"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." Says Robert Novak.

[N]ot many Republican lawmakers would speak up for Gonzales even if they were sure Bush would stick with him. He is the least popular Cabinet member on Capitol Hill, even more disliked than Rumsfeld was. The word most often used by Republicans to describe the management of the Justice Department under Gonzales is "incompetent."...

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?"

Painful.

Loading Guantanamo onto the U.S. Attorneys story, increasing pressure on Gonzales.

Secretary of Defense Gates wanted to move the Guantanamo detainees to the United States, and Condoleezza Rice agreed with him, according to this NYT article, which connects this story to the ongoing controversy over firing several U.S. Attorneys. The link between the two stories is Alberto Gonzales:

Mr. Gates’s arguments were rejected after Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and some other government lawyers expressed strong objections to moving detainees to the United States, a stance that was backed by the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, administration officials said....

[O]ne senior administration official who favors the closing of the facility said the battle might be renewed.

“Let’s see what happens to Gonzales,” that official said, referring to speculation that Mr. Gonzales will be forced to step down, or at least is significantly weakened, because of the political uproar over the dismissal of United States attorneys. “I suspect this one isn’t over yet.”

Details of the internal discussions on Guantánamo were described by senior officials from three departments or agencies of the executive branch, including officials who support moving rapidly to close Guantánamo and those who do not. One official made it clear that he was willing to discuss the internal deliberations in part because of Mr. Gonzales’s current political weakness. The senior officials discussed the issue on ground rules of anonymity because it entailed confidential conversations.

So someone has made the decision to ramp up the pressure on Gonzales by leaking these private deliberations. Someone sees an opportunity to take down Gonzales and is going for it.

Here's the reason not to move the detainees to the United States:

Some administration lawyers are deeply reluctant to move terrorism suspects to American soil because it could increase their constitutional and statutory rights — and invite an explosion of civil litigation. Guantánamo was chosen because it was an American military facility but not on American soil.

I wonder why this isn't persuasive to Gates and Rice. But since this wasn't a public debate, everyone who participated in it is disserved. One person has decided to leak on his terms, with his slant on the subject.

About that U.S. Attorneys matter.

I think David Brooks -- TimesSelect link -- has about the right take on it:

When you look at the prosecutors who were fired by the Bush administration, you see some who were fired for proper political reasons and some who were fired for improper ones. Carol Lam seems to have been properly let go because she did not share the president’s priorities on illegal immigration cases. David Iglesias seems to have been improperly let go because he offended some members of the president’s party.

But what’s striking in reading through the Justice Department e-mail messages is that senior people in that agency seem never to have thought about the proper role of politics in their decision-making. They reacted like chickens with their heads cut off when this scandal broke because they could not articulate the differences between a proper political firing and an improper one.

Moreover, they had no coherent sense of honor. Alberto Gonzales apparently never communicated a code of conduct to guide them as they wrestled with various political pressures. That’s a grievous failure of leadership.

The bad behavior has not stopped there. The Democrats, apparently out of legislative ideas after only 11 weeks in the majority, have gone into full scandal mode, professing to be shocked because politics played a role in prosecutorial priorities. They and those on their media food chain have made wild accusations far in advance of the evidence, producing enough cacophonous demagoguery to make rational discussion nearly impossible.

I'm sick of all of them.

"In partisan Republican circles, the pursuit of voter fraud is code for suppressing the votes of minorities and poor people."

An editorial in today's NYT:

In its fumbling attempts to explain the purge of United States attorneys, the Bush administration has argued that the fired prosecutors were not aggressive enough about addressing voter fraud. It is a phony argument; there is no evidence that any of them ignored real instances of voter fraud. But more than that, it is a window on what may be a major reason for some of the firings.

In partisan Republican circles, the pursuit of voter fraud is code for suppressing the votes of minorities and poor people. By resisting pressure to crack down on “fraud,” the fired United States attorneys actually appear to have been standing up for the integrity of the election system....

There is no evidence of rampant voter fraud in this country. Rather, Republicans under Mr. Bush have used such allegations as an excuse to suppress the votes of Democratic-leaning groups....

These are very harsh charges. I want to know more. If there really is "no evidence of rampant voter fraud in this country," is there some evidence of something less that "rampant" fraud that deserved investigation? Should we simply equate concern about voter fraud with Republican politics and, further, link that to hostility to the poor and minorities. This is a dramatic, bulky, bulgy packaging of issues!

And don't forget: Rove is at "the epicenter of the imbroglio"! So, I see: there's a big aura of suspiciousness to all of this. All I'm saying is, let's unpack the parts and try to understand what happened.

ADDED: I think the evidence of voter fraud here in Wisconsin is quite convincing.

"I haven't written about the U.S. Attorney's story because I'm having a hard time figuring out just how big a deal it is."

That -- from Orin Kerr -- resonates with me:

Parts of it are obviously very troubling: I was very disturbed to learn of the Domenici calls, for example...

At the same time, several parts of the story seem overblown. U.S. Attorneys are political appointees who serve at the pleasure of the President, and the press seems to overlook that in a lot of its reporting....

So in the end I don't quite know where I come out based on what we know. Without knowing where I come out, I don't feel I have much helpful to add. I realize that this may mean I am missing a big story.

The sheer intensity of the effort to make this the big story of the week is bringing out the resistance in me.