Q. Who runs the Justice Department? A. Karl Rove

John Farmer has a good column on the US Attorney purges in today's Newark Star Ledger. His conclusion: Gonzales was just taking orders from Rove.

… You'll remember he [Alberto Gonzales] first claimed he had only a minor role in the beheadings. He knew little about them or even about the reasons the eight were canned. He had taken the recommendations of subordinates. He hadn't a clue what was going on, and therefore was clean as a hound's tooth.

Be honest, now: Who'd believe that line of horse hockey? The heat was on, and Gonzales was ducking responsibility. Members of both parties resolved to call him before the Senate and drag the truth out of him.

What they got left senators on both sides of the aisle still searching for the truth.

… The man was a virtual amnesia victim.

… Leahy and Specter swore they'd get to "the bottom" of this. It shouldn't be hard: Actually, the truth is right before their eyes.

Remember when Gonzales first said he didn't know diddly about the firings and no one believed him? Well, that's when he was telling the truth. He was fibbing when he tried take the heat before the committee. He didn't know about the firings because no one told him. He was irrelevant, a dummy. The decision was made elsewhere.

But look at the fix that put Gonzales in. He couldn't tell the Senate outright that he was in the dark, because that would have raised the $64,000 question, the one the White House dreaded: "If you didn't fire them, who did?"

Which brings us to Karl (The Consigliere) Rove.

Rove's DNA is all over both the appointment of U.S. attorneys and now their political firings. He had the U.S. attorney in Arkansas sacked to make room for a crony. He assured Allen Weh, chairman of the New Mexico GOP, who complained about the delay in firing U.S. Attorney David Iglesias, that Iglesias "was gone."

And Rove was instrumental in getting the U.S. attorney's post in New Jersey for a fundraiser with no criminal trial experience, Chris Christie, who reciprocated by launching an investigation into Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez in the middle of a tough election campaign. (Christie's debt to Rove is presumably marked paid-in-full.)

This is dirty pool even by today's standards. But it's totally in keeping with Rove's career and character.

As a 19-year-old, he broke into the offices of a Democratic candidate for state treasurer in Illinois, stole campaign stationery and printed invitations to the candidate's office promising "free food, free beer, girls and a good time."

He was a prodigy of Donald Segretti, the "dirty tricks" guru of the Nixon 1972 campaign, who wound up in prison. Later, Rove latched onto the late Lee Atwater, the elder Bush's attack dog consultant, and wound up staging a seminar for young Republicans on using dirty tricks.

Rove's masterpiece of malevolence was his demonization of John McCain, a genuine hero, in the 2000 Republican presidential primary in South Carolina. Rove's minions painted McCain, who was tortured, as an informer while prisoner in Hanoi, and depicted McCain's adopted Vietnamese daughter as the product of an illicit liaison with a black woman. Rove, it should be noted, never spent a day in the armed services or saw a shot fired in anger, even by Dick Cheney.

And what about Gonzales? He's no dummy. He's a bright and talented man and a great American story, up from poverty to Harvard and the pinnacle of the justice system. Which makes him worse than a dummy. He's been willing to sacrifice all that to act the role of a dummy, a poster boy for incompetence, to serve an undeserving administration and an incompetent president.