I’ve been trying [seriously] to understand why watching this hearing was so uncomfortable to me. I kept coming and going, turning it down, turning it up, audibly moaning to my wife’s amusment. I’ve come up with three specific things:
First, when Gonzales was not being evasive or picky or not recalling, in other words when he was being cogent about what he was being asked, he was espousing a principle that was odious to me. He was saying that a U.S. Attorney’s performance was not being evaluated based of the cases before him/her, but on whether their numbers were high on cases that fit the President’s Agenda. That’s never been my understanding of how the Justice Department works.
Second, there’s a memo from a November 27th meeting in which they discussed how they were going to deal with any flack they got from firing these people. One way was to never say anything about the details, or how those details related to any particular staff member. And they’ve done that. They defend the firing of these eight Attorneys, but to my knowledge, we have no idea how they were chosen for firing – not any of them. It’s as if the list appeared as a virgin birth out of the cosmos.
Third. Gonzales was incredibly picky about the details of the Senator’s questions – things like "that was not a phone call, it was a conversation." Yet, he gave not one single detail himself about anything. Everything was principles or repeated comments about "processes." One wonders if he even works in the Justice Department, much less runs it.
But I think the part that made it so excruciating was something general – that he never answered a question,. he answered the "meaning" of the question. He reminded me of an interview David Frost did with James Earl Ray in the dark ages. When Frost asked a question, Ray would say, "well, if I say this, you’ll think that. And if I say this other thing, you’ll think that other thing." Then he’d pause for a moment [obviously trying to decide what he wanted us to think] and then give an answer. That’s what Gonzales did. He refuted meanings rather than answering questions.
In my years as a Psychiatrist, I came to see that as a sign that the person was essentially trying to ward me off. In my role then, I knew what to say. "You want me to believe this" and say what they were pushing. Then I’d say, "Everything you’re saying is an attempt to get me to think something you want me to think, rather than an attempt to give me the facts so I can reach my own conclusions. Why are you doing that?" If it continued, I simply moved on to something else. Why bother to play such games.
Listening to Gonzales was like that. It’s reasonable for him to feel defensive. Those people were after blood. But he was more than defensive, he sounded like a criminal trying to hide a crime, or worse, say there was not even a crime to hide. He was "play acting" and the only time it felt like a real hearing was when several of the Senators called him on it. I particularly enjoyed Dianne Feinstein rolling her eyes and looking exasperated.
How much longer do we have to endure these people?
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