The Week That Was & What a Week It Was

NEWARK, Delaware -- Even though there still is a chill in the air hereabouts, I dug into the back of my clothes closet this morning while getting dressed for work and pulled out a T-shirt with this image on it. Wearing this particular shirt seemed appropriate given the week we've just been through. Besides which, my boss is out of town.

The week began, of course, with the horrific massacre of 32 students at Virginia Tech University at the hands of a lunatic poster boy for gun control. That was followed in short order by the death and dismemberment of over 200 people in the heart of Baghdad in a series of insurgent car bombings that further put the lie to the notion that the last-gasp surge strategy was working. And then the partial-birth abortion ruling by a Supreme Court majority that blathered about the sanctity of life at a time when the man in the Oval Office has been so utterly unconcerned about the lives of American soldiers, Iraqi civilians and hurricane survivors, among many others.

But then the impossible happpened. Something that was so comically Orwellian that I briefly forgot about the triad of tragedies.

That, of course, was the long-awaited appearance of Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

There have been many watershed events in the six-plus years since that smirking frat boy from the Texas oil patch arrived in Washington, none of them good. But it is not being hyperbolic to say that we can look back on Thursday, April 19, 2007, as the day the wheels finally came completely off the Bush administration's wagon.

Up on Capitol Hill, Gonzalez parsed, obfuscated and outright lied his way through hours of grilling over the latest of the serial scandals in the Age of Bush -- the rank politicalization of the Department of Justice stage managed by the shadow attorney general -- White House consigliere Karl Rove.

The White House response to the testimony of a man who is far less competent than the U.S. attorneys that he fired was that "President Bush was pleased with the Attorney General’s testimony today. After hours of testimony in which he answered all of the Senators’ questions and provided thousands of pages of documents, he again showed that nothing improper occurred. . . . The Attorney General has the full confidence of the President, and he appreciates the work he is doing at the Department of Justice to help keep our citizens safe from terrorists, our children safe from predators, our government safe from corruption, and our streets free from gang violence."

Have a good weekend, folks. Dog only knows what next week will bring.