Alberto Gonzales and the race card

My New VDARE column on Alberto Gonzales is up. An excerpt:

The likelihood of Alberto Gonzales being confirmed as Attorney General stems in part from the Bush administration's readiness to play the Johnnie Cochran-style race card. Republicans have increasingly taken to slandering as racist anybody who criticizes a minority Republican. And, of course, Gonzales would indeed be "the first Hispanic" etc. etc.

Yet, what we haven't heard is much evidence that Hispanics particularly want to be symbolized by a national embarrassment like Gonzales.

Would you?

The best you can say for Gonzales is that he's a tool. He's a classic minion whose career over the last decade has consisted of concocting legal rationalizations for whatever George W. Bush wants to do.

What Bush wants to do is why VDARE.COM has its own questions for Gonzales—which the Senate appears unlikely to ask. Gonzales has been an enforcer in Bush’s campaign to flood the country with immigrants, legal and illegal, and re-engineer it with racial quotas.

Gonzales is so pro-illegal immigration that in his Senate testimony last week he used what I've called the "ultimate euphemism"—that illegal aliens are "lawful citizens."

That's not a slip of the tongue. Gonzales has a relentless prejudice in favor of authoritarian lawlessness, which is why the President wants to make him the nation's chief law enforcement officer...

And don’t believe the NRO crowd that only anti-American liberal wimps worry about little things like torture and tearing up the Geneva conventions. FBI G-men and military officers are also aghast at what Gonzales has done. Twelve high-ranking retired admirals and generals, including former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff John Shalikashvili, have criticized Gonzales in an almost-unprecedented open letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

After World War I, Winston Churchill forlornly reflected:

"When all was over, torture and cannibalism were the only two expedients that the civilized, scientific, Christian States had been able to deny themselves: and these were of doubtful utility."

I never thought I'd be nostalgic for the First World War. But the rapidity with which the Bush Administration, egged on by Gonzales, turned during their dramatically less desperate wars to torturing Afghan and Iraqi prisoners (70-90 percent of whom were arrested by mistake) makes the Great War look like a moral Golden Age. [More...]

More revealing Gonzales facts: The Washington Post reports:

Gonzales paints himself as a largely apolitical lawyer, who began leaning toward the GOP only after joining the prestigious Houston firm of Vinson & Elkins. He says he votes for the person, not the party, adding that he would have supported George W. Bush even if he had been a Democrat.

Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com