That’s the last line in the Washington Post article about Alberto Gonzales’ stunning performance in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday. It is a performance certain to be all over YouTube, but who cares, really? The New York Times didn’t cover the story on the front page of its web site, and one has to search a bit to find the story in the Washington Post. Frankly, I’m thinking the performance of the Attorney General was so embarrassing that those papers didn’t want to appear to be piling on. They don’t want to appear to be making fun of someone who is handicapped, perhaps, virtually unable to distinguish between the truth and lies.

Several came close to calling Gonzales an outright liar. Perhaps most important of those people was Senator Rockefeller, who demolished Gonzales’ whiney explanation about why he tried to coerce John Ashcroft in his hospital bed:

Mr. Gonzales, in an acrimonious hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, said that hours before the hospital confrontation, the White House had summoned Congressional leaders to an emergency meeting to discuss ways to head off a revolt at the Justice Department against the security agency program.

Mr. Gonzales said that he and Andrew H. Card Jr., then White House chief of staff, had tried to obtain Mr. Ashcroft’s approval as a last resort, after the lawmakers rejected emergency legislation but recommended that the program should continue despite the Justice Department’s opposition. Mr. Gonzales, who was then White House counsel, said he felt compelled to enlist Mr. Ashcroft’s help to obtain the reauthorization.

“Obviously, there was concern about General Ashcroft’s condition, and we would not have sought, nor did we intend to get any approval from General Ashcroft if in fact he wasn’t fully competent to make that decision,” Mr. Gonzales testified.

But some Congressional Democrats disputed Mr. Gonzales’s account of the White House meeting, and Justice Department aides acknowledged in a background briefing for reporters after the hearing that his “linguistic parsing” had caused confusion.

Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, who attended the 2004 meeting as the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, called Mr. Gonzales’s account “untruthful.” Mr. Rockefeller said he believed Mr. Gonzales was deliberately misleading Congress about the showdown over the N.S.A. program inside the Bush administration.

Tom Daschle was also at that meeting:

Daschle said in a statement that he could not recall the meeting and is “quite certain that at no time did we encourage the AG or anyone else to take such actions.” He added: “This appears to be another attempt to rewrite history.”

No Republican who was at that meeting has stepped forward to back up Mr. Gonzales, so we’re left with the conclusion that Gonzo lied, baldly and openly, in front of the Judiciary Committee yesterday. Still, I would expect the newspapers to repect him. It is part of their code to write of leaders with respect within news stories, even while their editorials may excoriate those same leaders. But that veneer of politeness is cracking at both the Washington Post and the New York Times.

It has become apparent that the man in charge of Justice in this country doesn’t know right from wrong. Indeed, it has become apparent that there is very little respect left for Mr. Gonzales outside the Oval office. Certainly there was no respect in the Judiciary Committee yesterday, but the surprising thing to me is the lack of respect in the newspaper coverage. Gonzles is described as “stunned” in the New York Times, where they come close to implying that Gonzales isn’t equipped to keep his own story straight. The post uses Gonzales’ word “lucid,” the word Gonzales used to describe Ashcroft in the hospital room confrontation, but I get the sense that the word is quoted as a contrast to Gonzales’ own testimony, to imply that Gonzales was anything but “lucid” yesterday. I get the sense from some of these reports that Congress is up in arms about lies told by Gonzles, and there are reports about those lies in other parts of the WaPo yesterday, but I also get the sense that the newspapers are treating the Attorney General with the pitying sympathy one would use towards a mental patient.

This isn’t good. The articles aren’t blasting off the front page, but hidden inside the papers, and descriptions of Mr. Gonzales’ performance focus on his inabilites rather than on his outright deceptions. It’s artful, and one wonders if the tone of the coverage is purposeful. No, I’m not for thinking the WaPo and the NYTimes got together and plotted their coverage. I eschew tin foil. I’m thinking at this point that it is natural for all of us to assume Mr. Gonzales is simply not up to telling the truth, and certainly in over his head at Justice. The WaPo and NYTimes coverage is somewhat sympathetic because they are in fact liberal and biased, and nobody who is truly liberal can continue to blast a man who suffers from such a debilitating disability.

In other news, the International Liars Association is not so kind to Mr. Gonzales. He has been expelled from membership.