Dear Ms. Marcus,

When you say,
"Is there anyone left -- seriously, is there a Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee -- who has confidence in Gonzales's capacity to fix this mess? Is there anyone who accepts Gonzales's CEO analogy -- and thinks that a sentient board of directors wouldn't have fired him long ago?"
are you being purely rhetorical, or do you really want to know whether all boards of directors always fire CEOs for allowing mistakes to be made?

My Corporations course appears to be one long lesson in how much corporate officers can screw up before boards of directors, all of which seem to be sufficiently sentient to be subject to derivative shareholder lawsuits, will fire them. I would say that while Gonzales would not necessarily stay at the helm of a massive, publicly-traded corporation, he at least would leave with a severage package possibly larger than his lifetime government salary thus far. Therefore I recommend that you not echo Bush rhetoric about running government like a business; given the businesses run by Administration officials, if they actualize their cliches, you could find yourself with a new beat in the UAE. (Today: "Our mayor can say that he's not worried and that the move is small, and indeed, from a corporate standpoint, it is. It's so insignificant that Halliburton didn't deign to make a filing about it with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Investors yawned in response." Tomorrow...)

Sincerely,
PG