Gonzales to Leahy: "And your mother."

Slate's Chris Suellentrop has, I think, the best report on the strange Kabuki dance that was yesterday's Gonzales hearings.

Remember what Dick Cheney said to Sen. Patrick Leahy this past June on the Senate floor? Think of Alberto Gonzales' testimony Thursday before the Senate Judiciary Committee, where Leahy is the ranking Democrat, as the Bush administration's logical follow-up: "And your mother."

By late afternoon, Leahy had become so frustrated with Gonzales' refusal to give clear answers to questions from him and other Democrats that he held aloft a bulky file that he said was filled with unanswered letters and queries addressed to Gonzales, President Bush's nominee for attorney general. "If he's confirmed, I'm sure he'll feel that he never has any duty to answer them," Leahy said. Leahy's file may have been bursting with questions, but for most of Thursday's nearly nine-hour hearing the committee's Democrats wanted an answer to just one question: Does Gonzales think the president has the power to authorize torture by immunizing American personnel from prosecution for it?

And Gonzales, near as I could tell, had one answer: "That's a hypothetical that I can't answer because it's hypothetical, and besides, the preznit's a good man who doesn't believe in torture, so even if I wrote that he does have that authority, it doesn't matter because he is too good a man to do stuff like that."

But here's my favorite moment from the hearings:

Durbin tries to get Gonzales to clarify. Can U.S. personnel, under any circumstances, engage in torture? Gonzales still can't muster a definitive "no." "I don't believe so, but I'd want to get back to you on that," he says. "There are a number of laws that prohibit that."

I'm just guessing, here, but I don't expect Gonzales will get back to Durbin on that. Ever.

And here's the part where Cheney and Rove, watching on TV up the street, must have broken out into their best knowing smirks:

With the consent of the Senate, I will no longer represent only the White House. I will represent the United States of America and its people. I understand the differences between the two roles.

He's kidding, right?

For more on this, Publius looks at what the torture memo tells us about Gonzales. And Wolcott has a good post on what torture says about Bush.