Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has a lot to worry about. His former chief of staff testified that Gonzales played a part in firing federal prosecutors because they leaned too hard on Republicans and weren't sufficiently supportive of President George W. Bush.
We thought we lived in a democracy, not a kingdom where you have to lick the boots of the emperor to keep your job. But that's another matter entirely. While all this scandal was swirling around him, Gonzales decided to visit Boston yesterday to talk about something completely unrelated to firing people for doing their jobs too well.
The Globe tried to get something out of Gonzales about the prosecutor-firing scandal, but he was more interested in "educating teenage girls about online dangers." Joined by "about a dozen district attorneys, FBI agents, and postal officials," Gonzales watched public service announcements about pedophiles.
We think protecting young people from online predators is extremely important, but it seems to us that Gonzales was engaging in a classic bipartisan political strategy of bailing for a new city and focusing on children in peril to dodge some bigger questions. And, lucky us, he chose Boston to try out this strategy.
WCVB's Pam Cross knew what was what, saying, "it was probably the boost the attorney general wanted - a room full of friendly faces in Boston and no questions about how he's running the justice department in Washington DC." Afterward, Gonzales tried out that folksy "here's the Texas truth, y'all" stuff of which the Bush Administration is so fond and said, "I know that the motivations for the decisions I made were not based on improper reasons."
Well, that must be why he left DC and tried to talk about pedophiles in Boston! We feel so much better about the honesty of the Justice Department now!
Alberto Gonzales workin' that happy face on the DOJ website.
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