Hurricane Alberto
I tuned into Bill O'Really's talking points last night (06 Jan), and as usual they got shaking my head and grunting expletives at the TV:

Today across the country, the left-wing media in a seemingly coordinated effort, attacked the nomination of Alberto Gonzales (search) to be the new attorney general. "The New York Times" ran a front-page torture story and two anti- Gonzales op-eds. "The Washington Post" ran a front page torture story and an anti-Gonzales editorial. "The Los Angeles Times" ran a torture story and an anti-Gonzales editorial. "The Boston Globe" ran a torture story, as did "The Chicago Tribune."

In addition, the far left Web sites took out ads that blamed Abu Ghraib (search), among other things, on Mr. Gonzales. All of this happened on a single day. Can you say coordinated attacks?

Interesting how there seems to be this concerted effort to try to smear Mr. Gonzales on one day. I can't imagine the Right doing any such thing. But really, what does O'Really expect--it's the major news article of the day, so of course it's going to be on front pages and editorial pages. In the end, though, the Democrats rolled over:

Democratic Sen. Joe Biden sat quietly, listening to it all. On another day, in another political reality, he might have been watching a presidential nominee self-destruct. The man who would be attorney general was coming off as evasive, as ill-prepared, as unwilling to accept responsibility for anything that happened on his watch as George W. Bush's White House counsel. But when Biden finally had his chance to put a question to Gonzales, he delivered this clear message instead: "You're going to be confirmed."

And they missed the one question that would have gone a long way to answering the crux of Gonzales' character:

... (F)or most of Thursday's nearly nine-hour hearing the committee's Democrats wanted an answer to just one question: Does Gonzales think the president has the power to authorize torture by immunizing American personnel from prosecution for it?

During the hearing, Leahy called this idea, which comes from the August 2002 document dubbed the "Bybee memo," "the commander-in-chief override." And by hearing's end it was clear that Gonzales believed in it. (Otherwise, why not simply answer, "No"?) Early in the day, Gonzales professed the requisite faith that America was "a nation of laws and not of men," but his opinion of the president's ability—however limited—to authorize individuals to engage in criminal acts suggests the opposite. This is a government of good men, Gonzales implicitly assured the senators, so there's no need to worry about legal hypotheticals like whether torture is always verboten. Don't worry, because we don't do it. It's a strange argument from a conservative: We're the government. Trust us.
[...]
Finally, Harold Hongju Koh, a Yale professor of international law (and dean of the Yale Law School), solves the riddle—about the "commander-in-chief override" not the mysterious nanny—by proposing a simple question for Gonzales. He tells the Judiciary Committee, "A simple question you could have asked today was, 'Is the anti-torture statute constitutional?" If Gonzales answers yes, then he does not believe the president can override the statute. Mystery solved. Only one problem with this professorial inquiry: By the time Koh testified, Gonzales was already gone.

The Washington Post also gets into this line of discussion:

At the Senate Judiciary Committee's hearing on his nomination to be attorney general, Mr. Gonzales repeatedly was offered the chance to repudiate a legal judgment that the president is empowered to order torture in violation of U.S. law and immunize torturers from punishment. He declined to do so. He was invited to reject a 2002 ruling made under his direction that the infliction of pain short of serious physical injury, organ failure or death did not constitute torture. He answered: "I don't have a disagreement with the conclusions then reached." Nor did he condemn torture techniques, such as simulated drowning, that were discussed and approved during meetings in his office. "It is not my job," he said, to decide if they were proper. He was prompted to reflect on whether departing from the Geneva Conventions had been a mistake, in light of the shocking human rights abuses that have since been reported in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Guantanamo Bay prison and that continue even now. Mr. Gonzales demurred. The error, he answered, was not of administration policy but of "a failure of training and oversight."