Getting Gonzales is Too Easy

I’m sure it had to happen. The discovery of the FBI abusing its power by invoking the PATRIOT Act more times than it reported… and of course the revelations that Republican politics were involved in the firings of several US Attorneys… are now prompting Democrats to DEMAND that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to throw himself on his sword and resign.

And I’d probably be jumping in on that bandwagon too. After all, two serious lapses of leadership back-to-back is not a good sign of job performance, especially two years into the job.

There’s just one little problem… it would be TOO easy to simply blame it all on Gonzales.

Gonzales is not the problem. He’s PART of it, but removing him doesn’t fix the problem.

The needed solution is three-fold, and I don’t see ANYONE willing to do ANY portion of it.

First: get rid of Karl Rove. If he really is behind the firing of one of the US Attorneys at the behest of the Republican senator, then Rove needs to go. Period. There is no other way around it. You don’t put politics in front of the rule of law. That’s how the GOP got their asses kicked in 2006. If Rove doesn’t understand that then Rove needs to be removed. In fact Rove DID NOT understand that lesson in 2006, which is why the election results were such a shock to the White House, so his termination would be something LONG overdue.

Second: it’s more than just the man at the top of the chain that is creating the atmosphere of Orwellian intrusiveness. Just getting rid of Gonzales or just getting rid of FBI Director Robert Mueller doesn’t cut it. There needs to be a clean sweep of the hierarchy in the Department of Justice. Directors AND their lieutenants need to go. Right now if you just boot either Gonzales or Mueller, or even both of them, you would still have the real movers and shakers in power in the Department of Justice, because the political mentality would be that they got their pound of flesh, so that’s it, the matter would be closed. The environment would still be there. You clean the whole hierarchy out, then there is no mistaking the intention.

Third: This is something that the Dems in Congress do not want to do… but they NEED to void out the portions of PATRIOT Act that are being abused right now! The American people were ASSURED from both Gonzales AND his predecessor that the intrusive provisions in the anti-American PATRIOT Act were essential and that they WOULD NOT be abused! Well guess what? THEY WERE! You don’t reward abuses of power by keeping the provisions of those abuses intact. You PUNISH abuses of power by REMOVING those provisions. If the American public could be lied to beforehand about the abuses, then they will be lied to again and again and again as long as the means to implement those abuses remain intact. You fix that by removing those means.

It’s way too damn easy to say that “someone” has to go over the mismanagement in the Department of Justice. There are a whole LOT of those folks who need to go. The question is… will the Democrats in the Congress be willing to take a stand and do what NEEDS to be done? Or will they just go for the quick fix?

I’m afraid that they’ll probably just go for the quick fix.