Gonzales’ surprise unsurprising

No wonder Attorney General Alberto Gonzales doesn’t think he ought to resign.

To hear him tell it, he had nothing to do with the White House plot going back to 2005 to fire all 93 U.S. attorneys. He nixed it when he heard about it, he says.

He also claims to have been mostly in the dark regarding the deliberations of Justice Department underlings who eventually handed pink slips to eight.

“I was not involved in seeing any memos, was not involved in any discussions about what was going on,” Gonzales insisted to reporters Tuesday. “That’s basically what I knew as the attorney general.”

It may strike many as incredible that the top legal official of the land should offer perfect ignorance as his defense. In the federal cases U.S. attorneys prosecute, from tax fraud to terrorism, ignorance of the law is no defense.

Yet Gonzales is just copying his bosses.

President Bush has been so disengaged as virtually to disappear from the public record on matters that range from possible felonies within the White House to wartime decision-making.

And Vice President Dick Cheney has already demonstrated the utility of offloading his chief of staff. Yet before his machinations to shield both himself and top aide Scooter Libby from a special prosecutor’s attention fizzled, he used a silent President Bush as his first line of defense.

The president obliged by never publicly verifying Cheney’s assertion that President Bush authorized the disclosure of weapons secrets, so no crime was committed when Libby revealed highly classified Iraq weapons data to a reporter.

As for the U.S. attorney firings, it may have been a buddy of Karl Rove’s who got one of the newly available jobs, but it was Gonzales’ chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, who took the fall. Sampson resigned Monday as the White House released a bunch of e-mails with his name all over them.

Still, it was neither Gonzales nor Cheney but President Bush who perfected the “Who? Me?” strategy.

The president wanted aides who could make critical decisions, whether they were the right ones or not. Yet then they also owned the problem, regardless of who said the buck stops here. Just ask “Heckuva job, Brownie,” the Hurricane Katrina FEMA disaster-master who has taken his anti-Bush cause on the road.

Even the Iraq war was delegated. For months, President Bush left it to Cheney to make the case for war. Key dissents and concerns about post-war plans and intelligence never made it to the president’s war councils.

Some critical decisions were taken in President’s Bush presence – including the decisions not to disband the Iraq army and not to fire Iraqi Baathists en masse.

Yet even these were promptly overruled by then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his Iraq occupation cohort, Jerry Bremer – without any apparent attempt to run the new rulings by the president.

President Bush expresses deep concern about the troops. He has visited wounded vets at Walter Reed Army Medical Center on more than one occasion. But when the Washington Post ran a devastating expose about the dead cockroaches, mouse droppings, the mold and the holes in the ceilings, the president did not step out front with anger simmering. He deferred to new Defense Secretary Robert Gates to take the public lead and discipline the Army brass as he saw fit, while Bush named a bipartisan commission to take a deeper, independent look.

Now, Gonzales – a longtime Bush associate from Texas – looks to the main man to keep him on. “The attorney general serves at the pleasure of the president,” he told reporters Tuesday.

Oddly, that’s the same rationale his department just used to fire the eight U.S. attorneys.