Arlen Specter, who looks a tad older than I last remember, has been getting all of the press regarding the Alberto Gonzales hearings. It follows into line of the beloved “Even members of his own party” storyline — so much so that Fox News did their usual thing of “accidentally” identifying him as a Democrat. And because this line drips with nervous dread.

Specter: Do you think constitutional government in the United States can survive if the president has the unilateral authority to reject congressional inquiries?
Gonzalez: I’m not going to answer this question.

But Sheldon Whitehouse, a Freshman Senator you probably don’t know — someone I checked off last midterm election as “R to D” and didn’t think much beyond that, to me served as sort of the mean average response. Go to the split screen of Whitehouse and Gonzales, and the contempt manifests on his face, as he looks incredulously onto Gonzales.

Gonzales arrived at a novel line about the infamous meeting to Ashcroft’s infimary bedside — the attempted circumvension of acting Attorney General Comey not signing off on extending the wire-tapping program — which, for everything else in what due to the nature of politics can be obfuscated into complexities into “a tempest in a teapot” and drubbed into the donkey versus elephant narrative– is therefor the most straight-forward Dramatic and bold part of the story. Gonzales says that Congress did it. The closed bi-partisan group of 8, and by that he pretty much would emphasize the Democrats. The meeting with the infirmed Ashcroft was no big deal — Comey’s testimony notwithstanding — and he just wanted to tell Ashcroft the urgency of what was needed.

But nobody believes him, and those that say they believe him are lying to either us or themselves.

On a purely political front in terms of the Donkey – Elephant War — fully apart from the meaning of actual governance and pretending as though scandal were just part of the sport which the two sides bob and weave with, there seems to be a certain malaise in the body politic — a fatigue. I don’t think it is possible for Congress to have a high approval rating in an environment like this one — Congress’s and the President’s approval ratings tend to be tied to one another because the government is seen either moving forward or not moving forward — since the Presidency is all powerful, the Democratic Congress’s ratings don’t much mattter. If the Democrats wonder why they can’t get any real traction in the American public’s psyche about, quote-in-quote “Attorney Gate”, it may just be because the jig is up, and they’ve already registered their displeasure to Mr. 26%, and fully understand what he is all about, at least in broad terms — drumming up specifics ends up being an act of redundancy and a few too many extra thoughts.

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