Dead man’s revenge

Maybe it wasn’t such a good thing for John Ashcroft to lose to a dead man in 2000. Oh sure, I know that this would mean that the Republicans would probably still have control of the Senate (although Lincoln Chaffee is looking mighty skittish). But then you read this by Dahlia Lithwick, and you wonder just how much damage that crazy Crisco-annointing, hymn-singing, repressed Jesus huckster can do as Attorney General.

As Frank Rich points out in this excellent column:

While the administration says yes, the factual backup is again fuzzy. Certainly it’s hard to be reassured by anything said or done by John Ashcroft, who in May 2001 testified to the Senate that “our No. 1 goal is the prevention of terrorist acts.” We now know that he was just putting us on. On Sept. 10, 2001, he refused a F.B.I. budget request to add 149 field agents, 200 analysts and 54 translators to its counterterrorism effort. He did so despite the fact, unearthed by Congressional investigators, that the F.B.I. then had only one analyst monitoring Al Qaeda.

The attorney general drives liberals crazy with his assaults on civil liberties, but we do have courts to sort that out (as they are already doing). What’s truly frightening about Mr. Ashcroft is his incompetence. Even as we learned this week that the Justice Department’s prosecutors are so sloppy that they mistakenly turned over 48 classified F.B.I. reports to Zacarias Moussaoui, Seymour Hersh reported in The New Yorker that the attorney general may have blown our chance to get useful Qaeda information out of Mr. Moussaoui by mismanaging his prosecution.

Add that to Lithwick’s column, and what we already know about the Padilla case, the New Orleans hookers, offensive statuary, his assault to Right to Die in Oregon, and you have to ask yourself, what can be done to stop this crazy bastard?

I wonder how Russ Feingold sleeps these days?

Dumbass.