Loyal to a Fault

Leonard Pitts in the Miami Herald on the damage done by all the president's minions.

You probably think Attorney General Alberto Gonzales resigned Monday because he was the most controversial Justice Department chief since John Mitchell went to prison for Watergate crimes.

You probably think the resignation had something to do with allegations of U.S. attorneys being fired for political reasons. Or all those convenient memory lapses when Gonzales was asked about the firings in Senate hearings. Or the simple fact that only very small children and very innocent adults still believe anything Gonzales says.

You might think any or all of that is what pressured him to quit, but you'd be mistaken. At least according to President Bush, who put a different spin on his friend's departure in a statement Monday. "It's sad," said Bush, "that we live in a time when a talented and honorable person like Alberto Gonzales is impeded from doing important work because his good name was dragged through the mud for political reasons."

As is often the case with the things our president says, there's a hole in that big enough to drive a Humvee through. It was, after all, Sen. Arlen Specter who said that Gonzales was not credible; Sen. John Cornyn who called his testimony "deplorable"; Sen. Chuck Grassley who accused him of changing his story; and Sen. Norm Coleman, to name one of many, who demanded his resignation.

All those worthies are, of course, Republicans. So it is hard to see how Gonzales is a victim of politics, unless this is all part of some Machiavellian effort by the Republican Party to undermine the Republican Party. Barring that, you have to accept Gonzales' departure as a product of bipartisan disgust. And you have to wonder if the president can still see Reality from the parallel dimension in which he lives.

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This is par for the course in an administration where mulishness, obstinance and refusal to face facts are often mistaken for resolve. Anyone who was looking for contrition had this president confused with some other.

This president doesn't believe in contrition. Or accountability. What he believes in is swagger, the ability to say fish is fowl and to insist on it with such clear-eyed conviction that an observer ends up checking his own glasses.

It is obviously a trait Bush values in his subordinates.

Consider that over the weekend, The New York Times sought to confirm a rumor that Gonzales was resigning. He instructed his spokesman to deny it.

There you have Team Bush in a nutshell. Under fire for his lack of truthfulness, protesting his integrity to the bitter end, Alberto Gonzales was asked a direct question.

And he lied.

Robin Toner has a piece in the New York Times today that posits that even with the most polarizing figures in the Bush administration -- Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and advisor Karl Rove -- leaving, things might get better in terms of peace between the White House and Democrats. Don't count on it.

After all, Ronald Reagan, buffeted in his second term by the Iran-contra scandal, managed to shore up his administration, make major progress in arms control and serve out his final months as a popular president.

Bill Clinton bounced back after impeachment in his second term.

Both of those presidents rebounded despite the partisan passions they stirred in many of their opponents.

But historical parallels, and conventional wisdom, have their limits. Mr. Bush, by temperament, governing style and political design, is a polarizing president like no other, pollsters say. And no reshuffling of administration staff members or an incremental wave of good news is likely to change that.

The reasons are pretty clear: George W. Bush and the people who support him have never been able to look beyond their own political ambitions and quest for power. Nothing that this administration has done in the last six years has been done without some political angle to it and some benefit to the friends and cronies of the president and the Republican party.

I'm not so naive to think that there isn't an element of politics in every administration, but the breathtaking overtness of the Bushies makes whatever previous administrations did look like chump change, even outdoing the benchmark set by the most calculating and paranoid president in recent memory, Richard Nixon. At least Mr. Nixon knew his limits and he respected the advice of other politicians, including those across the aisle. Mr. Bush, for all his talk about cooperation, has never used the Democrats except as a punching bag, and his theory of bipartisanship is "Be reasonable: Do it my way." Even on his worst day, Richard Nixon knew that he was the President of the United States, not just the people and the party that voted for him, and even in his most craven moment, he knew that he had to resign because, as he said, he lost the support of the Congress and the Senate and that made it impossible to accmplish anything. Mr. Bush could not care less about the support of the Congress and the Senate, much less accomplishing anything that might do anything other than create the perpetual Republican majority.