NINE DOWN

The resignation of Alberto Gonzales as US Attorney-General brings to nine the number of former Texas associates of Mr Bush who have been appointed to important Washington posts but failed to stay the course. The best–known, of course, was Karl Rove (known as Mr Bush's brain) who departed a couple of weeks ago and left Mr Gonzales in an extremely isolated position. His resignation has been a foregone conclusion for several months as Congress and the media probed his role in the dismissal of several independent-minded Federal prosecutors but it was his recent abysmal self-contradicting defence of the President's wire-tapping programme in front of a Congressional committee that probably sealed his fate. Gonzales was White House legal counsel during Mr Bush's first term and in 2002 was responsible for drafting the infamous memo which described parts of the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war as “obsolete” and “quaint”. Even before he became Attorney–General he seemed to take the view that during and after military operations a President's powers should not be constrained by legal considerations; it was loyalty of a kind, which Mr Bush returned, but it was not what was required from an administration's principal legal adviser.