Ashcroft, A.G.
At the time John Ashcroft was being considered by the Republican-controlled Senate for the post of Attorney General, there was a major hullabaloo from the few remaining if vocal left-intellectual-progressives, who outright said the man was dangerous. Ashcroft had represented people from Missouri in the House for a number of years, staking out a position as a right-wing excessive who loved Guns and Christianity with a fervor that caused hackles to rise with a sproing. He lost his Senate race last year to a dead man, a popular governor whose widow was then appointed to the seat.
The lefty opposition was right, but Ashcroft was confirmed by a narrow margin. So hey, how bad could he be? I mean, we suffered through the blatant corruption of Ed Meese as Attorney General under Ronald Reagan, and the grossly-political Janet Reno, in case you thought I was being partisan. The answer is that it could be pretty bad, and on the other hand, it could get really pretty bad. Kinda like Paul Ehrlich's analogy that if you put a frog in a pan of boiling water, it will jump out, whereas if you put a frog in water and boil it, you'll boil the frog, too. Let's be optimistic that this frenetic zealot will turn up the heat too fast and be popped out onto the stove.
Of course, he's operating in the right climate. The American public, intellectually drowsy as usual but patriotic to the max, is in a blank-check signing mode when it comes to stopping terrorism. Act first, explain it later, and try to avoid all serious thought about the facts in between. It was bad enough that they have detained over a thousand people with marginal cause and little due process. Or that Congress gave a green light to trample privacy rights like a Napa Valley grape stomp.
But for a while now, Ashcroft has been revealing his truest colors. With all of this new authority to go after the bad guys, Ashcroft is following a personal agenda. He's started going after medicinal marijuana practitioners and assisted-suicide doctors on the West Coast, at a time when precious resources were needed to track down the domestic evil-doers. And now he's strumming his Second Amendment beliefs, to the clear detriment of the war on terrorism.
Ashcroft was asked by the FBI for permission to go through gun ownership records to compare them to immigration data. What a logical investigative move to make. But Ashcroft turned them down. Long a gun-nut protector, Ashcroft said looking through the federal records in search of criminals who are living among us and are likely plotting more terrorism would be a technical violation of privacy laws regarding gun registration.
At a Senate hearing earlier this month, Ashcroft was "forceful and unyielding" according to The New York Times, which broke the gun registration story by the way. He charged that criticism of Administration policies "gives ammunition to America's enemies, and pause to America's friends." New York's senior Senator Charles Schumer countered that "when it comes to the area of even illegal immigrants getting guns and finding out if they did, this administration becomes as weak as a wet noodle." That was about as stiff as the Ashcroft questioners got.
Ashcroft is probably to the right of Bush and Cheney, though not by a lot. They like him because his reactionary iconoclasm gives them cover. My guess is that they will pay out as much rope as they can, until the loopy Ashcroft goes too far, and then they will let him "twist slowly, slowly in the wind" before they cut him down. After which they'll attack the Real Americans for having hounded him out of office. Crazy, huh?
And that's SetonnoteS...I'm Tony Seton.
.