RISE TO THE LEVEL OF GONZALES BEING DISMISSED FROM OFFICE.

There is simply no reason for anyone to be calling for Gonzales to resign or be fired.

If ever an Attorney General should have been canned, it was Janet Reno.

She gave the order that resulted in the deaths of 79 people, including 25 children, at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco.

One could easily consider the attack on the compound to be a violation of civil rights.



And then there was Reno's heavy-handed method of dealing with six-year-old Elian Gonzalez, stripping him from his relatives in Florida and sending him back to Cuba after his mother had died trying to bring her son to America.



Reno came under criticism and rightfully so; but the Dems didn't abandon her and neither did her boss Bill Clinton.

And let's not forget what Reno did when she assumed office. She axed all 93 U.S. attorneys, every single one. As the editorial states, some were in the middle of investigations that had political ramifications.

In a 1998 article for National Review, Robert Bork provides more insight:

In the history of the Republic, the names of Bill Clinton and Janet Reno will be forever linked, a prospect that ought to appall Miss Reno. That is entirely due to her efforts to preserve the President from his own follies, to use a polite word. Bill Clinton heads what is probably the most corrupt Administration ever, while Miss Reno has been called the worst of all Clinton's Cabinet appointments. From his point of view, of course, she may be the best, which comes to much the same thing.

Miss Reno's only visible qualifications for the post of attorney general were two: she is a woman and she had been a prosecutor. The first characteristic was indisputable, although, in any non-feminized era, it would have been irrelevant. The second seemed heartening, but it did not prepare her for Washington. Coming from obscurity, she must have been caught off guard by the rampant corruption into which she was thrust. So varied and unceasing have been this Administration's infractions of law that Miss Reno resembles a desperate tennis player, running from side to side of the court and from net to baseline in a frantic effort to hold down the score. Unfortunately for her White House coach, she is becoming winded and wobbly-legged.

She was not in charge from the beginning. Upon taking office, in an unexplained departure from the practice of recent Administrations, Miss Reno suddenly fired all 93 U.S. attorneys. She said the decision had been made in conjunction with the White House. Translation: The President ordered it. Just as the best place to hide a body is on a battlefield, the best way to be rid of one potentially troublesome attorney is to fire all of them. The U.S. attorney in Little Rock was replaced by a Clinton protege. The long-running Waco emergency that culminated in the deaths of eighty Branch Davidian men, women, and children again proved that Janet Reno was not in charge in the Justice Department. Webster Hubbell, Hillary's former law partner in Little Rock and Bill's man at Justice, coordinated tactics with the White House. The President did not even talk to his attorney general throughout the crisis.

Read the complete article.

It's worthwhile to compare Reno and Gonzales.

It makes the calls for his resignation look ridiculous.

What's more ridiculous?

The fact that Republicans don't have the cojones to stand up to the idiot Democrats is even more embarrassing than the unfounded uproar over the firings of the U.S. attorneys.

Why aren't the Republicans laughing at the Dems for getting bent out of shape over NOTHING?

Instead, they bow to the Dem fools, like hypocrites Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton.

Hillary has actually started an online petition calling for Gonzales to resign.

I join Senator Clinton in calling on Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to resign. He fired several U.S. attorneys for political reasons and then repeatedly and falsely claimed they were fired for performance issues. It is time for him to step down.

That really is total crap. What a hypocrite!

I think I can't be shocked anymore by how low Bill and Hillary Clinton will go, but then one of them does something that manages to stun me.

How the Republicans have acted doesn't shock me. It does disappoint me. No, it angers me.

The Republicans should be ashamed, not for what Gonzales did but for what they haven't done -- STAND UP AND QUIT APPEASING THE DEMOCRATS.