While likely GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich in April called for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to resign over his "mishandling" of the U.S. prosecutors purge, it turns out the two men have a lot in common. As we learned on Tuesday, when it comes to pressuring the gravely ill, Gonzales and Gingrich share the same bedside manners.

During his testimony Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee, former Deputy Attorney General James Comey detailed then White House Counsel Gonzales' visit to the bedside of the hospitalized AG, John Ashcroft. In March 2004, Comey served as the acting attorney general during Ashcroft's recovery from emergency gall bladder surgery. In that capacity, Comey had refused to recertify President Bush's illegal NS domestic surveillance program. On March 10, Gonzales and Bush chief-of-staff Andy Card went behind Comey's back to pressure an "extremely ill and disoriented" Ashcroft, a man so ill his wife refused him to have any visitors. As the New York Times described it:

When the White House officials appeared minutes later, Mr. Gonzales began to explain to Mr. Ashcroft why they were there. Mr. Comey said Mr. Ashcroft rose weakly from his hospital bed, but in strong and unequivocal terms, refused to approve the eavesdropping program.

"I was angry,' Mr. Comey told the committee. "I had just witnessed an effort to take advantage of a very sick man, who did not have the powers of the attorney general because they had been transferred to me. I thought he had conducted himself in a way that demonstrated a strength I had never seen before, but still I thought it was improper."

Ultimately, President Bush intervened to make changes to the NSA eavesdropping program to avoid the resignation of Comey and others at the Justice Department. But clearly, Alberto Gonzales showed he was quite comfortable in bringing bedside pressure to bear on Ashcroft, a man described as "very, very ill; in critical condition, in fact."

Which puts Alberto Gonzales in good company - with Newt Gingrich.

As Mother Jones detailed in a 1984 feature on the philandering, power-hungry Gingrich, the future House Speaker similarly had no problem brow-beating the gravely ill. In this case, though, the stricken person was his wife.

In 1980, Newt was separated from his first wife Jackie. As she lay incoherent in her hospital bed following surgery for a reoccurrence of uterine cancer, Gingrich paid her a visit to announce he wanted a divorce. As Lee Howell, a Gingrich friend and associate at whose wedding Newt was best man, described it:

"Newt came up there with his yellow legal pad, and he had a list of things on how the divorce was going to be handled. He wanted her to sign it. She was still recovering from surgery, still sort of out of it, and he comes in with a yellow sheet of paper, handwritten, and wants her to sign it.

Newt can handle political problems, but when it comes to personal problems, he's a disaster. He handled the divorce like he did any other political decision: You've got to be tough in this business, you've got to be hard. Once you make the decision you've got to act on it. Cut your losses and move on."

All of which explains why Gingrich wants Gonzales to resign. Not because there was anything wrong with Gonzales' firing of the U.S. prosecutors ("The president has every right to have the U.S. attorneys he wants"), but because President Bush and the Republican Party need to cut their losses and move on ("how could you have so totally mishandled what was a slam dunk").

Asked about Gonzales' leaning on the critically ill John Ashcroft to bless the President's illicit NSA surveillance of Americans, White House press secretary Tony Snow shrugged the question off by saying, "Trying to take advantage of a sick man. Because he had an appendectomy, his brain didn't work?"

On that point, New Gingrich couldn't agree more.

(For more on the moral black hole that is Newt Gingrich, see here and here.)