starting to like Hagel. Too bad he's a dyed-in-the-wool Conservative. Nonetheless if he keeps up this line of clear thinking he may soon realize being a moderate will gather votes as quickly as some of the more oppressive ideologues of either party.

Don't you just get nauseous when you see Fredo grin when asked if he should step down and he bounces it "back" to Shrub? Don't you just want to toss?

Many Democrats repeatedly deferred to Bush's appointments saying that he should be able to choose his own cabinet members. I really hope they see the fallacy of this argument now even if it is 6 years too late.

Of course, it'll probably be the Republicans who insist on a future Democratic President appointing candidates that they approve. However, I can at least hope Democrats will at least take a hard look at Republican appointments in the future.

I've been advocating for some time that the incompetents and criminals of this maladministration need to stay in their places, on the front page and top of every newscast for as long as it takes for this country to wake up and throw them all in jail, en masse, at once.

However, in the case of Gonzales, I believe he is the finger in the dike holding back the flood of Smirky's crimes.

Once Gonzales is out from under the Usurper's protection, then the Usurper is exposed to revelations of everything Fredo knows.

I think at this point it doesn't matter whether Gonzo stays or goes. The grand tissue-paper facade is ripping apart, and nothing can save it now.

As if there was any need to document just how bad things have gotten, Chuck Hagel combines absurd understatement with what stands out as a daring assertion coming from the lips of the only legitemately patriotic Republican left standing.

A realistic assessment of Alberto Gonzales would substitute the phrase "obvious criminal" for the ridiculous "lacks moral authority"

Gonzales should have been asked to leave after referring to the Geneva Convention as "quaint". Where were the Republican former soldiers when that memo was made public?

We've been hearing alot obout Gonzales' loyalty to George Bush over the years. But what is loyalty rooted in ? At what point does starry-eyed loyalty become a self serving arrangement. Certainly its almost rediculous that Gonzales hasn't resigned by now. It seems that anyone with any amount of self respect would have. Its equally odd that George Bush is so stridently supportive of him. Ganzales is being crucified for the crime of being Bush's and Rove's waterboy.Now is his "loyalty" coming with a price? If he did resign and take the fall would his "loyalty" suddenly shift in a much more selfish direction.

Maybe Bush and Rove have to prop this fool up because he could be BIG trouble for them if they ever cut him loose.

He can be impeached and removed. All of this strikes me as more posturing to seem effective.

Why in the world would Bush fire Gonzales OR let him resign. Then he'd have to name a new AG that would have to be confirmed by the Senate. Does he really want the kind of publicity that an Attorney General confirmation hearing would get? He'd either have to nominate someone with a lot of credibility and integrity who could actually get confirmed (and who would then waltz into the DOJ and undo all of that nice "politicizing" that's gone on for the last 6 years) or he could nominate someone as lame as Gonzalez that would not only not get confirmed, but would look like an idiot on the news every night when he couldn't come up with good answers to all of the probing questions that would be asked. So why put himself through it? He's obviously told Gonzo that he needs to stay put for the good of the administration (and the hell with the country and the morale at the DOJ). The only way to get rid of our corrupt Attorney General is for Congress to impeach him and we all know that ain't gonna happen. By the time Bush leaves office the Department of Justice isn't going to be worth the powder to blow it to hell. All of the good people have either already left or will soon leave when they see that they no longer have any credibility. What's left will be the loyal Bushie appointees and their minions who are more interested in disenfranchising voters and prosecuting Democrats than they are in seeing that justice is done.

Neither "Moral Authority" nor "Competence" are part of the AG's job description.

People just "ASSUME" that a president would select a person with those qualities.

Seems to me this issue is closed. Gonzo will stay. As others have pointed out, Cheney, in particular, remembers what happened when Elliot Richardson, Nixon's AG, resigned over Watergate. That event led directly to the appointment of Archibald Cox as a Special Prosecutor..and the rest is, as they say, history. Not history Cheney is going to repeat.

So, Gonzo will stay, because if he does resign, and Bush does try to appoint another AG, the Senate confirmation process will, inevitably, turn up stuff so malodorous, that Impeachment hearings on the President and Vice-President would be unavoidable, whatever Pelosi says.

It's too much to hope for that Gonzo would resign, or be fired. It seems to me that it's totally in Bush's and Cheney's interest to keep him on, no matter what happens.

Even if Goodling actually says something damning (unlikely, in my view), they'll keep him. The alternatives are all worse, with Dems controlling the Congress, and, thus, the Committee hearings.

I have been hoping, ever since the elections, that methodical, professional investigation, as a matter of routine Congressional practice, is going to turn up so much serious criminal activity, that Pelosi won't be able to deny the opening of Impeachment hearings. The Dems may not want those hearings, but if they keep investigating this Administration, it seems like Impeachment is all but inevitable.

It seems miraculous to me that the hearings haven't begun already. They would have, if not for Democratic political calculations. The evidence is all there. No need to hunt for it, hardly. Lewis Lapham made an entirely compelling case for Impeachment over a year ago. His case is, if anything, strengthened by current events.

The Dems are just cowardly. They want to win in 2008, and they think they'll lose if they impeach Cheney, then Bush. They might. So what? If we *don't* impeach those two, every future President will know he or she can break the law with utter impunity. Is that a good thing?