Democrats who oppose Alberto Gonzales’ nomination to be Attorney General are frequently citing the talking point that he’s not independent enough, as in this McClatchy Newspapers story:

“By refusing to voice his own values and understanding of the law, he has failed to demonstrate the independent leadership he will need as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer,” [Senator Dianne] Feinstein said.

As with Rice, Democrats said that Gonzales was too loyal to Bush. Democrats said Gonzales’ personal ties to the president damaged his ability to pursue allegations of wrongdoing involving administration officials and their supporters.

But almost every Democrat venerates John F. Kennedy, whose brother Robert was probably the least independent attorney general ever when judged in terms of “personal ties to the president.” To my knowledge, Chuck Schumer of New York is the only Democrat to address the elephant in the room – here’s what he said during a committee hearing last week:

[T]he position requires a greater degree of independence than, for example, the secretary of State, whose obligation is to advance the president’s interests abroad. When the White House asks the Justice Department, Can we do X? — the Justice Department is charged with giving an objective answer, not one tailored to achieve the president’s goals. The bottom line is it’s hard to be a straight shooter if you’re a blind loyalist.

There are two models for an attorney general, loyalist and independent. We all know that there have been attorney generals over the years who have been close to the president. There is no better example than our colleague’s brother, Robert Kennedy, who served his own brother, President Kennedy. That said, no one ever doubted in the confines of the Oval Office that Bobby Kennedy would oppose his brother if he thought the president was wrong. History has documented those disagreements.

Judge Gonzales is more of a loyalist than an independent. That alone certainly doesn’t disqualify him, but it raises concerns. After an extensive review of the record, unfortunately and sadly, and despite my great personal affection for the judge, his testimony before the committee turned me around and changed my vote from yes to no. He was so circumspect in his answers, so unwilling to leave even a micron of space between his views and the president’s, that I now have real doubts whether he can perform the job of attorney general.

In short, Judge Gonzales still seems to see himself as counsel to the president, not attorney general, the chief law enforcement officer of the land.

I’m sure RFK and his brother had their disagreements in private, but this is hardly a convincing distinction. If independence is important in an attorney general — and it probably is — then that applies to RFK as much as Gonzales.

For me, Ed Kilgore of New Donkey makes the strongest argument against Gonzales, which is goes far beyond just the independence issue:

Gonzales doesn’t represent the truly hard cases on torture; he stands for the proposition that anything not explicitly prohibited by the administration’s extremely narrow interpretation of U.S. law and international treaties is just aces with him. And as a Washington Post editorial yesterday noted, after stonewalling the Senate Judiciary Committee on the subject initially, in his final hearing he squarely confirmed that this was indeed his position.

If you believe, as I do and I hope you do, that the war on terror is an ideological war in which perceptions of American values and good intentions are in the long run as important as military assets, then confirming the Poster Boy for Torture as Attorney General provides a propaganda victory for Islamic Jihadism that’s potentially just as damaging as those images from Abu Ghraib. Moreover, Gonzales’s confirmation will also reinforce the already dangerous impression that the United States will only obey those rules we get to set ourselves, an impression the administration finds ways to strengthen nearly every day.

Add it all up, and for me at least, the calculus is pretty clear: this guy should not become Attorney General, on the merits, and completely separate from the politics of the thing.