Wednesday, March 28, 2007

“Blood in the Water”   [Rich Lowry]

In terms of the Gonzales can’t go because there will be “blood in the water” argument, I think we've been here before in all the controversies over Rumsfeld. It was supposedly never the right time to push him out, because the liberals would claim victory, or the former generals would claim victory, or it would be an implicit concession of various mistakes, etc., etc. (I agreed with this logic at the time.) Even when Bush finally pushed him out after the election, conservatives were saying it was a mistake because it signaled weakness or panic or disloyalty. But the key thing was: We got a better secretary of defense, one who was much better suited to dealing with the Iraq war. If this had happened sooner, we might have been seeing the kind of progress we're witnessing in Baghdad now six months or a year ago. All the signaling and the other side claiming victory and all the rest would have paled in comparison to that.

No one I know, I’m afraid to say, has ever had particularly high regard for Gonzales’ legal skills. Now, we are going to have a not particularly good AG who is politically weakened on top of it. Who wants that? In my mind, it's never a bad time to upgrade and get someone really suited for the job, someone who should have been appointed in the first place. It's only one of the most important positions in government.

03/28 12:48 PMShare