The Real Gonzales Damage: gwb43.com

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The White House said Friday it believes embattled Attorney General Alberto Gonzales can survive the uproar over the firing of eight federal prosecutors, a day after his one-time chief of staff undercut Gonzales' account of the firings.

Isn't that a heartwarming thing to read? Not "we're behind him a thousand percent," but "we think he can survive." Can we manage the expectations any lower? Next up, I suppose, is "we believe the AG's battles are in their last throes," and then finally "We believe the his mission is accomplished."

The Watergate analogy is now irresistable. Maybe six months ago I spent an afternoon at the Nixon Archives listening to some of the White House tapes. (I was doing some research on the 1971 opening of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. But that's for another diary.) Listening to only a few conversations demonstrated just how rich a source of information these tapes were, and why Nixon fought with everything he had to keep them out of the hands of Congress.

I'm just barely old enough to remember the day when a dude named Butterfield, giving testimony, unveiled the existence of the White House taping system. ("Amazing," I remember reading someone having written, "he even bugged himself.") The tapes weren't a smoking gun; they were an entire arsenal of guns, each of the smoking. That's why you can count the number of days between the Supreme Court's unanimous ruling against Nixon's claim of executive privilege and Nixon's departure on one set of fingers and toes.

The last couple of days have reminded me of that, with the revelation of the use of extraneous mail servers for White House business.  Maybe it's just Nixon-nostalgia kicking in, but I have a feeling that the part of the whole Go-Go-Gonzales vortex that's going to end up having the hardest, most destructive impact on the remaining lameduckery of George Bush is going to be the two simple names, "gwb43.com" and "rnc.com."

The House and Senate should do everything in their power to get access to White House mails deliberately sent using non-governmental mail servers in an attempt to avoid disclosure. The fact that the servers are non-governmental can easily be construed as a waiver of executive privilege.

And that will be the end not only of the Bush administration, but any possibility that Bush will ever be able to rise above a historical reputation as another member of the Nixon league.