AG AG Out

Attorney General Antonio Gonzales joins the junk heap of failed Bush nominees. Or so thinks the Left, anyway.

The Left is making much of the resignations of Rumsfield, Rove and now Gonzales, seeing them as connected by their incompetence, but AG AG stood out alone in the incompetence field.

The war is going better since Rumsfield left, but that's more the nature of war than the nature of defense chiefs. Trying to find a course between the needs on the grounds and the demands of Washington, stymied by faulty intelligence, Rumsfield could have done better ... but he could have done worse, too.

His main fault, in the Left's eyes, was that he was too outspoken in favor of the war and against its critics. They hounded him out.

Rove was the domestic policy chief and things went pretty well on his watch, well enough to justify staying through 'til the end. But to the Left, he was forever the architect of the stolen 2000 election, so they attacked using Plame and the federal prosecutor angles until it just became too stupid for a brilliant guy to stay.

Gonzales was different, a man not capable of carrying out the mission he was given. He might have survived his incompetent management style -- we've had plenty of similar AG's in the past -- but he had three things going against him.

Most palatable was that he was the front man for increased intelligence for the War on Terror. To the Left, that made him the point main for infringements on personal freedom; infringements no one really felt personally, but infringements, nonetheless, that they couldn't tolerate.

Less palatable reasons to drive out Gonzales were that he was a long-time friend of Bush and that he was a minority conservative Republican, something the Dem machine absolutely cannot tolerate.

But in the end, it was the flagrantly incompetent handling of the federal prosecutors case that cost him his job. He allowed a molehill to become a mountain, a teapot to house a tempest, and in politics, that'll cost you.

It should have cost him sooner.