IMPEACH BUSH

It's no easy task to make the odor emanating from the U.S. Justice Department smell worse than it already does. It's even harder to make the man at the top of the department, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, look less fit for the office than he already looks. Unfortunately, it seems that the department and the attorney general are up to those challenges.

A couple of things have made the stink at Justice worse in recent days. One was McClatchy reporter Marisa Taylor's story detailing the deparment's decision to reassign a prosecutor who was pushing for indictments after a probe of financial fraud at two insurance companies.

Another was the plea agreement that the Justice Department reached last week in a case involving Purdue Pharma, the maker of the notoriously addictive painkiller OxyContin, and three of its executives. The deal let the executives avoid jail.

Both the decision to drop the insurance investigation and the Purdue Pharma plea arrangement raise serious questions about the Justice Department's handling of cases involving high-level corporate wrongdoing. Adding them to the ongoing controversy over the firings of U.S. attorneys intensifies the political odor that now taints the department.

Ordinarily, it would be up to the attorney general to clear the air. But as Gonzales demonstrated on Tuesday, this is no ordinary time at Justice.

Appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Gonzales avoided a rerun of his testimony last spring, in which he repeatedly said he couldn't recall facts or details. On the whole, he might have been better off if his memory had failed him again.

He explained his grotesque 2004 visit to former Attorney General John Ashcroft's hospital room as merely an effort to do the bidding of congressional leaders who wanted to see the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program continued. That was at odds with previous testimony by former Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey and was immediately disputed by members of both the House and Senate.

He defended his previous statement under oath that there was no disagreement within the Bush administration about the legality of the NSA domestic surveillance program. That statement was true, he blithely asserted, because the disagreements involved different "intelligence activities."

He told Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., that he didn't know how many U.S. attorneys had been fired. He told Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the panel's ranking Republican, that the OxyContin plea deal was fair, but admitted that he hadn't reviewed the case.

Most of all, he made it clear that he has no intention of resigning. Instead, he said, he would stay on to fix the department's problems.

Gonzales' performance shredded what little credibility he had left. On Thursday, four Democraic senators -- Feinstein, Charles E. Schumer of New York, Russell D.Feingold of Wisconsin and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island -- asked Solicitor General Paul Clement to appoint a special prosecutor to probe whether Gonzales had committed perjury in his testimony.

There is plenty -- possible perjury, the U.S. attorney firings, the derailed insurance probe -- for a special prosecutor to pursue. If that's what it takes to clear the air at Justice -- well, as Gonzales' boss might say: Bring it on.