Gonzales's Profound Lie

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales testifies before the Senate today.

The list of Attorney General Gonzales's alleged lies is already long; the latest is a technical one, that he had nothing to do with identifying to with identifying which United States Attorneys should be fired, even though evidence proves he was intimately involved. The most profound lie may just be the foundation of his entire defense--that he's an incompetent buffoon, that that all the things done in the Justice Department over the last two years that were legally or morally question happened without his approval or even his knowledge.

He wouldn't be the first right-wing attorney general to be a black-hearted man willing to break the law out of a twisted means-justifies-the-ends morality. He's not even the second. John Mitchell, Richard Nixon's attorney general, boasted proudly in 1972 that "this country is going so far to the right you're not even going to recognize it," then did his part to make it so by helping lead the Watergate conspiracy to steal the 1972 president election as Nixon's campaign manager.

And here's an amazing story about the nation's next right-wing attorney general. It was told in Lou Cannon's latest Reagan biography, investigation by the United States Office of the Independent Counsel.

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