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Ever since Alberto “Buttercheeks” Gonzales started to disgrace the office of the Attorney General of the United States — preening himself every time someone called him General Gonzales — there has been active speculation exactly how stupid the man really is.

Buttercheeks, it seems, finally tired of the debate, and decided to settle the matter once and for all. Esquire, for reasons that are not immediately apparent, decided to make Buttercheeks one of the roughly 20 people invited to pontificate on The Meaning of Life. And Buttercheeks used this as his debate-ender.

He warmed up with:

So if I had to do it again, what I would not do is use the word quaint and the Geneva Conventions in the same sentence.

Dude, I think you just did.

John H. Richardson, who wrote the article for Esquire, presents it a series of stand-alone bullet points (without the bullets, though). This is what he wickedly strung together as two consecutive points:

The notion that what happened at Abu Ghraib was a result of the policies of the Bush administration I just think is totally ridiculous.

You do the best you can, looking at precedent, in trying to anticipate where the Supreme Court is going to draw the balance between the protection of civil liberties and protecting the national security, and in some cases we guessed wrong.

Hard to read that without picking up the impression that Buttercheeks is admitting that Abu Ghraib was a result of the policies of the Bush administration. But this, of course, is just Richardson being wicked.

(Al Kamen, of the Washington Post, incidentally, plays a thoroughly dishonest game with these Gonzales quotes. He runs them together like this, without any explanation:
“The notion that what happened at Abu Ghraib was a result of the policies of the Bush administration I just think is totally ridiculous,” Gonzales says. “You do the best you can, looking at precedent, in trying to anticipate where the Supreme Court is going to draw the balance between the protection of civil liberties and protecting the national security, and in some cases we guessed wrong.”)

But here’s the real money shot—Buttercheeks’ own words, without editing tricks:

We should have abandoned the idea of removing the U. S. attorneys once the Democrats took the Senate. Because at that point we could really not count on Republicans to cut off investigations or help us at all with investigations. We didn’t see that at the Department of Justice. Nor did the White House see that. Karl didn’t see it. If we could do something over again, that would be it.

If Gonzales was still a General in Bush’s army, someone would be urgently whispering in his ear: “Sir, you’re not allowed to actually admit in public that you feel the only reason you shouldn’t have done it is that you should have realized you could no longer get away with such shit.” But he’s not even a fake general any more. And Esquire wasn’t going to be whispering in his ear. Not when every journalistic instinct had them chortling with glee, and going: “Bingo!”

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Esquire, by the way, didn’t let Buttercheeks get away with this blatant falsification:

All the internal investigations are over with, no finding of wrongdoing, no finding that I misled Congress.

They sicced him with an asterisk, and provided this helpful gloss:

A 2008 Department of Justice investigation was referred to a federal prosecutor and remains ongoing.

This is the former Attorney General of the United States, and he doesn’t even understand when an Department of Justice investigation is over? Explains a lot, doesn’t it?