Bush couldn’t admit that Gonzales failed at Justice

President Bush could have acknowledged the service of Alberto Gonzales as attorney general without painting Gonzales as the victim of a smear campaign.

He could have simply praised Gonzales for his loyalty, his patriotism and his hard work, and the tribute would have come across as both heartfelt and appropriate.

The fact that Bush couldn’t or wouldn’t do that says a lot about this president and his administration, and a lot about why Gonzales is only one in a string of the president’s most trusted advisers who have left Washington.

After praising his attorney general and former White House counsel Monday, Bush felt compelled to add these two sentences:

“After months of unfair treatment that has created a harmful distraction at the Justice Department, Judge Gonzales decided to resign his position, and I accept his decision.

“It’s sad that we live in a time when a talented and honorable person like Alberto Gonzales is impeding from doing important work because his good name was dragged through the mud for political reasons.”

One in a series

That endorsement of Gonzales and indictment of ... whom? — the president never really says — will go down in history with some of Bush’s other ill-advised pronouncements. Such as, “You’re doing a heckuva job, Brownie,” in the wake of the Katrina disaster. Or his presentation of the nation’s highest civilian award to men who arguably dropped the ball before 9/11 and were architects of a failed policy in Iraq afterward. Or standing behind Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his mismanagement of the war, while forcing into early retirement generals who were telling the truth about what it would take to win in Iraq.

The irony, of course, is that this culture of blame-shifting dominates a White House that is held by the political party that claims to believe in accountability and personal responsibility. And the other irony is that if it weren’t for the antipathy that the right wing of the Republican Party held toward Gonzales, he would never have been attorney general. The president would have loved to have nominated his old friend from Texas to be the first Hispanic justice on the Supreme Court of the United States.

Higher responsibility

The nation owes those Republicans a debt of gratitude. There is no reason to believe that Gonzales would have demonstrated any greater fidelity to the Constitution as a justice than he showed as attorney general. There is no evidence that Gonzales ever recognized that his first responsibility as attorney general was to the American people, not to President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney or the president’s political adviser, Karl Rove.

Gonzales wasn’t undone by a grand political conspiracy. He was undone by giving contradictory testimony and nonanswers in response to specific questions asked during Senate committee hearings. The only political element involved is that those questions would never have been asked if Republicans had remained in control of the House and Senate.

That’s not dirty politics. It’s a demonstration that the checks and balances designed into our political system more than two centuries ago still work.

President Bush would be advised to consider the existence of those checks and balances before he nominates Gonzales’ successor.