Taking look at Alberto Gonzales's -- how shall we say it? -- steadfastness, Andrew Cohen in his earlier Washington Post entry Rough Justice - The Case Against Alberto Gonzales, notes this:

He has run true to form over the past two years and has diverted hardly at all from his long history of dogged obedience to the President, which often has come at the cost of institutional independence and adherence to the rule of law.

But today, the evasiveness, the memory lapses, the obfuscation, prevarication, and downright lying were the focus of today's (7-24-07) Bench Conference entry, where Cohen shares the exchange between Schumer and Gonzales from Tuesday's hearing:

GONZALES: I don't know. But I told the spokesperson to go back and clarify my statement...

SCHUMER: Well, wait a minute, sir. Sir, with all due respect -- and if I could have some order here, Mr. Chairman -- in all due respect, you're just saying, "Well, it was clarified with the reporter," and you don't even know what he said. You don't even know what the clarification is. Sir, how can you say that you should stay on as attorney general when we go through exercise like this, where you're bobbing and weaving and ducking to avoid admitting that you deceived the committee? And now you don't even know. I'll give you another chance: You're hanging your hat on the fact that you clarified the statement two days later. You're now telling us that is was a spokesperson who did it. What did that spokesperson say? Tell me now, how do you clarify this?

GONZALES: I don't know, but I'll find out and get back to you.

But before we all start jumping up and down with glee over the end days of Alberto, consider who might replace him. Way way way back in March of this year, McClatchy Washington Bureau published the short list of possible replacements. Lambert and the ePluribus Media research crew pulled together some background data on five of them in Lambert's Meet the new boss? Same as the old boss ...

1. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff
2. SEC Chairman Chris Cox
3. White House anti-terrorism advisor Francis Fragos Townsend
4. former Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson
5. former Solicitor General Theodore Olsen

Lambert closes his overview of these five with the then prescient observation:

Even with all of the speculation and calls for resignation or the ouster of Attorney General Gonzales, this is unlikely to be resolved in the short term. Since the White House and Congress have been squaring off on every issue - from Iraq to the US Attorney firings to Executive Privilege claims and many other matters, and given the history between Gonzales and President Bush, we may not see Gonzales resign or be fired unless he is facing impeachment and conviction. However, in light of the fact that a number of people are being mentioned as future candidates for Attorney General, it behooves us to find out a bit more about these potential candidates.

The time may be at hand... according to the CNN/Time's report, Senator Rockefeller said: "Once again he [Gonzales]'s making up something to protect himself and creating situations that never happened ...based on what I know about it, I'd have to say" Gonzales has committed perjury."

Further reading from from the ePluribus Media Community and on the ePluribus Media Journal