Just this month, on 8-2-07, to be exact, Salon was publishing Blumenthal's straight-faced pronouncement that Gonzalez would never resign because he knew too much about the nefarious Bushco crime family, right?

Now, 25 days later, the reason that Gonzalez must resign is that he knows too much about those evildoings in the Bush White House.

Can anybody tell me -- did Blumenthal just switch brands of aluminum foil for his headgear? Is that what the issue is?

This kind of thing used to be the domain of 3 a.m. call-in programs on AM radio. Now, it passes for what is supposedly a credible movement-wing of the Democrat party. Are the Sidney Blumenthals of the world going to pick the 2008 Democrat nominee for President? I suppose I can only hope so...

No, mhellman, I am NOT accepting any of this idiotic baloney.

Here was Blumenthal, earlier this month: (God forbid a guy like this ever being allowed to advise a future President on something important, like projecting the U.S. economy four years out...)

"Bush cannot afford to have Gonzales resign or be removed. Gonzales' leaving would ratchet up the administration's political crisis to an intense level. Bush could not nominate a replacement without responding to the Senate Judiciary Committee's inevitable request for information on every matter that he has attempted to keep secret. On every unresolved and electrified issue the Senate would demand documents -- the entire cache on the development of policy since 2001 on torture, the gutting of the Civil Rights Division, the U.S. attorneys and much more. Only Gonzales' perpetuation in office holds back the deluge."

~Sidney Blumenthal in Salon, 8/2/07

Who cares? As I wrote elsewhere, I am every bit as "sorry" now as I was when they pulled the plug on the Harriet Miers SCOTUS nomination. It's the same thing. We can find someone to do a much better job. And that includes doing a better job of defending administration policy. I fault the President only in supporting, for too long, fellow Texans (Miers and Gonzalez in particular) for whom he felt a great deal of understandable loyalty. I look for the President to replace Mr. Gonzalez with a choice that is as much of a professional and political improvement as Samuel Alito was over Ms. Miers.

I can only hope that Chuck Schumer, Dick Durbin, Pat Leahy, Ted Kennedy and Joe Biden all take up temporary residence in Texas to personally oversee the investigations of Karl Rove and Alberto Gonzalez. Anything to keep them away from the levers of power in Washington and any serious governmental decisionmaking.

But here's the part I don't get; if Barney Frank or Tammy Baldwin (just for instance, purely hypothetically) did something perverted, is it "okay," for them to have done so, because their public policy positions include same-sex marriage, homosexual employment and housing rights, abortion rights on demand, etc.?

What is it that makes some private sexual conduct okay, but not other conduct, based only on the perp's public policy positions? Does your policy on budgetary matters make a difference as to whether your conduct should be exposed?

The case of Larry Craig crosses a line, apparently, which is that criminal activity of any kind is intolerable. Of course, Patrick Kennedy's getting loaded and driving his car on Washington's sidewalks didn't earn him any kind of legislative sanction either, so there are crimes, and then there are crimes.

I agree with Karl Rove and that is that the Republican party was weak and ineffectual in dealing with the Mark Foleys in its midst. And there is a price to pay for that. I suspect that Rahm Emmanuel would not tolerate such a thing in the Democratic caucus and the Republicans need their own Rahmbo. We'll see how Mitch McConnell deals with this. I'd kind of like to see

In the meantime, wasn't Frank Church the last Democrat in Idaho? They all went to Oregon and Washington State in 1982, right? Does anyone think that Larry Craig's seat will go to a Democrat? Seems to me that a good move might be for Craig to resign quickly and then have Governor Butch Otter appoint himself to Craig's unexpired term and then run in the next general.