Gonzales Resigns! Stop. Renaissance geeks seek 17th century parallels! Stop.

Today's announcement that Al "Fredo" Gonzales has resigned as Attorney General, thus bringing to a close the tenure of our national consiglieri, prompts me to provide a refresher of our past posts dealing with comparisons between the Bush administration and early modern politics--some fanciful, others more serious genealogies of contemporary politics. I'm also prompted by the fact that, despite our relative radio silence these days, we seem to have acquired a fair number of new readers (unless our old readers are simply changing locations to fool us). Anyway, in the past, we've discussed: an instance of early modern waterboarding, clearly defined as torture by the English Joyce Appleby's discussion of Bush and the US founders, with our plea for a further genealogy back to the English civil war Iraq, Bush, Henry V, and the just war theory of the soldier Williams John Yoo and his analogues in the Caroline court of the 1630s-40s John Yoo and Milton's Belial (with a nice debate in comments over this ascription) Bush post-midterm-election and Coriolanus post-banishment Royalist readers of The Nation Barney Frank, Renaissance scholar Early modern liberalism And two selections from our Shakespearean history play The History of George the Second, Parts One and Two, the first from 1 George II, 1.1, the second from 2 George II, 3.2