“Alberto Gonzales was never the right man for this job,” Senate majority leader Henry Reid said last week. “He lacked independence, he lacked judgment, and he lacked the spine to say ‘no’ to Karl Rove.”

Oh Reid sir, how right you are.

One thing the outgoing Attorney General has taught the nation is never to assume that the so-called Nation’s Lawyer may have a full command of the law or even a very convincing sense of justice. In fact, he or she may not even be a very good attorney.

Gonzo fired eight US Attorneys, not for reasons of competence, as he said, but because the president’s now-former chief political adviser, Karl Rove, passed on word of the administration’s displeasure with some of the attorneys’ apparent political sympathies. “I acknowledge that mistakes were made here. I accept that responsibility,” Gonzales said eventually, only after the Justice Department released emails proving his involvement in the mess.

Gonzales oddly repeated the mantra to Congress, as a weak form of defense, that “[he] worked for the American people and served at the pleasure of the president.” The pleasure of the president? As if that clears him of the responsibility to uphold the law or to resign when it becomes clear to the American people he’s alleging to serve that he is incompetent to serve them.

It may be a fact that presidential appointees act on the whim of unelected strategists such as Karl Rove, but the absurdity of that fact is underlined when the daily job description of the appointee involves interpreting the law and upholding the Constitution. In the case of the Attorney General, his job every day seemed to be merely to cover and justify what he was doing in the place of the job he was supposed to be doing! Gonzalez made the decision each day to not do his job— unless his job was to be first a tool and then the perfect patsy for administration politicos.

It’s shameful to see the United States in this situation today— an example of bureaucratic corruption at the highest level even as Bush sells the country and its military operations as the best hope for democracy and for the spread of liberties guaranteed by the rule of law.

There will be no love lost once Gonzales leaves in September. He has been an embarrassment to the law since he took office and he has been lying (with very little talent or style) to Congress for months. He used the Patriot Act to illegally intercept and search Americans’ private communications. In 2002 he authored a controversial memo that questioned whether parts of the Geneva Conventions even applied to Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters detained in Afghanistan. More than that, he effectively endorsed torture as policy and the curtailing of legal rights to anyone even suspect in the worldwide open-ended War on Terror. These “approaches” to the law and our security are now being assailed on all fronts and will hopefully not survive long into the post-Bush era.

It seems clear that any lawyer who voluntarily bum-rushes a hospitalized Attorney General sick and dying of cancer to pressure him to alter the laws regarding snooping on American citizens is not a fit candidate to himself become Attorney General. And yet Gonzales, who as Bush’s Chief of Staff bum-rushed sick and dying John Ashcroft, became our Attorney General. Not only did our president appoint him, he also stood by him, defended him, and strung out his crippled and ridiculous tenure. That’s an example of democracy in action, I guess, but not the kind of democracy Bush seems to expect the Iraqis, for example, to be so eager to embrace.

Kudos to Gonzo for finally doing the right thing and getting the hell out. Let’s just hope the next Attorney General acts more like a lawyer and less like a muppet baby.

The kicker: