With enemies like these

Being persona non grata isn't always a bad thing. Like when you're not invited to a convening the politburo? That's not such a terrible indictment:

Thursday night, many of Washington’s A-list attorneys will join President Bush at a black-tie gala in Union Station to celebrate the silver anniversary of the Federalist Society, the network of conservative lawyers whose members and allies have steered the administration’s legal policies and judicial nominations.

But scanning a roster that includes Robert Bork, Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, former Attorney General Edwin Meese and former Solicitor General Theodore Olson, one prominent Republican is missing: James Comey, Bush’s erstwhile deputy attorney general whose contrarian views on such issues as torture and wiretapping led him to leave the administration shortly after Alberto Gonzales took over as attorney general.

Comey’s riveting Senate testimony in May helped ensure the end of Gonzales’s Washington career, recounting how Gonzales, then the White House counsel made a nighttime visit to the hospital room of an ailing John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, to seek reauthorization of a wiretapping program the Justice Department had concluded was unlawful.

Not that Comey is left with nothing to do. While the Federalists are feasting, he’ll be a mile away at the Renaissance Washington Hotel, delivering the keynote speech at the American Bar Association’s annual conference on national security law. The title of Comey’s address: “’Can We Talk’: Finding Common Ground in Fighting Terrorism.”