Sadly, I'm inclined to say that between Gonzales, Brown and Owen, Gonzales may be the least destructive for the country.

Gonzales is an amoral legalist, the sort of corporate lawyer who will read through the law to find some legal justification for an already determined posistion. Somebody who doesn't care about moral issues and sees law only as a game to be manipulated.

But Brown and Owen are actually scarier, Owen seems to be a real social conservative believer, willing to twist the plain text of the law to get whatever decision she wants out of it. In fact her reading of the law was so weird that even Gonzales challenged it at one point. And Brown seems to me to be downright erratic, though usually to the right of Clarence Thomas.

Part of my rational is that Gonzales is the only one of the bunch that might surprise us in a good way. Owens and Brown are real believers, and placed in a posistion without external review and no way of being removed are most likely to become more reactionary. Gonzales however might go the other way. I doubt that we have ever seen what his personal opinions are because they are determined by whoever pays him. On the Supreme Court he would be in a posistion to make his own choices.

Not exactly good odds, but given a choice between 99.99% assured disaster, 99.95% assured disaster and 99% assured disaster, I'll take the 99%.

Jay