I never thought I would admire John Ashbroft

It is true and it is all Alberto Gonzales fault.

I first heard the story on NPR about Gonzales pressing a very ill Ashcroft to sign off on Bush's plan to tap telephones. The following is from today's New York Times:

Mr. Comey, the former No. 2 official in the Justice Department, said the crisis began when he refused to sign a presidential order reauthorizing the program, which allowed monitoring of international telephone calls and e-mail of people inside the United States who were suspected of having terrorist ties. He said he made his decision after the department’s Office of Legal Counsel, based on an extensive review, concluded that the program did not comply with the law. At the time, Mr. Comey was acting attorney general because Mr. Ashcroft had been hospitalized for emergency gall bladder surgery.

***

Mr. Comey said that on the evening of March 10, 2004, Mr. Gonzales and Andrew H. Card Jr., then Mr. Bush’s chief of staff, tried to bypass him by secretly visiting Mr. Ashcroft. Mr. Ashcroft was extremely ill and disoriented, Mr. Comey said, and his wife had forbidden any visitors.

***

When the White House officials appeared minutes later, Mr. Gonzales began to explain to Mr. Ashcroft why they were there. Mr. Comey said Mr. Ashcroft rose weakly from his hospital bed, but in strong and unequivocal terms, refused to approve the eavesdropping program.

“I was angry,” Mr. Comey told the committee. “ I had just witnessed an effort to take advantage of a very sick man, who did not have the powers of the attorney general because they had been transferred to me. I thought he had conducted himself in a way that demonstrated a strength I had never seen before, but still I thought it was improper.”

Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Card quickly departed, but Mr. Comey said he soon got an angry phone call from Mr. Card, demanding that he come to the White House. Mr. Comey said he replied: “After what I just witnessed, I will not meet with you without a witness, and I intend that witness to be the solicitor general of the United States.”

So, Ashcroft was ready to resign. From the Times, it appears that Bush acted as peacemaker :

At Mr. Comey’s urging, Mr. Bush also met with Mr. Mueller, who emerged to inform Mr. Comey that the president had authorized the changes in the program sought by the Justice Department.

“We had the president’s direction to do what we believed, what the Justice Department believed, was necessary to put this on a footing where we could certify to its legality,” Mr. Comey said. “And so we set out to do that and we did that.”

Another incident that makes me think that Bush is not nearly as fecklessly inept as many would paint him and feeds my belief that there are maneuvers going on of a Machiavellian complexity but luckily without a Machiavellian intelligence executing those maneuvers.

From today's Washington Post:

By now, it's abundantly clear that a number of the U.S. attorneys whom Gonzales's minions sent packing didn't live up to Karl Rove's expectations in one crucial particular: They had failed to ring up convictions, or even mount prosecutions, for voter fraud. As Dan Eggen and Amy Goldstein reported in Monday's Post, five of the 12 federal prosecutors either sacked or considered for sacking last year had been singled out by Rove and other administration officials for nonperformance on voter fraud. Amazingly, all five came from states -- Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico, Washington and Wisconsin -- where Republicans were embroiled in tight election contests.

***
From Rove's perspective, however, a crackdown on voter registration campaigns in minority communities made cold electoral sense. Shortly after George W. Bush became president, Rove began to impress upon leading Republicans the importance of the nation's changing demographics -- that with the nation becoming steadily less white, Republican survival depended on winning a greater share of black and Hispanic voters. That, of course, was just one way to address the party's electoral problem. The other, in close races, was to suppress black and Hispanic turnout -- a task that would become far easier if the airwaves were buzzing with news of voter-fraud indictments. It was a task that required federal prosecutors who would indict first and ask questions later.

I am probably not the first to suggest that everything done by this Administration has been for political gain to benefit its adherents, contributors and the Republican Party (and I think in that order) rather than the common good of the country.