Testimony: I did, however, listen to John Ashcroft testify before the 9/11 commission. I almost drove off the road when he made his implicit attack on Jamie Gorelick. I got a kick out of it, simply because Gorelick is representative of Clinton's horribly lightweight DOJ team. But it made Ashcroft look small, petty, and partisan. His message, after all, was quite forthrightly "Clinton's DOJ set us up for 9/11." I'm not sure what is going on here, but I have a couple theories:

1. Ashcroft, already a press punching bag, is willing to take the bullet on this and be the administration's designated recrimination pusher. Powell, Rumsfeld, Rice, and even Bush can be polite, sympatize with the previous administration, and claim to be not pointing fingers -- all while Ashcroft steps up to rhetorically indict the previous administration.

2. Ashcroft is going unilateral on this. He knows he's out of step with the Bush administration's no-blame front, but this is what he really believes, and he'll go down fighting.

Either one makes it seem unlikely he'll serve in a second term.

More: Easterbrook shares my annoyance when the AG is called "General Ashcroft." In the formulation "Attorney General," general is not a noun; it is an adjective. The Secretary General of the UN and the U.S. Surgeon General are also not generals. One is a secretary (albeit one who does not take Gregg -- get it, Easterbrook?), and the other is a surgeon (or at least typically a doctor). Addressing any of them as "General" is either pure affectation or pure idiocy. There is no third possibility.