GONZALES OUT!

From McClatchy courtesy of AlterNet:

Bush's herd of loyal Texas advisers continues to thin

They were fiercely loyal, unfailingly disciplined and, as a unit, offered the president a comforting touchstone from his home state.

Now, Team Texas is moving ever closer to extinction. The already thinning cadre of advisers who followed George W. Bush from Austin to Washington is unraveling even further, with Alberto Gonzales and Karl Rove heading toward the door.

Although Texans are still dotted throughout the administration, most of the influential Lone Star transplants who've worked at Bush's side since his days as Texas governor either have left town or removed themselves from day-to-day influence at the White House.

Gonzales, a steadfast loyalist who served as Bush's counsel in the governor's office, announced his resignation as attorney general Monday after enduring a months-long uproar over his stewardship of the Justice Department. Rove, the architect of Bush's victorious presidential campaigns, will leave at the end of the week.

More here.

The only thing surprising about Gonzales' resignation is that it was so long in coming. That is, anybody in his position with half a brain would have quit sometime last spring. That's the thing. Gonzales is an idiot, more like FEMA's "Heckuva Job Brownie" than, say, Karl Rove, whose intelligence I'm kind of beginning to doubt myself.* Gonzales has been credited with being the legal mastermind behind Bush's bullshit rationales justifying various kinds of torture; however, the Washington Post recently reported that all that came out of Cheney's office--Gonzales is totally unfamiliar with the law in that area. So if he didn't mastermind the torture presidency, what's he actually done? To the best of my knowledge, he harassed his predecessor, Ashcroft, while he was laid out in a hospital bed, and lied to Congress, in a fairly blatant way, about the politically motivated firings of several US prosecutors. That is, he's never been anything more than a political operative. Bottom line: Gonzales is a mediocre lawyer who hitched his fortunes to a piss-poor businessman turned mediocre politician and rode the gravy train all the way to Washington, where he spread his worm-slime down every hallway he walked.

I really hope Congress continues to investigate him. He, like so many other Bush loyalists, needs to be behind bars.

(*I'm beginning to wonder if the ability to lie and smear on a grand scale is really evidence of intelligence. I've known plenty of morons over the years who are able to slander and malign pretty effectively, even when their lies are obvious. Is Karl Rove really a smart guy? More like a second-tier high school debate nerd.)

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