Today’s Must ReadVirtually everyone in Washington, D.C. — with the exception of President Bush — thinks Alberto Gonzales should resign. The reasons range widely. But that’s the conclusion pretty much everyone has drawn.
Is that going to stop Gonzales? No, sir. So he’s spending every waking hour getting ready for a showdown with the Senate.
It’s a scene reminiscent of a training montage from the Rocky movies. From The Washington Post:
Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales has retreated from public view this week in an intensive effort to save his job, spending hours practicing testimony and phoning lawmakers for support in preparation for pivotal appearances in the Senate this month, according to administration officials.
After struggling for weeks to explain the extent of his involvement in the firings of eight U.S. attorneys, Gonzales and his aides are viewing the Senate testimony on April 12 and April 17 as seriously as if it were a confirmation proceeding for a Supreme Court or a Cabinet appointment, officials said.
Ed Gillespie, a former Republican National Committee chairman, and Timothy E. Flanigan, who worked for Gonzales at the White House, have met with the attorney general to plot strategy. The department has scheduled three days of rigorous mock testimony sessions next week and Gonzales has placed phone calls to more than a dozen GOP lawmakers seeking support, officials said.
You can almost hear “Eye of The Tiger” in the background.
As the piece points out, despite the flurry of phone calls, Gonzales will have very few friends when he goes before the Senate Judiciary Committee — besides Sen. Orrin “Hear No Evil” Hatch (R-UT). The ranking member, Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) has privately suggested to Gonzales that he should begin his testimony with an apology, the Post reports. The hearing will only get worse from there. And if it’s another one of Gonzales’ non-apology apologies, where he apologizes for the way the purge was carried out while not addressing the purge itself, then it will most certainly get much worse.
Note: For those muck junkies among you for whom Timothy Flanigan’s name rang a bell, it’s because he was President Bush’s nominee to be deputy attorney general in 2005 — his nomination was withdrawn mostly due to his connnection to the Abramoff scandal as a former senior counsel at Tyco.
