Garbage in, garbage out.
…
The Administration line on Alberto Gonzales’s resignation is that he made the decision on his own, after weeks of consideration. On Friday, at the end of a two-week vacation in Texas, the Attorney General called President Bush and told him “that he felt it would be in the best interest of the [Justice] department,” if he stepped down, according to a senior Administration official. The President “reluctantly accepted that decision,” the official says, and later asked Gonzales and his wife, Becky, to come down to Crawford, Texas, where Bush has been on vacation. Arriving for an informal lunch with the President and First Lady there on Sunday, Gonzales handed over his resignation in writing and told the President that he’d be able to stay in the job only for another three weeks.
That timing fit with Josh Bolten’s deadline for resignations: Bush’s chief of staff has asked anyone in the Administration who is planning to leave before the end of Bush’s presidency to let him know before Labor Day this year. And the departure also comes conveniently at the tail end of the August doldrums, with Washington still on summer recess and much of the country on vacation. Better to make the move now, the White House figured, than wait for Congress to return and perhaps renew its campaign to oust Gonzales. “You’re not going to make a decision with the tip of a bayonet in your face,” says a former senior official.
Some White House watchers are pointing to another factor in Gonzales’s departure: the resignation earlier this month of Bush’s longtime adviser, Karl Rove. Rove had argued that letting Gonzales go would only make matters worse for Bush in the final months of his presidency. “Karl has concerns about a confirmation process where Democrats will try to exploit unfairly that process,” says the former senior Administration official. But that official and others say Rove’s departure had nothing to do with Bush’s decision to accept Gonzales’ resignation.
-more-
http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1656544,00.html?cnn=yes