Gone-zales

Alberto Gonzales, the U.S. Attorney General who helped open the door to torture in the war on terror and later became an object of public ridicule for his contradictory and baldly obfuscating testimony on the fired U.S. attorneys scandal, resigned today, becoming the second major Bush administration figure to step down in recent weeks.

Here then, via Youtube, some of Gonzo’s greatest hits.

Testifying before Congress on the attorneys scandal, Gonzales improbably cites his own faulty memory more than 70 times when refusing to answer questions.

The above performance led the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart to opine that Gonzales “is either a perjurer or a low functioning pin head.”

You have to think that the writers at the Daily Show and the Colbert Report will be at least a little sad at today’s news. The chance to pen bits like “ “Mommy why is the lying man still in charge of the law?” doesn’t come every day.

On a more serious track, Gonzales’s enduring legacy may be his relentless fight to undermine the right of habeas corpus, a bedrock principle of criminal law. Here, again before the Senate judiciary committee, Gonzales makes the unlikely argument that “There is no express grant of habeas in the constitution.” There is only “a prohibition against taking it away.”

Finally, in a display of what can’t really be described as anything short of utter contempt (in the social, not legal sense) Gonzales, summoned back to the Senate in May, proceeds to read the exact same statement he gave them a month earlier.