Gonzales & The Incredible Lightness of Being

As Prosecutorgate drags on and on, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales finds himself a deeply unpopular figure among the American public, a pariah to congressional Republicans and a doofus to many people on his own staff, but continues to hang on by his fingertips because the president won’t open the trap door to political purgatory that he so richly deserves to fall through.

This scandal — the one that conservative pundits declared would last barely last a week — has obscured the mischief that Gonzales worked when George Bush was governor of Texas.

The WaPo‘s Richard Cohen jerks us back into that time and place in a column noting that Gonzales the Cipher did whatever George the Boss wanted in Austin, as well as Washington:

Dead men tell no tales. But if they did, the ones they would tell about Alberto Gonzales would by now be familiar: an expert in giving his boss, George W. Bush, precisely what he wanted. The dead men in this case are the ones who were executed while Bush was governor of Texas and Gonzales was his legal counsel. Sometimes, as often seems true with Gonzales, the details eluded him.

Clearly, those details could have made the difference between life and death — or, given the realities of the Texas system, death and a remote chance of a reprieve. But since Bush was not likely to temporarily block any execution or even to raise his voice in mild objection to a particularly heinous railroading, Gonzales kept his death penalty memos short and to the point. Almost always, the point was that the execution should proceed.

More here.