ASHCROFT’S INTERVIEW

My buddy Jonah Goldberg, one of the funniest and smartest writers on the web, defends John Ashcroft’s interview with the neo-segregationist magazine, Southern Partisan. He says that the worst Ashcroft did was call some Confederates ‘patriots,’ and imply that their cause wasn’t exclusively slavery. Fair enough. But why give the interview in the first place? Everyone knows the kind of magazine Southern Partisan is. If I were a famously conservative Senator, I’d avoid it like the plague. No, you don’t have to agree with everything published in a magazine to give an interview. But don’t you draw the line somewhere? Do you think that if a black Senator had given an interview to the Nation of Islam’s Final Call, he wouldn’t be given a hard time? Or if a gay Senator gave an interview to a NAMBLA publication? Or a Jewish Senator to the newsletter of Rabbi Kahane’s followers? Conservatives have long been practitioners of guilt by association when it comes to their opponents. Black pols always have to distance themselves from segregationists, Arabs from Muslim fundamentalists, gays from any conceivable freak out there with a printing press. Now it’s pay-back time. I still think it doesn’t bar Ashcroft from being attorney-general, but I do think it’s evidence that he is a deeply reactionary figure who should be anathema to any administration forging compassionate conservatism.