Many people are outraged that the Attorney General of the United States has been caught in a lie about his involvement in the politically-motivated firings of the eight United States Attorneys. I am not one of them. I am looking at the bright side.

To recap:

On March 12, Gonzales denied any involvement in the prosecutor purge: "I was not involved in seeing any memos, was not involved in any discussions about what was going on … That’s basically what I knew as attorney general."

New documents released tonight, “including Gonzales’s appointment calendar, show that the attorney general and his deputy, Paul McNulty, participated in an hour-long meeting about the firings on Nov. 27. Seven of the eight prosecutors were let go on Dec. 7.” The meeting occurred during the 18-day gap in documents the Justice Department had previously released.

When the media confronts an obvious contradiction like this, it does not come out and call the public official a liar. Instead, the media will say that the documents appear to contradict prior statements. That's how the New York Times handled it this morning:

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and senior advisers discussed the plan to remove seven United States attorneys at a meeting last Nov. 27, 10 days before the dismissals were carried out, according to a Justice Department calendar entry disclosed Friday.

The previously undisclosed meeting appeared to contradict Mr. Gonzales’s previous statements about his knowledge of the dismissals. He said at a news conference on March 13 that he had not participated in any discussions about the removals, but knew in general that his aides were working on personnel changes involving United States attorneys.

I am delighted that Gonzalez was caught with his pants around his ankles. I am looking at the bright side. This episode only sheds more light on the rotting corpse that is the Bush presidency, exposed for all to see as a corrupt enterprise that would be prosecuted under the RICO laws were it a private organization. Only the diehards continue to support the King and his minions, who are destroying everything they touch. A corrupt Attorney General is a bellweather, like an innocent cough that signals emphysema. Will this accelerate the end of the Bush administration? Bush won't be impeached, but he can crawl to the finish line and return to Crawford, Texas, where he can take up volleyball and learn how to read.

No lawyer can get away with lying to the court. Gonzales will not get away with lying to the country. He will not be around much longer. He should be sentenced to serve as a public defender in night court in a sleepy Texas town, handling DWI and burglary cases. Let's face it: Gonzalez was a good flunky, but Alberto, you suck at being Attorney General.

The newspaper this morning reports another scandalous act of cowardice. In Connecticut, some high school kids actually wrote the script for a war-related play that the principal quashed.

Student productions at Wilton High School range from splashy musicals like last year’s “West Side Story,” performed in the state-of-the-art, $10 million auditorium, to weightier works like Arthur Miller’s “Crucible,” on stage last fall in the school’s smaller theater.

For the spring semester, students in the advanced theater class took on a bigger challenge: creating an original play about the war in Iraq. They compiled reflections of soldiers and others involved, including a heartbreaking letter from a 2005 Wilton High graduate killed in Iraq last September at age 19, and quickly found their largely sheltered lives somewhat transformed.

“In Wilton, most kids only care about Britney Spears shaving her head or Tyra Banks gaining weight,” said Devon Fontaine, 16, a cast member. “What we wanted was to show kids what was going on overseas.”

But even as 15 student actors were polishing the script and perfecting their accents for a planned April performance, the school principal last week canceled the play, titled “Voices in Conflict,” citing questions of political balance and context.

The principal, Timothy H. Canty, who has tangled with students before over free speech, said in an interview he was worried the play might hurt Wilton families “who had lost loved ones or who had individuals serving as we speak,” and that there was not enough classroom and rehearsal time to ensure it would provide “a legitimate instructional experience for our students.”

It's easy to get mad at the principal for his cowardly act of censorship. The principal should be re-assigned to work at the strip mall convenience store selling beer and cigarettes to the locals. The students who wrote the play from scratch should be appointed Ministers of Culture in the State of Connecticut. It's not so rare for a pathetic authority figure like the school principal to trigger the clampdown on independent and free thought. But screw him for a moment. Focus instead on the rare student who cares enough about current events that would go out of his way to design a cultural event like this. Look at the bright side.