Will Accountability Prevail? From Watergate to Gonzogate

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Will Accountability Prevail? From Watergate to Gonzogate
by Col. Daniel Smith | May 5 2007 - 10:20am

April 27 on Public Broadcasting System (PBS) television saw an all-too-brief and much-too-rare analysis of the ever-shifting influences that drive policy formulation and program implementation of an administration under siege.

Should you have missed the program--the inaugural of a new series, "Bill Moyer's Journal" for Friday, April 27--it undoubtedly can be purchased from PBS. The segment of interest comes near the beginning, and it is so trenchant that a number of Internet sites carry it on-line. Moyers, a veteran journalist who also was a White House insider in the Johnson administration, discusses political developments of the week just ended with Jon Stewart, host of the fake news program "The Daily Show" carried on Comedy Central. When Moyers refers to Stewart as a journalist, Stewart demurs and reiterates his comedic profession and calling.

Perhaps, but he is a comedic commentator and societal gadfly in the serious tradition of Will Rogers and, to an extent, Mark Russell and even Bill Maher--a tradition that has its roots in the biting satire of Jonathan Swift in Britain and Voltaire in France.

The specific event that Moyers and Stewart discussed was the testimony of the Attorney General of the United States, Alberto Gonzales, before the Senate Judiciary Committee, April 19, relative to the role Gonzales played in the December 2006 firing of eight federal prosecutors. The public record, including sworn testimony from current and past Justice Department officials was full of contradictions and missing documents.

~snip~

Gonzales had at least three weeks notice of the hearing in which he reportedly "rehearsed" his answers to questions posed by Justice Department officials role-playing as the Senate committee. The shooting incident at Virginia Tech on April 16 prompted the Senate committee to postpone Gonzales' appearance from April 17 to April 19. Despite all that time available to search records and calendars, the Attorney General, under oath, responded 74 times--45 times before the committee broke for lunch--with some version of "I don't recall specifically," "I have no recollection," "I don't recall remembering," or "I can only testify as to what I recall." (Alternate counts say 64 "I don't know" answers over five hours--either way, quite a few.) Were that not frustrating enough for both Republican and Democratic lawmakers, Gonzales went out of his way to assert and reassert: "I firmly believe that nothing improper occurred." This is virtually an epistemological miracle: even though he could not remember any details of meetings he attended and conversations he had, he is sure everything done was proper.

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