In an unusual aside, Andrew Cohen, who writes the Washington Post “Bench Conference” column, explains his Gonzo coverage of the past six months (who the hell is he apologizing to, anyway?):

Now that Gonzales is gone from office, I think it is an appropriate time for me to explain to you why I did what I did, why I don’t expect to do it very often in the future, and why it’s important (and for me altogether appropriate) sometimes to express genuine outrage about a particular series of circumstances. Straight-line correspondents may not be able to tell you how they really feel about a particular story. But in this case I believe that telling you how I truly felt about Gonzales and his stewardship of the Justice Department was the only true way to communicate to you the depth of the problem and the width of its implications.

I did not make lightly the decision to become a fierce critic of the Attorney General. I have always believed that my job as an analyst is to shed more light than heat on a topic–to provide you with enough context and perspective so that you can make your own informed judgments about a particular legal issue or event. And I recognize that when you become too subjective about a particular topic, or when you write about it in a particularly conclusive way, you run the risk of cutting into the reservoir of credibility you have with news consumers. After all, one person’s utterly lame pol is always another person’s honorable politician.

But there are times in the life of a “beat journalist”–my “beat” being the law–when the knowledge and experience you’ve gathered over the years–in my case, 10 years– tells you that something is so horribly off-kilter with a particular person, institution, or practice that it cries out for a different kind of coverage, a different level of analysis; a different depth of commentary. And when that time comes, it seems to me, the commentator has a responsibility to explain forcefully and with passion why what is occurring is so different from and so much worse than what has occurred before.

And so it was for me with Gonzales. His tenure as Attorney General, on matters of both substance and procedure, was so atrocious and beneath contempt to the men and women who care deeply about the Justice Department that I felt it necessary to stridently defend them at his expense. His lack of independence from the White House on critical matters of constitutional law–say, the legality of the domestic surveillance program, for example–was so glaring and destructive that I felt it needed to be highlighted for you so that you might be roused from your slumber into outrage. His utter lack of leadership at the Department–not knowing which federal prosecutors were to be fired, he says–was so unacceptable that I felt the typical “he-said/she said” analysis would not have been able to do credit to the incompetence at work in the corridors of power.

I took no joy in going after the Attorney General the way that I did and I take absolutely no satisfaction now that he is gone. That’s because there are no winners in this story. There are only losers. Because the damage he caused to the Justice Department, and to the rule of law, and to the Constitution itself is so vast that it will take years to mend. And also because I cannot help but think about how different things might be today if only President George W. Bush had selected a qualified attorney general in 2005 (there were and are plenty of Republican candidates) instead of selecting his buddy, the hack crony, whose only qualification for the job was that he would willingly do the White House’s bidding.

I do not plan to continue to cover the Justice Department beat the same way now that Gonzales is gone. I plan to go back now to that “more light than heat” paradigm that seems to have worked well for both you and I over the years. And I pray that the new attorney general does so much better than his predecessor that the next 18 months are for us a virtual love fest. Let me put it another way: although it may not make for good copy, I would always rather be able to praise good governance when it occurs than to criticize bad politics when it smothers us all.

I thought the last paragraph was the most telling. Why wouldn’t he cover it the same way? Isn’t that his job?