Gonzales just not up to the job

In the wake of Alberto Gonzales resigning as attorney general, there will probably be talk about the need of renaming the Peter Principle to the Alberto Principle.

The idea of the Peter Principle was formulated by Laurence Peter in his 1968 best-seller "The Peter Principle," and is stated this way: "In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence."

The idea is that employees who do a good job are promoted to progressively harder jobs until at some point they are promoted into jobs they are incapable of handling. Thus each employee tends to rise to a "level of incompetence."

Sadly, this seems to have been the case with Alberto Gonzales, who by all accounts is a decent, hard-working, patriotic American who nonetheless did a horrific job as attorney general.

Democrats and Republicans have very different reasons for their dissatisfaction with Gonzales, but they do generally agree that he was incompetent at the job.

Perhaps his worst moments were during his appearances on Capitol Hill. He generally sounded something like the Miss Teen USA contestant who had to answer a question about the world map and the United States even though she apparently had never heard of either.

In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in January, the attorney general averred that "there is no express grant of habeas in the Constitution." You know, the U.S. Constitution, which says in Article 1 that "The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it."

Perhaps the attorney general was making a fine distinction of the difference between a privilege and a right, but you would never know it to listen to him stumbling over his own words.

Later hearings did not provide any opportunity for people to regain confidence in Gonzales' understanding of either the law or his position. An April hearing before the Judiciary Committee gave Gonzales the opportunity to testify 71 times that he could not recall events related to the firing of eight U.S. attorneys the year before. There were many ways he could have handled the situation that would have brought him honor or respect, but instead Gonzales earned guffaws.

Again, we don't think Gonzales was malicious or intentionally misleading of Congress or the American people; we just think he was in over his head. The good news is that he was not given a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court instead of to the transitory job of attorney general.

And now the inevitable transition has come. There are certainly qualified conservatives whom the president might wisely appoint to serve capably until the end of the president's term. If President Bush has learned his lesson, he will not just appoint an old friend he trusts, but someone who is capable of doing the job.