Welcome to Gonzales Watch - Blawging the Ex-Attorney General

The American Bar Association bestowed Alberto Gonzales with one its biggest honors: it named him Lawyer of the Year for 2007.

What was the rationale of America’s most-respected organization for lawyers? Gonzales was “[t]he most talked-about attorney this past year by a mile…[he] rose from being the grandson of illegal immigrants to the first Hispan­ic attorney general of the United States.”

According to Edward Adams, the ABA’s Journal’s editor and publisher, choosing Gonzales wasn’t about a popularity contest. “It’s about who has had the most effect in the world of lawyers this year.”

Only in America! Gonzales’s convenient memory lapses of what led to his politically-charged firings of career U.S. Attorneys — telling Congress “I don’t recall” roughly 70 times in one hearing — is unlikely to ever be forgotten.

Nor will Gonzales’s role as White House Counsel in when he wrote a January 25, 2002 memo to Pres. Bush decrying the Geneva Convention as “quaint”, rendering “many of its provisions obsolete.”

Very strange, indeed.