1. Anonymous says:

    Hah! I like annotated news stories (annotated with the truth).

    The big difference here is Bush could shove Harriet Miers out the door and not worry about a score of career White House council staffers putting a shiv in Bush’s back in response. Bush needs to keep Abu G. as AG because the second he’s gone DoJ is going to explode with leaks revealing two terms of Bushian criminality. Even the veal in the DC press corps will be able to figure out Bush is a criminal worthy of shackles, not a jolly good fellow who chuckles over tea with the freakin’ Queen.

  2. Neil says:

    I like the way Black spins a narrative six paragraphs long and OTR members tell the story the way senior officials want it told, no? We start with

    1. Deep throat (and common man USA) thinks Gonzalez has no credibility. [We’re all on board with the storyteller now. Moreover, credibility is not the only issue at issue so framing it as a credibility issue is an effective deflection. No mention of these: competence, ethics, illegal partisanship of USAs, merit less prosecutions of Democrats to influence elections, obstruction of justice… you get the picture… all unmentioned. ]

    2. Bush doesn’t think Gonzalez has done anything wrong. [Yes it’s a mystery why Bush thinks this but absent any other insight into Bush’s knowledge of the facts, we’ll have to accept it. Maybe it’s code for Bush wants AGAG in the job regardless. Anyway, it explains way Bush hasn’t demanded AGAG’s resignation.

    3.Rove wants Gonzalez to resign for the President’s sake [Bwaaaa Haaaa haaaaa. Sorry. It’s just too sic. Is there any other reason Rove is pointing the finger at Gonzo? Ya think?]

    4. It’s a relationship thing between Bush and Gonza. [Bush’s strong commitment, which is a good instinct, may be hurting him now… we should forgive him because his hearts in the right place.]

    5. Bolten, the voice of reason, is the only one capable of advising Bush to [get the scandal straightened out by] dump[ing] Gonzalez. […So I guess we can expect this to go on for a while… until Bolten gets through… and who knows how long that will take… but Bolten’s not talking so you’ll just have to watch and wait.]

  3. Sara says:

    Charlie Black has an interesting History. He was in the first Reagan Administration, left sometime in the second term to set up his own lobby shop, and almost got caught up in an indictment of those responsible for the HUD rip-off’s (small change these days) that Lantos’s committee investigated during the Bush I Administration. The only person I remember tried in that case was John Mitchell’s step daughter who got some time in the pooky. Anyhow…

    One of the things Charlies Black was involved with was setting up â€dinners†for some Christian fund to establish orphanages in S. Africa, and anyone who wanted a HUD grant, had to buy a table — I think it was about $15,000 per table — and the organizer of the fund raiser was — Jack Abramoff, who at the time was representing some faction of the Apartheid Regime in S.Africa. The money didn’t go to kids, it went to Abramoff and to his sponsors. But Black was the guy who put the squeeze on the HUD grant hopefuls for buying into the Abramoff project. The Lantos Hearings that delivered up all this were between 91 and 93.