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From last night's Special Report with Brit Hume: --On the Attorney General-- FRED BARNES: Well, obviously, Alberto Gonzales was a drag on the administration. I think President Bush is better off the last 16 months that he's gone. Everything that I've been told today was this was done not at Bush's request, but that Gonzales himself decided to go by the Josh Bolten rule . . . that if I'm not out by Labor Day of the year before . . . I'll stay to the end. He wasn't ready to stay to the end. And he was getting battered . . . by Democrats, by the press, by people inside the administration, inside the Justice Department itself. And what the president needs is a strong attorney general with credibility on the big issues that are going to come up just in the next few months.
One is warrantless surveillance of terrorists that you talked about. Another one is the interrogation of terrorists. And there's the whole question of Executive Power. NINA EASTON: It's funny, Fred, because you say it was a drag on the White House, and I think six months ago a lot of us were saying, for damage control, this guy should resign. It would be in the White House's interest to resign. But, in fact, it had this perverse effect of, in some ways, you could argue, helping the White House. . . . Congressional approval ratings -- what are they now? Eighteen percent -- historic lows. He became the centerpiece of a new Democratic Congress that was focused on investigation. And it has rebounded to the detriment, I believe, of the Democrats. They weren't able to get front and center on the agenda. They got some pieces through, but not a lot. They got focused on this.
And as the Republicans like to say, there's something like 600 investigations going on now, and subpoenas. . . . CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: When Gonzales was in front of Congress, particularly when he had an easy case, as you mentioned, the case of the firing of the attorneys, all he had to say is, 'They serve at the pleasure of the president. Of course the White House is involved. Why wouldn't it be?' He never made that case. He was very weak in his response. It was not a question of wrongdoing, it was a question of a man who was over his head. BARNES: I don't think you want somebody from inside the administration. Chertoff, you'd have three weeks of questions about Katrina, and you don't want to live through that again. The Democrats would, because they think it's a great issue to use against Republicans. |
