Despicable

There are a few world-class gutter maneuvers in the asshole playbook. Hitting on the widow at her husband’s wake is one. Publicly humiliating the handicapped for their disability also comes to mind. Intimidating the infirmed while in the hospital is another classic (my favorite performance of this was when Newt Gingrich asked his wife, whom he was cheating on, for a divorce while she was hospitalized for cancer treatment – what a sweetheart he is).

According to testimony given by Former Deputy Attorney General James Comey, AG Gonzales, White House Counsel at the time, tried the hospital tactic on a bed-ridden Attorney General John Ashcroft.

May 15 (Bloomberg) -- Alberto Gonzales pressured then- Attorney General John Ashcroft while he was hospitalized in 2004 to recertify a classified program whose legality was questioned by the Justice Department, the agency's former No. 2 official told the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Former Deputy Attorney General James Comey testified that he and other Justice Department officials planned to resign after the visit to Ashcroft's hospital bed by Gonzales, then White House counsel, and White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card. Comey was acting attorney general because of Ashcroft's illness. He wouldn't specify the program at issue, though panel members said it apparently was secret wiretapping of suspected terrorists.

"I was concerned that this was an effort to do an end-run around the acting attorney general and to get a very sick man to approve something'' that the Justice Department had concluded "was unable to be certified as to its legality,'' Comey told the Senate panel in Washington. Comey said Vice President Dick Cheney also had told him he disagreed with the department's stance.

Read the article. These are indecent people who know no bounds.

UPDATE: and good on John Ashcroft (not my favorite person BTW) for standing his ground and doing what was right, sort of.