Alberto Gonzales, the president's unloved Attorney-General, seems to have resigned. Conventional wisdom started to congeal over the weekend that for a replacement Bush was going to try to find a relatively uncontroversial figure who'd have an easy time getting confirmed.

That might happen, but my best guess is that Bush will go out of his way to pick somebody fairly controversial -- someone whose confirmation liberals will find outrageous -- and then start loudly and immediately declaring that each hour's delay in confirming his nominee is putting thousands of lives at risk. The hope would be to generate one of these situations where all the Republicans plus maybe a dozen Democrats vote to confirm, and then progressives spend the next month arguing with themselves over it, and even the Democrats who reliable agree to surrender on anything terror-related get criticized in fall '08 for being soft on terror.