Inside, outside, good guy, bad guy

White House photo by Chris Greenberg
President George W. Bush and Mrs. Laura Bush sit with U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and his wife, Rebecca, during a visit Sunday, Aug. 26, 2007, at the Bush ranch in Crawford, Texas.

Well, you can't say it's been a boring summer here in Our Nation's Capital, mes amis. New York may be empty while tout le monde vacays in the Hamptons, and the population of D.C. maybe reduced to the people who actually live here, but the White House keeps churnin' out the hits: the Libby pardon, the Rove resignation and, now, Fredo's farewell.

Over at his dashing, redesigned blog, the Media Consortium's Brian Beutler examines the irrelevance of the label "Washington insider" when assessing a bureaucrat's virtues. Alberto Gonzales, of course, was a Washington outsider, but too much of a parent-pleasing, White House insider to do his job properly.

Your blogstress, however, cautions her devotees not to fall for yet another often false dichotomy, the one that goes like this: He who contradicts the bad guy is a good guy.

It would have been hard not to take joy in the contradiction of Gonzales's testimony on the NSA warrantless wiretapping crimes of the Bush administration by FBI Director Robert Mueller. Mueller, you'll recall, remembered quite clearly Gonzales's attempt to get a feeble, befuddled John Ashcroft to sign off on the program from his hospital bed. Merci beaucoup, Bob.

But Bob ain't quite done. As Beutler reports, Mueller's been busy with a domestic spy program of his own. And maybe even a little voter suppression.