Today’s Interesting News

Pleading the Fifth

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ senior counsel and White House liaison Monica Goodling has announced her intention to invoke her Fifth Admendment right against self incrimination regarding any questions she may be asked by the Senate Judiciary Committee investigating the firings of federal prosecutors.

But wait, there’s more. Stephen D has a very intriguing post up over at the Booman Tribune detailing why Ms. Goodling may not have the right to invoke the fifth in this circumstance. Her reasons for invoking it just don’t qualify.

Novak

I can’t stand the idea of linking to this ghoul, but what he wrote in his column today stunned me.

Republican leaders in Congress, who asked not to be quoted by name, predicted early last week that Gonzales would fall because the Justice Department botched the firing of eight U.S. attorneys. By week’s end, they stipulated that the president would not sack his longtime aide and that Gonzales would leave only on his own initiative. But there was still an ominous lack of congressional support for the attorney general.

“Gonzales never has developed a base of support for himself up here,” a House Republican leader told me. But this is less a Gonzales problem than a Bush problem. With nearly two years remaining in his presidency, George W. Bush is alone. In half a century, I have not seen a president so isolated from his own party in Congress — not Jimmy Carter, not even Richard Nixon as he faced impeachment.

Republicans in Congress do not trust their president to protect them. That alone is sufficient reason to withhold statements of support for Gonzales, because such a gesture could be quickly followed by his resignation under pressure. Rep. Adam Putnam (Fla.), the highly regarded young chairman of the House Republican Conference, praised Donald Rumsfeld in November only to see him sacked shortly thereafter.

[...]

The saving grace that some Republicans find in the dispute over U.S. attorneys is that, at least temporarily, it draws attention away from debate over an unpopular war. But the overriding feeling in the Republican cloakroom is that the Justice Department and the White House could not have been more inept in dealing with the president’s unquestioned right to appoint — and replace — federal prosecutors.

The I-word (incompetence) is also used by Republicans in describing the Bush administration generally. Several of them I talked to cited a trifecta of incompetence: the Walter Reed hospital scandal, the FBI’s misuse of the USA Patriot Act and the U.S. attorneys firing fiasco. “We always have claimed that we were the party of better management,” one House leader told me. “How can we claim that anymore?”

This is Robert Novak reporting this. This is not some lefty-dirty-f_cking-hippie-blogger, it’s the freakin’ town crier. This is the guy they go to to get stuff out there that they want out there. If Novak is writing this then the Gonzo and Rove and all of the other little Loyal Bushies can bend over and kiss their narrow asses goodbye. Bush’s may be gone unexpectedly as well if he keeps up his arrogant, petulant, whiney-ass-titty-baby routine.

Just Ask Chuck Hegel (h/t C&L)

STEPHANOPOULOS: It is clear to me that you are angry about this, and you also gave an interview to Esquire magazine this month, the April edition of Esquire magazine, where you were quoted as saying, “The president says, ‘I don’t care.’ He’s not accountable anymore. He’s not accountable anymore, which isn’t totally true. You can impeach him. And before this is over, you might see calls for his impeachment.”

HAGEL: Well, any president who says, I don’t care, or I will not respond to what the people of this country are saying about Iraq or anything else, or I don’t care what the Congress does, I am going to proceed — if a president really believes that, then there are — what I was pointing out, there are ways to deal with that. This is not a monarchy.

Ladies and gentlemen, the “I” word (the real one) is being spoken…by Republicans. How long will it be before we see Hagel, and Specter, and maybe Lindsay Graham, Orrin Hatch, John Warner and Gordon Smith and Collins & Snowe, maybe 10 or 12 others, a little group like that, strolling down to the White House to have a little chat with Georgie-Peorgie, just like they did with Tricky Dick. Maybe they’ll have it in mind to let Commander Codpiece know that they will not allow him to take down their party and that they are asking him for his resignation; for performance reasons.

Peace In Northern Ireland?

This is quite something:

After years of hostility and recriminations, the leaders of Northern Ireland’s dominant rival groups, Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein and the Protestant leader, the Rev. Ian Paisley, held their first face-to-face talks on Monday and agreed to form a joint administration for the province on May 8.

The deal came on the day Britain and Ireland had set as the deadline for restoring Northern Ireland’s local government, more than four years after it was suspended in October 2002 in a dispute over espionage activities by the Irish Republican Army.

“The word historic has to be used,” said Brian Feeney, a historian at St. Mary’s University College in Belfast. “It was the only way it was ever going to work. The two leaders of the two traditions had to do the deal.”

It’s historical.