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Mo Rocca has appeared on a bunch of shows, including 'The Daily Show,' 'I Love the 80s,'...

Gonzales is Done: The Scandal Has Gotten Too Close to the President

Alberto Gonzales will resign very soon.

The Bush administration has a policy of always throwing the lowest ranking guy in a scandal under the bus. In the original Start Trek series, if you were beaming down with Captain Kirk and Spock and we had never seen you before, you were a dead man. In the Bush administration, if there is a scandal involving some of the top players in the White House and a man you've never heard of before, he's the one that's going to get zapped. In this case, it was Kyle Sampson.

But this time, it didn't do the trick. The scandal has grown and it's gotten too close to the president. ABC News is now reporting that Karl Rove was involved in the discussion to fire the prosecutors from the beginning, despite earlier protestations to the contrary.

Even more importantly, the president himself has admitted he was involved. He said yesterday that he talked to Alberto Gonzales about the US attorneys and what should be done. You can watch him admit his involvement here.
Then, he laid out a classic preemptive defense.

This is another standard Bush administration tactic. Knowing that they're lying, they say something that they can come back and technically defend later, even though it is clearly misleading.

A perfect example is what they said about the connection between Iraq and 9/11. They would mention the two things in the same sentence over and over again, but were careful (most of the time, but not all of the time) to not directly say that Iraq carried out 9/11.

Here's an example of the preemptive defense by Dick Cheney:

"If we're successful in Iraq, if we can stand up a good representative government in Iraq, that secures the region so that it never again becomes a threat to its neighbors or to the United States, so it's not pursuing weapons of mass destruction, so that it's not a safe haven for terrorists, now we will have struck a major blow right at the heart of the base, if you will, the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11." – September 14, 2003

He didn't say Iraq ordered 9/11, but he put them close enough to each other to give a perfectly misleading impression. Why? Because he already knew they didn't do it, but he wanted people to think they did.

In this case, here's the preemptive defense from the President: "I never brought up a specific case nor gave [Alberto Gonzales] specific instructions."

That means I told him generally who to fire and how to fire them. Later, he'll be able to say, "I never lied. I didn't tell him specific cases or give him specific instructions."

Bush admits he was involved in this decision. But it's much deeper than he's letting on. You can tell because he's already laid down the preemptive defense. Plus, Bush loves politics and this is the kind of political hatchet job that he thoroughly enjoys. Policy bores him. Who cares about the levees in New Orleans? So booooring. Bin Laden determined to attack inside the United States? Yeah right, who cares? Time to clear some brush. But politics? That's fun!

Now, that the scandal has indisputably touched Rove, there's only one stop left -- Bush. That's why they have to stop the bleeding. Gonzales has to be sacrificed to call off the dogs. If I'm wrong, Gonzales will stay and they have nothing to worry about. If I'm right, Gonzales better start packing because we know Captain Kirk isn't going down.

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Mo's Bio

Mo Rocca appears on a bunch of shows, including CBS News Sunday Morning (with the indescribably wonderful Charles Osgood), The Tonight Show on NBC, and NPR's Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! He's a sometime judge on Iron Chef and was featured on Telemundo's Amore Descarado. Last year he starred on Broadway in the 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. His expose "All the President's Pets" was published by Crown in 2004.



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News Bloggers

Mo Rocca appears on a bunch of shows, including CBS News Sunday Morning (with the indescribably wonderful Charles Osgood), The Tonight Show on NBC, and NPR's Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! He's a sometime judge on Iron Chef and was featured on Telemundo's Amore Descarado. Last year he starred on Broadway in the 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. His expose "All the President's Pets" was published by Crown in 2004.

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