The American Dream

On Feb. 2, Sen. John Kyl, R-Ariz., announced his support for Alberto Gonzales' nomination as attorney general of the United States. "It would be hard to find a more compelling example of the American Dream than Alberto Gonzales," Kyl said, "the son of migrant workers who grew up with seven siblings in a two-bedroom house in the town of Humble, Texas, and was the first person in his family to go to college."

With this sentiment, Kyl echoes Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, who wrote a spirited defense of Gonzales for The Washington Times back on Jan. 6. "The nomination of Judge Alberto Gonzales to serve as our nation's 80th attorney general - and our first of Hispanic descent - is the American Dream come true." (Sound familiar?) "Yet," Cornyn continues, "his nomination faces noisy, if ultimately futile and unjustified, opposition."

Futile, perhaps. But unjustified?

Alberto Gonzales may well embody the American Dream. But that attribute alone doesn't qualify him to protect the dream for the rest of us. To imply as much is tantamount to arguing that Abraham Lincoln was a great president not because he steered our country through the Civil War and issued the Emancipation Proclamation but because he grew up in a log cabin, or that George Washington's true greatness lay in his refusal to lie about chopping down a cherry tree.

These biographical tidbits about our leaders, compelling as they may be, do not comprise the sum of these great men's characters. They are the pieces of the story that we give to children, who are not yet ready to digest the real meat of what Lincoln and Washington did for their country.

Gonzales is, at best, "a cipher," which is how Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., described him. At worst, he is a key architect of the edifice in which prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo experienced unspeakable suffering, the images of which rightly damaged the reputation of the U.S. military around the world.

When asked about his role in the Bush administration's new definition of torture, its denial of Geneva Convention protections to prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and its decision to declare U.S. citizens "enemy combatants" and incarcerate them without benefit of access to legal counsel, Gonzales repeatedly told the Senate Judiciary Committee: "I do not recall" and "I do not have a specific recollection." Such evasion reinforces the impression that Gonzales is not the right man for the job.

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., summed it up best. On Jan. 26, he told reporters that he liked Gonzales and viewed him as "a genuinely good man," but that he thought Gonzales was too compromised to place in charge of the Justice Department. "It's hard to be a straight shooter when you're a blind loyalist," Schumer said.

Home