One Is Silver and the Other Is Gold

It appears that the Bush administration has taken to heart a nursery rhyme told incessantly by my Irish/Italian grandparents concerning the nature of multiple best friends. Turns out that Alberto Gonzales was "too much of a distraction" to the Administration, preventing them from successfully running the world.

And how do you get to replace a torturing, habeus corpus-denying, warrantless-spying right wing hack? By being a PATRIOT ACT-writing, black people ignoring, war on terror-architecting right wing hack.

I think the discussion surrounding tapping Chertoff as the U.S.'s lead domestic terrorist ensures that any argument made by U.S. liberals (or conservatives) about the uniqueness of Gonzales' neoconservativity is a nonstarter. This resignation, whether brought about by distraction (read: too much talk about what the U.S. foreign policy must imply domestically, namely, a reduction in civil liberties and what can only be called human rights violations on a good day) or personal choice (read: Gonzales was tired of being the fall guy for these policies), is no different than impeaching Bush and ending up with President Cheney. Not only does this not constitute any real shift in domestic perspective for Bush, by replacing the architect of the terror list with the architect of the PATRIOT ACT and the war on terror, it is in fact exactly the opposite: a consolidation of personnel, ensuring that right-wing policies can continue amidst a flurry of public skepticism.

But at least now if my civil liberties are violated in the coming months, I have the recourse of sitting in a crowded football stadium for weeks while people starve, waiting for Mikey to come listen to my grievances.