Today marked Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ final day in office. Several top Justice Department and Bush administration officials gathered this afternoon at the Great Hall in the Department of Justice to bid the Attorney General a fond farewell. Senior Justice officials heaped unabashed praise on Gonzales.

Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Steven Bradbury:

“[H]undreds of innocent human beings have been freed from an unimagineable hell on Earth.”

Assistant Attorney General for National Security Kenneth Wainstein:

“He gave us the authority to conduct comprehensive oversight on all aspects of national security investigation.”

United States Attorney for the Western District of Texas Johnny Sutton:

“When he got to the part about protecting children, his eyes would light up.”

When it came for Gonzales’ time to speak, his voiced “crack[ed] with emotion” as he proclaimed his “highest regard and admiration for the employees of the department.” Watch highlights from the ceremony:

Gonzales leaves his post with an approval rating of 28 percent. The Washington Post reported today, “It will be the first time in more than a decade that Gonzales will not be serving his friend and longtime patron, President Bush.”

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Today, an internal Justice Department audit exposed excessive spending on lavish DoJ parties and events. Some highlights:

An internal Justice audit, released Friday, showed the department spent nearly $7 million to plan, host or send employees to 10 conferences over the last two years. This included paying $4 per meatball at one lavish dinner and spreading an average of $25 worth of snacks around to each participant at a movie-themed party.

There was plenty, too, for those needing to satisfy a sweet tooth.

More than $13,000 was spent on cookies and brownies for 1,542 people who attended a four-day “Weed and Seed” conference in August 2005, according to the audit by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine. And a “networking” session replete with butterfly shrimp, coconut lobster skewers and Swedish meatballs at a Community Oriented Policing Services conference in July 2006 cost more than $60,000.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) has released a statement praising President Bush’s speech on Iraq last night, saying he is “pleased” that “troops will come home before the year’s end”:

Our commanding officer in Iraq, General Petraeus, came before the Congress this week and made clear that the surge is working; military progress is being made to the extent that some troop withdrawals can begin in the months ahead. I’m pleased that President Bush is listening to his commanders on the ground and with his announcement this evening that some troops will come home before the year’s end.

Yet last month, Cornyn was adamantly opposed to this drawdown. On Aug. 23, Sen. John Warner (R-VA) called on Bush to announce on Sept. 15 that approximately 5,000 troops “could begin to redeploy and be home to their families and loved ones no later than Christmas of this year.” Cornyn immediately put out a statement blasting Warner’s proposal:

It’s a little curious to me that people are proposing a change in strategy when in fact the current strategy appears now to be working.

Bush’s announcement last night mirrors Warner’s proposal. Yet all of a sudden — just a couple of weeks later — Cornyn thinks it’s a great idea to “change” strategy even while he still believes the current strategy is working.

Cornyn’s hypocrisy resembles that of Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), who called Bush’s Iraq announcement “wise,” after criticizing Warner’s plan as “irresponsible.”

Last night, President Bush announced that because the “troop surge is working,” he would be pulling out roughly 23,700 troops by mid-July 2008 and returning the U.S. force in Iraq to pre-surge levels. Yet as the AP notes today, the United States may actually “wind up with thousands more troops in Iraq next summer than before the buildup of forces he ordered in January.” Salon’s Tim Grieve has more.

In the New York Times this morning, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R) ran an ad supporting Gen. David Petraeus’ recent sugarcoated testimony before Congress. In the ad, Giuliani asks “who should America listen to” on Iraq — critics of the war, or Petraeus and Giuliani:

On MSNBC this morning, Giuliani’s senior communications adviser, Jim Dyke, defended the ad, saying “we oughta have a serious discussion in this country about” Iraq:

I’m an American. And because I believe that the terrorists, the Islamic terrorists, have declared war on us. And I believe that we oughta have a serious discussion in this country about the approach to defending ourselves.

When host Contessa Brewer challenged Dyke’s implied contention that “people who question” the current war strategy are “un-American,” the Giuliani aide dismissed Brewer’s query as “a silly question.” Watch it:

Indeed, America needs a “serious discussion in this country” on Iraq. One person who has proved himself to be someone America should not “listen to” is Rudy Giuliani. The former New York City mayor, who has never visited Iraq, has complained that “America is too consumed with Iraq.”

In 2006, Giuliani had an opportunity to study the issue as a member of the Iraq Study Group, but he quit the post because it conflicted with his lucrative speaking tours. Newsday reported:

Giuliani quit the group during his busiest stretch in 2006, when he gave 20 speeches in a single month that brought in $1.7 million.

In 2004, after tons of explosives in Iraq went missing, Giuliani defended President Bush by saying “the actual responsibility for it really would be for the troops that were there.”

In his Iraq speech last night, President Bush took a moment to thank “the 36 nations who have troops on the ground in Iraq.” TPMmuckraker’s Spencer Ackerman has been counting coalition members with troops on the ground and has been able to find only 34 — many of whom have just a minor presence in Iraq. In his search, Ackerman discovered that the total is about to drop to 33: Next month, Iceland is pulling out its one lone soldier.