Tod Lindberg has a humorous column up in the Weekly Standard today, where he explains why George W. Bush is a brilliant man for refusing to fire Alberto Gonzales. Here is the gist of it.
Richard Nixon screwed himself; Bush did not.
Richard Kleindienst was Nixon’s attorney general at the time of the Watergate break-in. He resigned on April 30, 1973, the same day Nixon fired John Dean and accepted the resignations of H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. Though Kleindienst was primarily under fire for his role in handling an antitrust case, the timing of his departure inevitably made him a Watergate casualty.
Notice, here, that Lindberg offers no opinion on whether the concern over Kleindeist’s handling of an ‘antitrust case’ was a valid reason to ask for his resignation. As throughout this column, such considerations are not even secondary concerns…they don’t even enter into the arena of debate. All that matters is the effect. Nixon wasn’t able to replace his AG without his nominee, Eliot Richardson, making a concession to the Democrats in the Senate.
The price of confirmation for Richardson was his willingness to appoint a “special prosecutor” with a broad mandate and a grant of independence to investigate the Watergate crimes and unfolding coverup.
It took a couple weeks of battle for Richardson to satisfy Sen. James Eastland’s Judiciary Committee with the selection of Archibald Cox, who had served as solicitor general in the Kennedy administration and remained close to Massachusetts’s premier political family as a professor at Harvard Law School. As Nixon noted bitterly in his memoirs, “If Richardson had searched specifically for the man whom I would have least trusted to conduct so politically sensitive an investigation in an unbiased way, he could hardly have done better than choose Archibald Cox.”
At this point, Lindberg invokes The Dean:
As David Broder wrote in the Washington Post at the time, “There is no way now that Richardson can spare his President from the most pitiless investigation. . . . Should the President lean on him in any way, all Richardson has to say is, ‘Sir, if that is an order, I am afraid I would have no choice but to resign.'” When Nixon ordered him to fire Cox five months later, Richardson did resign.
All of this was avoided by the far-seeing Bush when he refused to jettison Alberto Gonzales. This next graf is priceless.
It may seem hyperbolic to equate the U.S. attorney firings with the Watergate break-in. Except that it’s not so much the triggering event as the stonewalling, memory lapses, contradictory testimony, missing documents, and lies under oath that constitute the real meat of a Washington scandal. Anybody who thinks an independent counsel let loose on the U.S. attorney firings could ever reach the conclusion that they were no big deal, even if they were no big deal, doesn’t appreciate the logic and momentum of their own that such investigations acquire.
This is some of the purest Republican doublespeak ever recorded. It perfectly captures the mind of a criminal organization. He lists all the problems with AttorneyGate (making less than no effort to distinguish these problems from Watergate) and then suggests that they might not be a big deal. And if anyone judged that they were a big deal, it would be explainable as the inevitable conclusion of any special prosecutor because special prosecutors never see a deal that isn’t big.
A Gonzales departure would offer [former Rep. Elizabeth] Holtzman, [who served on the House Judiciary Committee when it voted to impeach Richard Nixon in 1974] the main chance to make good on the title of her 2006 book, The Impeachment of George W. Bush: A Practical Guide for Concerned Citizens. She is hardly alone among Democrats in slavering over the prospect of a new “independent counsel”-style investigation of the Bush administration-one that would succeed where Patrick Fitzgerald failed by finding and charging a conspiracy and coverup all the way to the top…
Whether Bush got effective counsel about the danger of caving over Gonzales, figured it out himself, or simply lucked into it because of loyalty to an old friend, he seems to have managed to escape the greatest politico-legal peril he has faced.
Lindberg is making the case that Bush was wise to hold on to Gonzales because it is insurance against getting impeached…or forced to resign. He makes absolutely no effort to suggest that Bush doesn’t deserve to be impeached (in fact, he implicitly suggests the opposite). Nevertheless, Lindberg praises Bush for…what exactly? Surviving?
The mind of a Republican operative is, indeed, a foul and dirty thing.
