Alberto Gonzales: Live by the not very plausible deniability, die by the arguably slightly more plausible deniability

Ah, time, how you do fly. It seems like only yesterday that I was writing about how the new Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, had twisted himself into a tasty pretzel of nonsensical post-hoc justification to explain why he had dissed Priscilla Owen when they were on the Texas Supreme Court together.

(Review: He said that when he labelled her dissenting opinion "judicial activism" for essentially imposing a Just Make The Dumb Slut Have the Kid Already rule in abortion judicial-bypass cases, he wasn't saying she was an judicial activist, but that if he had written the same thing it would be activism for him. For reals, read it and weep.)

Flash-forward today, when that same kind of preposterous non-explanation is a maybe-firing offense! Gonzales' explanation for the role he was playing while his chief of staff masterminded the firings of a bunch of U.S. Attorneys was a classic:

"I was not involved in seeing any memos, was not involved in any discussions about what was going on . . . That's basically what I knew as the attorney general."

Really, I think the first one was worse.

Gonzales: "It's not you, it's me"

One of President Bush's judicial nominees, Priscilla Owen, has the distinction of having been called a "judicial activist" by none other than the current Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, when they served together on the Texas Supreme Court. In a case in which a minor sought judicial permission to get an abortion without telling her parents, Owen dissented to write that pregnant teenage girls should essentially have to prove they are experts in philosophy, medicine, and comparative religion before getting a judge's permission to terminate their pregnancies. (The dumb girls, apparently, should go ahead and become parents.) Gonzales wrote a concurrence arguing that this would "create hurdles that simply are not to be found in the words of the statute" and would constitute "judicial activism."

Now that President Bush has nominated Owen for a promotion, however, Gonzales is twisting himself into a pretzel to explain away his earlier statement. A press release by the Committee for Justice cites at length from Gonzales' testimony during his confirmation hearing to become A.G. this fall. In it, he says that when he called Owen an activist, he was actually talking about himself. What? Yes, that's right, he was talking about himself because he felt that if he had ruled the way Owen did, that would have been activism for him--but if she really felt that way, then it was not activism for her. It's all very creative and postmodern, but it's not any more convincing or reassuring than "It's not you, it's me" in its normal "I'm dumping you" context. Here, its meaning is more "I'm dumping all credibility."