The Washington Post re-invents former Attorney General John Ashcroft, casting him as a protector of civil liberties in comparison to Alberto Gonzales.

Who are they kidding? John Ashcroft may have had a moment on his hospital sick bed in which he balked at re-authorizing the warrantless NSA surveillance program, and he may have expressed reservations about indefinite detentions at Guantanamo, but he was just as abominable as an Attorney General, and in my opinion, more so than Alberto Gonzales.

From his push on the Patriot Act, to his initiating warrantless monitoring of attorney-client conversations, to his many failed terrorism cases, his connection to Abu Ghraib, his insistence on prosecuting medical marijuana cases even in states that had legalized it, his attempt to keep tabs on federal judges, his belief that the undocumented could be held indefinitely and most spectacularly, his crusade to increase the use of the death penalty in federal cases, over the objections of his own prosectors and a federal judge, he should not be re-evaluated for his one moment of lucidity.

He was the worst Attorney General ever.

A blast from the past: The criticisms of Senators at his confirmation hearings.

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The New York Times has an editorial today, "Their Master's Voice" about Bush's loyalty to his yes-men.

It’s a familiar pattern: Mr. Bush sticks by his most trusted aides no matter how evident it is — even to the Republican Congressional chorus — that they are guilty of incompetence, bad judgment, malfeasance or all three. (George Tenet, the director of central intelligence; Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; and the Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers spring to mind.)

And, of course, Alberto Gonzales.

The last thing Rudy Giuliani needs is praise from Bernie Kerik. But, that's what he's getting.

With friends like these....

Keep it up Bernie.

Another take: The New Republic on Giuliani.

Giuliani is now pursuing the same strategy of sowing division, only this time on a national level. To hear him tell it, the election will pit weak-kneed Democrats against hard-line Republicans. "I listen a little to the Democrats, and, if one of them gets elected, we are going on defense," he recently told an audience in New Hampshire. "We will wave the white flag on Iraq. We will cut back on the Patriot Act, electronic surveillance, interrogation, and we will be back to our preSeptember 11 attitude of defense."

The New Republic piece cautions not to count Rudy out of the race. It says his sowing of dissent among Republicans is a planned strategy. One can only hope it's a strategy doomed to fail.

Matt Yglesias, also known as "what's his name," cracks Atrios-like on Peretz-Singer, who wrote this about Matt:

Actually, that's how [he] makes a living: by writing about people who are smarter than him and know more about the world than him. And since neither smarts not knowledge carry much cachet; with the left blogosphere (also not with the right blogosphere) its stars like what's his name ridicule the writers whose arguments he can't quite grasp.

Ha! A little vitriol from TNR. What's Chait got to say about that? Anyway, Matt busts on Peretz-Singer:

In my next life, maybe I'll try to take a more respectable path to media prominence, something like using my wife's money to buy an established magazine.

Snap!

This unsurprising news about Justice Clarence Thomas' silence in oral arguments has inspired some negative comments:

Justice Clarence Thomas sat through 68 hours of oral arguments in the Supreme Court's current term without uttering a word. In nearly 16 years on the court, Thomas typically has asked questions a couple of times a term.

This is much ado about nothing. Yes Thomas is particularly quiet in oral arguments but, given a nine member Court, this seems rather unremarkable to me. My problems with Thomas have nothing to do with this.

It is when he writes and votes that my objections emerge.

We didn't do an open thread yet this week, so here you go. What are you thinking about or reading that's of interest today?

• Via Mike at Crooks and Liars, take a look a the groups the police had under surveillance before the 2004 Republican Convention.
• Via Lindsay at Magikthise, Max Blumental takes a look at Jerry Falwell's segregationist and intolerant record.
• Via Avedon Carol at Sideshow, Max's father Sidney Blumenthal writes about the unraveling Bush presidency, taking a look at the changing role of loyalty.
• Via Sentencing Law and Policy, Scotus Blog examines how the 2008 election could affect the Supreme Court.

And in the news, two of the three kidnapped soldiers in Iraq may be alive. One is believed to have been killed.

There were three days of testimony this week in the terrorism trial of Jose Padilla. The prosecution's evidence may or may not be what it claims.

My interest was piqued by the testimony of one the Lackawanna (formerly known as Buffalo) Six defendants. He's testifying for the Government in hopes of reducing his own ten year prison sentence. You may recall in that case there were threats to have the defendants declared enemy combatants and moved to Guantanamo if they didn't plead guilty.

The issue now: Is miltary training at a camp in Afghanistan necessarily terrorist training?

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Meteor Blades comments:

The optimists hope that by September enough Republicans will be in boiling water that they will join enough Democrats to pass some kind of out-of-Iraq bill of the sort we haven't seen yet, or who will just cut off funding by not voting for any bill.

I think the first option - call it the Obama plan - is highly unlikely, but possible.

I think the second option - call it the Armando plan - is not possible, even though it is the one I would favor were I a Congressman or Senator.

So rounding up Republicans will be easier than holding the line with Democrats? Okaaaaaay. Let me remind my good friend MB what Krugman wrote today:

Matt Yglesias spots one of the funniest pieces of journalistic hackery I've seen in a while:

The Attorney General was not told that he was a subject or target of the…investigation, nor did he believe himself to be,” the letter said, leaving Washington to choose between Waas’ credibility and that of the Bush Justice Department.

Let's see now, Murray Waas vs. Alberto Gonzales on the credibility meter . . . hmmmmm.

Hahahahahahahahahahaha. Boy, they got Waas good with that one. Hahahahahahahaha!

Time to pull out the old Spanish saying, "le salio el tiro por la culata." (The gun backfired.)

Colorado Senator Ken Salazar has joined the roster of Senators urging Alberto Gonzales to resign.

Salazar, D-Denver, has long been considered one of Gonzales' few Democratic allies in Congress, and until today he had declined to join many fellow Democrats and handful of Republicans who have been calling for Gonzales to step down in the wake of a controversy over the firing of federal prosecutors last year.

In a press conference in Denver, Salazar said he has become concerned about a "politicization" of the Department of Justice. He said he spoke to Gonzales and urged him to resign, saying it was "time for the Department of Justice to get a fresh start."

Salazar is hardly a liberal Democrat. He's not only centrist, but a well known compromiser who values bi-partisanship.

I'm beginning to think Gonzales may actually resign. If it wasn't likely, I don't think Salazar would have taken a lead role in this.

Then again, perhaps Salazar, formerly the Attorney General of Colorado, just feels particularly strongly about the job.

Greg Sargent gets this from a congressional Dem staffer:

[A]side from sending the bill back there are only two apparent possibilities left: Either the White House gives on one of these points. Or the Dem Congressional leadership caves and produces a bill with some sort of benchmarks but no accountability -- in other words, something that's effectively meaningless. . . ."If this is what they go with, it begs the question, Why did we go through this whole exercise with the first supplemental and everything else?" our staffer asks. "What did we really accomplish?"

The staffer answers the question:

Getting past the smarmy pretension exhibited by Matt Yglesias and Dan Drezner in this discussion, at the 8:20 mark Matt makes an important point about brands in the political discourse. Not just for the Media, but for the entire chain, from the Times to the blogosphere. Discussing Mickey Kaus, Matt says:

It is not a political position that [Mickey Kaus]is espousing, [it is] a media product. . . . Mickey has created this persona for hmself, it is not . . . dishonest persona . . . but he is playing the Mickey Kaus character for Slate. And that is the same for columnists and stuff [I read "stuff" as all of the players in the political discussion] . . . . That is just the reality of it.

This is absolutely true. Everyone in the Media food chain is playing to persona. From figurative top to bottom. And that brings me back to what I always want to talk about, Iraq.