Sad, sad. Is there no loyalty, no honor, among Republicans?

“I do have confidence in AG Al Gonzales,” Bush said during a joint news conference with President Felipe Calderon in Merida, Mexico. “I talked to him this morning, and we talked about his need to go up to Capitol Hill and make it very clear to members in both political parties why the Justice Department made the decision it made.”

This is a lot like a baseball owner’s dreaded “vote of confidence” in a manager, isn’t it?

Translation: Nice knowing ya, pal!

Is there no gratitude?

And after a “Nice Man” Gonzales wrote all those memos that let Bush execute 57 prisoners, too!

During Bush’s six years as governor 150 men and two women were executed in Texas—a record unmatched by any other governor in modern American history. Each time a person was sentenced to death, Bush received from his legal counsel a document summarizing the facts of the case, usually on the morning of the day scheduled for the execution, and was then briefed on those facts by his counsel; based on this information Bush allowed the execution to proceed in all cases but one. The first fifty-seven of these summaries were prepared by Gonzales, a Harvard-educated lawyer

Gonzales’s summaries were Bush’s primary source of information in deciding whether someone would live or die. Each is only three to seven pages long and generally consists of little more than a brief description of the crime, a paragraph or two on the defendant’s personal background, and a condensed legal history. [M]any have a clear prosecutorial bias, and all seem to assume that if an appeals court rejected one or another of a defendant’s claims, there is no conceivable rationale for the governor to revisit that claim. This assumption ignores one of the most basic reasons for clemency: the fact that the justice system makes mistakes.

A close examination of the Gonzales memoranda suggests that Governor Bush frequently approved executions based on only the most cursory briefings on the issues in dispute.In fact, in these documents Gonzales repeatedly failed to apprise the governor of crucial issues in the cases at hand: ineffective counsel, conflict of interest, mitigating evidence, even actual evidence of innocence.

I mean, here’s Alberto attending to all of Bush’s most personal needs—“Please don’t kill me!—but one little slipup, and it’s bedtime for Gonzo.

Where’s the justice in this, I ask you?