Back from hiatus

HipHopLawyer is back from a long (but sadly not long enough) sojourn to beautiful Costa Rica. Pics and commentary to follow, but only after I get caught back up on a dismally large backlog of HipHopLawyering.

For now, I encourage you, gentle readers, to join me in jubilating in the enormous clusterfuck that was Mr. Alberto "Judge" "Al" Gonzales' testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday.

We lead off with NYT, whose editorial board opens its looong and utterly brutal commentary with this: "If Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had gone to the Senate yesterday to convince the world that he ought to be fired, it’s hard to imagine how he could have done a better job."

Gonzales was pummeled repeatedly by members of his own party, a good example of which was Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma), who told Gonzales "It was handled incompetently. The communication was atrocious. You ought to suffer the consequences that these others have suffered, and I believe that the best way to put this behind us is your resignation." The ranking Republican member of the committee, Arlen Specter (R-Pennsylvania) told Gonzales that his account was "significantly, if not totally, at variance with the facts."

For a good bit of comedy, check out this chart, wielded during the hearings by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), which shows the difference between the Clinton and Bush protocols for communications between the White House and the Justice Department. Funny!

Going through the coverage and commentary of this story (golly, there's LOTS), I repeatedly encounter the words: disastrous, hapless, incompetent, deplorable, down-in-flames, disgusting, discouraging, preposterous, comedic, evasive, clown, train wreck, clueless, disingenuous, and laughable. NYT called Gonzales a "bumbling fool" and a "dull-witted apparatchik."

What was the White House response in the face of all this? After the conclusion of the hearings and continuing through this morning, White House spokesperson Dana Perino was quoted as saying the following: "He has done a fantastic job in the Department of Justice. The attorney general continues to have the president's full confidence."