TIMOTHY McASHCROFT

I should say again: I think John Ashcroft is a terrible choice for attorney-general, but I’m not the president. If Ashcroft does a terrible job and starts speaking in tongues at press conferences or enforcing chastity on federal employees, then Bush will be accountable. It’s not up to Kate Michelman to protect the president-elect from his own bad judgment. That won’t stop the liberal interest groups, of course, for whom Ashcroft is a godsend. And the boost it will give to their direct mail efforts is nothing compared to the boost it will give to their rhetoric. My current favorite examples of anti-Ashcroft excess are a) from Mike Barnes of Handgun Control: ‘Mr. Ashcroft apparently believes in the so-called insurrectionist interpretation of the Second Amendment. This is the same extremist theory subscribed to by Timothy McVeigh and so-called militia groups;’ and b) James Ridgeway’s Village Voice assertion of Ashcroft’s ‘serial objection to women judges nominated for the federal bench – a years-long performance that might provide a preview of how, as AG, he would handle recommendations for the court.’ The evidence? Ashcroft opposed six women candidates and was unsuccessful in almost all of them. Ridgeway doesn’t tell us how many female judges in total came before Ashcroft and how many he approved; and he doesn’t tell us why Ashcroft might have disliked them (my bet is they were all liberal judicial activists). But in the eyes of the Old New Left, it is only necessary to oppose some women judges to be deemed sexist, just as it is only necessary to oppose a handful of black judges to be a racist. The sheer desperation of these arguments speaks to the degeneration of liberalism into a congeries of racial, sexual and ethnic smears. Readers are invited to send in the worst arguments against Ashcroft. Within a few days, we’ll be rivaling Salon.