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This Guy's Still Here?Gonzales cringes some more before the Senate.

By Emily BazelonPosted Tuesday, July 24, 2007, at 6:01 PM ET

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Schumer's point is that Gonzales was lying then and is covering his tracks now. This leads to a little theatrical moment. For the most part, the senators today don't try to hit Gonzales with questions he can't know the answers to. They want him to explain himself, not duck. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., posted his questions last week on the Web. But this question was a surprise. When Gonzales says to Schumer, "I'd like to look at my responses" at the press conference, Schumer is ready to smoothly reply, "We'll bring them up to you right now."

"Good," Gonzales says, which he must immediately regret, because it's a trap. After some whispering from the row of aides sitting behind him, Gonzales says that he "did misspeak" at the June press conference, "but I went back and clarified it with a reporter." Which reporter? More whispering. "Dan Eggen, at the Washington Post, two days later." Schumer presses. Gonzales repeats, "I clarified my statement to the reporter." Then, after more questions and more whispering, "I didn't speak directly to the reporter." There's an intake of breath around the room, and it's not just from the women wearing pink whose hats and banner and mouth tape read "Fire Gonzales."

"What did your spokespeople say to him?" Schumer asks.

"I don't know," Gonzales answers.

This is either a petty hunt or precisely what is wrong with Gonzales as attorney general. He says one thing, then he says another; he tries again, then runs over himself. "If you want to be attorney general, you should be able to clarify yourself," Schumer scolds him. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., tells Gonzales that his testimony is a first. "I've never heard comments and questions like those I'm hearing today from both sides of the aisle," she says. "Then I listen to your responses, which are nonresponses. … No question is answered directly. Everything is obfuscated." The senators are howling with institutional rage. They feel deceived. They feel dissed. Some of them may be ready to do something about it. "Mr. Chairman, I think we should look into this," Schumer says to Leahy. He's talking about a perjury investigation. Specter mentions a special prosecutor.

In the midst of the indignation and the muddle is "something absolutely unexpected," as Spencer Ackerman and Paul Kiel point out at TPM Muckraker. Gonzales has claimed that he went to see Ashcroft about something other than the warrantless surveillance at the NSA that we know included some domestic communications. In other words, there was something else "vital" and "urgent" enough to justify the race to Ashcroft's sickbed. Is Gonzales simply parsing the word other in a way that only he understands? Or is he talking about some brave new world of surveillance that we don't yet have a clue about? The conspiracy-minded might wonder.

The senators don't buy it, however. They stick with frustrated references to Alice in Wonderland and Hamlet ("Something is rotten …"). I had a different, pop-cultural, flash, to E.B. Farnum, the default mayor on the HBO series Deadwood, put in office to be the tool of those who actually run things. He's the master of cringe and grandiosity. He tries to hatch "schemes and swindles" for his betters, but they always go wrong. He can't get anyone "to take him seriously." Take a look at that face: Isn't it sad, beleaguered, and familiar?

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Emily Bazelon is a Slate senior editor and an editor of DoubleX.

Photograph of Alberto Gonzales by Tim Sloan/AFP/Getty Images.

COMMENTS

Remarks from the Fray:

Alberto Gonzales is still here, still sitting at the Attorney General's Table. It is just a reminder of one more failure of the Democratic run Congress. It is getting or should I say, it is downright embarrassing for the Democrats. They promised so much while asking us for our votes and confidence in them, so far, they haven't delivered on one of them.

The Democrats are sleep walking through their first few months. There is not one item on their agenda, they focus on. They gave half hearted attempts to bring the Troops home. They could have stopped the Funding for the war and chose not to. They talked of Impeaching Bush but, chose to take it off the table. Recently Senator Finegold put a Censure Bill for Bush, Harry Reid is not interested, there's to much to do, whatever that means.

Both party's are mirror images of each other, cloned from the same egg. I can think of a few choice words to call what they did but, I'll keep it "G" rated by saying, they Betrayed us. They thought it more important to look after their jobs then service the Country and its people, which is their jobs.

--Geyser

(To reply, click here.)

What the hell is going on? The Congress is pulling the AG into countless inquiries over what? Tapping the lines of terrorists calling their comrades here in the states? I say tap away, listen and tape and do whatever you want. They are terrorists!

Thanks to the NY Times we all now know the U.S. authorities have high tech computers to sift through countless phones call algorithms in an effort to tap the ones that count. And the Libs in Congress are up in arms. This is chicken feed compared what FDR, JFK and RFK did in their day. The FISA court? Did that court bring any contempt charges? Did they object? No.

Who cares if they didn't seek approval afterwards, it was a done deal anyway. You want to fight terrorists or court battles?

Stop with the boring "Bush is shredding the constitution and is targeting us all. bla bla bla". The only "victims" have been manufactured in college libraries by Left wingers. As if the Left gives a damn about the U.S. Constitution with the constant attacks on the first and second amendments and insistence that the constitution is a "flexible" document.

--Mayfray88

(To reply, click here.)

Richard Nixon seems downright honorable and decent by the standards being set by this administration. At least his pathetic "I am not a crook!" statement seemed to show an awareness, a sort of public acknowledgement, that this issue was actually on the minds of Americans and needed to be addressed, however unconvincingly. Nixon at least seemed human at the depth of his plight.

In contrast, the Bushies more resemble something like an infestation of termites or lice. You just know that no appeal to reason, decency or historical precedent could possibly get rid of them. No public spectacle of bumbling ineptitude or sweaty evasiveness can shame them. This is not mere corruption; it's pestilence of the highest order.

These are alien creatures who resemble and act like human beings during the daytime. At night, they gather in humid, overheated chambers beneath the National Archives building—sort of like the egg chamber in Aliens—to sap the lifeblood of the Constitution with highly specialized sucking mouthparts. It's a terrible fear I have to find myself locked in the Smithsonian at night, with my handheld Alien detector going "beep, beep, beep" as Alberto Gonzales makes his way towards me through the ventilation duct.

--fingerpuppet

(To reply, click here.)

(7/27)

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