Starting Black History Month With a Bang: Confirming John Ashcroft

Well, I didn't think that I would end up spending the first day of Black History Month thinking about *John Ashcroft*.

Oh well.

(*Tomorrow, I see *Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.)

Cheers,
Bijan Parsia.

Abstract: In so many ways, the nomination and confirmation of John Ashcroft to the post of Attorney General is an affront to the overwhelming majority of African-Americans; that confirmation came at the start Black History month is the icing on the cake.



Starting Black History Month With a Bang: Confirming John Ashcroft
URL: http://www.pfaw.org/news/ashcroft_extreme.shtml
By Bijan Parsia


   Let's start with the most charitable, nay, an impossibly charitable,
   take on John Ashcroft: He's not nearly as bad as his reputation, and
   the huge numbers of Missouri African Americans who voted against his
   reelection to the Senate just happened to prefer a dead guy.
   Furthermore, let us assume, he, unlike almost everyone else in the
   entire world, is able to shift in a matter of months from rabid,
   extreme advocacy to impartial evenhandness with regard to people he
   professionally professed to loathe.
   
   He's still clearly a terrible choice.
   
   For a man professing to be a uniter, President Bush seems stunningly
   unaware of the value of appearances for bringing people together.
   Even if Ashcroft were a civil rights wonder, the fact that he's
   unable to convincingly convey that is grounds enough to bar him from
   a post which is the heart of civil rights enforcement. Given this
   fact, it's difficult to see how, even given the impossibly
   charitable reading of Ashcroft, this is an unifying appointment.
   
   African Americans have had little reason to trust the justice
   system, and, simply judging from his last Senate race, little reason
   to trust Ashcroft. Even if Ashcroft had all the good will in the
   world, isn't the mistrust of so many African Americans an enormous
   handicap to for the AG to start out with? And the mistrust people
   feel for Ashcroft -- rightly or wrongly (although, I think, in this
   case, rightly) -- properly will contaminate Bush so as to ensure a
   hostile and suspicious reaction to future ambiguous moves he may
   (will) make. Bush is either profoundly clueless or astoundingly
   cynical to have nominated Ashcroft, or, perhaps most likely, both.
   
   Is Bush simply unable to understand why African Americans might find
   Ashcroft a horrible choice? Or why the post of Attorney General has
   a special importance for the African American community, espeically
   in light of the Flordia vote? We can grant that acceptibility by
   African Americans (or gays, or pro-choice women, or gun control
   advocates, or civil libertarians, or...) is not necessarily the sole
   determining criteria of suitability for Attorney General, but I
   don't see that it was taken into account at all. It hearkens back to
   Dick Cheney's miraculous discovery that he, himself, after all, was
   the best choice for vice president.
   
   Do they even care if they fool anyone? Are they even fooling
   themselves?
   
   And the Democrats have given a poor showing in all this. I dearly
   wish someone had had the guts to filibuster, if only long enough to
   delay the vote another day; yes, yes, the Democrats delayed the vote
   in the first place. But still, was it too much to hope that someone
   would have found confirming Ashcroft on the first day of Black
   History Month repugnant enough to do something about it?
   
   Let that be the first lesson of this year's Black History Month: It
   was too much to hope for.


--
Posted on Monkeyfist at http://monkeyfist.com/articles/739