As you can see, we now have the first hint of what was at the center of the Ashcroft hospital room showdown. According to the New York Times, what the White House calls the ‘terrorist surveillance [i.e., warrantless wiretap] program’ originally included some sort of largescale data mining.

I don’t doubt that this is true as far as it goes. But this must only scratch the surface because, frankly, at least as presented, this just doesn’t account for the depth of the controversy or the fact that so many law-and-order DOJ types were willing to resign over what was happening. Something’s missing.

Of course, ‘data mining’ can mean virtually anything. What kind of data and whose you’re looking at makes all the difference in the world. Suggestively, the Times article includes this cryptic passage: “Some of the officials said the 2004 dispute involved other issues in addition to the data mining, but would not provide details. They would not say whether the differences were over how the databases were searched or how the resulting information was used.”

To put this into perspective, remember that the White House has been willing to go to the public and make a positive argument for certain surveillance procedures (notably evasion of the FISA Court strictures) which appear to be illegal on their face. This must be much more serious and apparently something all but the most ravenous Bush authoritarians would never accept. It is supposedly no longer even happening and hasn’t been for a few years. So disclosing it could not jeopardize a program. The only reason that suggests itself is that the political and legal consequences of disclosure are too grave to allow.

Late Update: The Post has a follow story on the data mining issue. It covers most of the same ground but hints a little more directly about possible interception of emails and phone calls. The article suggests that examination of “metadata” was the issue here. But, again, it doesn’t fit. The intensity of the covering up doesn’t match the alleged secret.

Not that he should be fired. The Times editorial in tomorrow’s paper says he should be impeached if Paul Clement, who for a complicated set of reasons is acting AG in this matter, doesn’t appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Gonzales’ numerous and increasingly overlapping bad acts.

Leave it to President Bush to take us down so many unexplored and untrodden cul-de-sacs and byways of the US Constitution. Judges have been impeached with relative frequency, if we consider the two-plus centuries of history under the US Constitution. And this makes sense since there are quite a few federal judges, no one can fire them, and they have lifetime tenure; they can only be impeached.

In practice we’ve impeached three presidents, though technically Nixon wasn’t impeached because his resignation short-circuited the process which had already commenced.

But to the best of my knowledge only one cabinet secretary has ever been impeached, Secretary of War William Belknap in 1876. And what is highly relevant for the present discussion is that this was after Belknap had resigned from office. According to the historian of the senate, “Belknap, tipped off in advance that a House committee had unearthed information implicating him in the acceptance of bribes in return for lucrative Indian trading posts, rushed to the White House and tearfully begged President Ulysses Grant to accept his resignation at ten o’clock on the morning of March 2, 1876. Around three o’clock that afternoon, representatives, furious at both the president and Belknap for thwarting them, impeached Belknap by voice vote anyway.”

So this means that in almost 220 years of history under the constitution, the impeachment power has never been used to remove a cabinet secretary from office. Not once. And that’s really saying something. But the reason isn’t that hard to figure given the structure of our government. The normal course when a cabinet secretary has been implicated in grave wrongdoing or has lost the confidence of the overwhelming number of senators (which I think he clearly has, though partisan loyalty has kept many Republicans from saying it) is for him or her to resign. And if they won’t see fit to resign the president fires them since if nothing else the person can’t fulfill the responsibilities of office under those debilitating circumstances.

But then there is the big ‘unless’.

Unless the president is party to the wrongdoing that placed the cabinet secretary in jeopardy. And that is clearly the case we have here, which explains the historical anomaly that the possibility of Gonzales’ impeachment is even a topic of serious conversation.

Of course, here, as we’ve noted before, there is an extra wrinkle. Gonzales isn’t any cabinet secretary — not the Secretary of State or Interior. He’s the Attorney General, which means that he’s the one that can and is bottling up numerous investigations into the president and his appointees. Because the senate will never give the president another Gonzales, the man is literally irreplaceable.

Former Surgeon General Richard Carmona told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee earlier this month that he wanted to use his stature as the “nation’s doctor” to speak out on public health issues, but the Bush gang wouldn’t let him: “Anything that doesn’t fit into the political appointees’ ideological, theological, or political agenda is ignored, marginalized, or simply buried.”

Here’s Exhibit A.

A surgeon general’s report in 2006 that called on Americans to help tackle global health problems has been kept from the public by a Bush political appointee without any background or expertise in medicine or public health, chiefly because the report did not promote the administration’s policy accomplishments, according to current and former public health officials.

The report described the link between poverty and poor health, urged the U.S. government to help combat widespread diseases as a key aim of its foreign policy, and called on corporations to help improve health conditions in the countries where they operate. A copy of the report was obtained by The Washington Post.

Three people directly involved in its preparation said its publication was blocked by William R. Steiger, a specialist in education and a scholar of Latin American history whose family has long ties to President Bush and Vice President Cheney. Since 2001, Steiger has run the Office of Global Health Affairs in the Department of Health and Human Services.

Carmona was reportedly told that he had strayed from the White House script. A “senior official” told him, “You don’t get it…. This will be a political document, or it will not be released.” Carmona balked at the proposed changes, and despite the support of the National Institutes of Health, the Catholic Medical Mission Board, and several universities, the report was shelved.

Richard Walling, a former career official in the HHS global health office who oversaw the draft, said Steiger was the official who blocked its release. “Steiger always had his political hat on,” he said. “I don’t think public health was what his vision was. As far as the international office was concerned, it was a political office of the secretary. . . . What he was looking for, and in general what he was always looking for, was, ‘How do we promote the policies and the programs of the administration?’ This report didn’t focus on that.”

Another gem for the Great List of disappeared information over the last six and a half years.

On Friday, when Rudy Giuliani’s and Mitt Romney’s presidential campaigns declined CNN’s invitation to participate in the upcoming YouTube debate, they explained that they’d just love to be there, but gosh darn it, they have scheduling difficulties.

Sure, they hate the way questions will be presented to the candidates, but that’s irrelevant, they said. As Romney’s spokesperson told the NYT, the campaign’s decision not to participate was “not a question of format, it’s a question of our travel schedule.”

Fine, CNN said. The debate will be rescheduled to accommodate the candidates’ calendars.

ThinkProgress spoke with the [Ron] Paul campaign today, who confirmed that CNN contacted them and said that it is rescheduling the debate. The campaign said that it believes it was done to accommodate the schedules of the other candidates. Earlier today, the New York Times reported that CNN “said it would work with the campaigns to find a new date.”

It’s unclear whether the other candidates will actually participate in the rescheduled debate.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and predict that no matter what they new date is, Romney and Giuliani will still have “scheduling conflicts.” Call it a hunch.

In any presidential campaign, critical media narratives develop around candidates, which are often tough to break. Al Gore, for example, was labeled a “serial exaggerator.” It was a bogus story, but it dogged Gore throughout 2000, and raised doubts about his veracity.

Reporters haven’t picked up on it yet, but Rudy Giuliani is offering his critics the exact same storyline. The New York Daily News, for example, reports today:

It is Rudy Giuliani’s favorite boast on the presidential campaign trail: “I cut taxes 23 times” as mayor of New York, he says, a claim inevitably met by applause.

The impressive-sounding stat stars in radio ads this week in New Hampshire and Iowa, where the voiceover asserts that Giuliani “cut or eliminated 23 taxes.”

Trouble is, it’s not really true, say tax-cutting allies of the former mayor, as well as experts at the city’s Independent Budget Office and elsewhere.

To arrive at the number he likes to cite on the stump, Giuliani has to claim credit for tax cuts initiated by others, tax cuts he opposed, and in one instance, he counts one tax cut twice. Best of all, Giuliani includes a scuttled tax increase on his list (“We don’t consider not raising a tax a tax cut,” said Charles Brescher of the city’s Independent Budget Office).

Examples like these keep piling up. On Friday, he argued that Democrats “refuse to admit the existence of Islamic terrorism,” which is obviously false. His explanation for quitting the Iraq Study Group proved to be untrue. Last week, Giuliani told an audience that the leading Democratic candidates “want to raise your taxes 20 to 30 percent,” a claim unsupported by reality. According to the International Association of Firefighters many of his FDNY claims are completely false.

I’m sure there are other examples; these are just a few recent ones that come to mind. The point is, Giuliani is offering a negative media narrative that could seriously undermine his campaign. Maybe it’s a symptom of an inexperienced candidate who lacks discipline on the national stage, maybe Giuliani just needs to give his speeches a little boost, so he takes certain liberties with the truth.

Either way, one of these days, this might come back to haunt him.

Ouch.

On Fox News Sunday this morning, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-GA) refused to defend Attorney General Alberto Gonzales against accusations that he may have perjured himself before Congress. “It’s very damaging…we badly need an attorney general who is above any question,” said Gingrich.

He continued: “Both the president and country are better served if the attorney general is a figure of competence. Sadly, the current attorney general is not seen as any of those things. I think it’s a liability for the president. More importantly, it’s a liability for the United States of America.”

Later in the show, host Chris Wallace revealed that no conservative would willingly defend Gonzales on Fox. “By the way, we invited White House officials and Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee to defend Attorney General Gonzales,” said Wallace. “We had no takers.”

How bad is it? Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), the only Republican senator who went easy on Gonzales during the latest humiliating hearing, acknowledged on ABC this morning that “of course” Gonzales has a credibility problem.

Remember the good ol’ days (pre-2001) when political norms dictated a resignation under these circumstances? Good times, good times.

When Rick Perlstein ran this Glenn Beck quote, I thought it might be a joke. Or perhaps a paraphrase. Maybe an Onion-like parody. Alas, the CNN host, who praised the John Birch Society this week, recently told viewers:

“[Y[ou know, Al Gore’s not going to be rounding up Jews and exterminating them. It is the same tactic, however. The goal is different. The goal is globalization. The goal is global carbon tax. The goal is the United Nations running the world. That is the goal. Back in the 1930s, the goal was get rid of all of the Jews and have one global government.

“You got to have an enemy to fight. And when you have an enemy to fight, then you can unite the entire world behind you, and you seize power. That was Hitler’s plan. His enemy: the Jew. Al Gore’s enemy, the U.N.’s enemy: global warming….

“Then you get the scientists — eugenics. You get the scientists — global warming. Then you have to discredit the scientists that say, ‘That’s not right.’ And you must silence all dissenting voices. That’s what Hitler did.”

I suppose there’s a logical explanation for why CNN has given this man his own talk show, and why ABC News invited him to be a regular contributor to “Good Morning America.” I just can’t think of what that explanation might be. It’s not like his ratings are keeping him on the air.

Report: Rove tells closed-door meeting of 2008 House GOP candidates that Iraq wasn’t the chief reason the party lost control of Congress last year. That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Sunday Roundup.

The LA Times’ Doyle McManus has a curious piece today, noting that foreign policy is already dominating the 2008 presidential race more than any campaign in the post-Cold War era. That’s the good news. The bad news is, McManus’ analysis doesn’t make a lot of sense.

It’s easy to tell the difference between the two parties on foreign policy in this presidential campaign. The Democrats all want to talk about getting out of Iraq, but not so much about Al Qaeda or terrorism. The Republicans all want to talk about terrorism, but not so much about Iraq.

Although fireworks erupted last week among the leading Democratic candidates, those differences are narrow compared with the chasm between the two parties’ worldviews, one focused on battling the threat of radical Islam, the other on ending the war.

The problem each party faces, polls show, is that most Americans want answers to both questions, not just one or the other.

Now, if the point is that some Republican candidates will go to almost comical lengths to avoid discussing Iraq policy, McManus might have a point. But that’s not really what he’s getting at here.

His argument is that the GOP finds it politically advantageous to avoid talking about Iraq, while Dems find it politically advantageous to avoid talking about a broader counter-terrorism campaign. There are at least two major flaws to this.

First, as Matt Yglesias explains, “The point, of course, is that ending the war in Iraq isn’t something contrary to improving the country’s ability to reduce its vulnerability to terrorism, nor is it something other than improving the country’s ability to reduce its vulnerability to terrorism, rather, it’s a constitutive part of improving the country’s ability to reduce its vulnerability to terrorism.”

And second, I think McManus is simply mistaken about the Dems’ rhetorical emphasis. The leading candidates seem to be going out of their way to, to borrow McManus’ phrase, “answer both questions.”

At a recent Democratic debate, for example, Barack Obama said, “[W]e live in a more dangerous world, not a less dangerous world, partly as a consequence of this president’s actions, primarily because of this war in Iraq…. What we’ve seen is a distraction from the battles that deal with al Qaeda in Afghanistan. We have created an entire new recruitment network in Iraq, that we’re seeing them send folks to Lebanon and Jordan and other areas of the region. And so one of the things that I think is critical, as the next president, is to make absolutely certain that we not only phase out the Iraq but we also focus on the critical battle that we have in Afghanistan and root out al Qaeda.” Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and Chris Dodd all had similar assessments, but according to the LA Times piece, Dems are reluctant to talk about al Qaeda or terrorism.

McManus is right that Republican candidates are anxious to avoid discussions about the war in Iraq, but he seems anxious to cast a pox on both houses. In this case, only one deserves it.

Following up on an item from the Sunday Roundup, Bob Novak reports that Karl Rove believes he knows how to get the GOP back on solid ground.

Karl Rove, President Bush’s political lieutenant, told a closed-door meeting of 2008 Republican House candidates and their aides Tuesday that it was less the war in Iraq than corruption in Congress that caused their party’s defeat in the 2006 elections.

Rove’s clear advice to the candidates is to distance themselves from the culture of Washington. Specifically, Republican candidates are urged to make clear they have no connection with disgraced congressmen such as Duke Cunningham and Mark Foley.

In effect, Rove was rebutting the complaint inside the party that George W. Bush is responsible for Republican miseries by invading Iraq.

You’ll remember, of course, that this is the same Rove who assured Republican candidates in 2006 that Dems couldn’t possibly win back both chambers of Congress. When pushed before the elections about the polls favoring Dems, Rove told NPR that he’d found a secret math that gives him insights that mere mortals can’t comprehend.

ROVE: I’m looking at all of these Robert and adding them up. I add up to a Republican Senate and Republican House. You may end up with a different math but you are entitled to your math and I’m entitled to THE math.

SIEGEL: I don’t know if we’re entitled to a different math but your…

ROVE: I said THE math.

About a month ago, (subscription-only) Roll Call had an item on whether Rove “still holds the same stature among Republicans that he once enjoyed.” The article suggested that his star has fallen. As Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) put it, “Obviously, I’m not a fan.”

And yet, Rove’s still at it, telling ’08 candidates not to worry too much about all of that unpleasantness in Iraq. I’m not sure why the GOP candidates would listen to Rove’s advice, but if Dems are really lucky, the myth of Rove’s genius will lead Republicans to misread the landscape and take his advice.