Let the Eagle Soar

Steve Conn:

[P]erhaps the nomination which best demonstrated just how inept this administration would prove to be was John Ashcroft. You will recall that Ashcroft got the job of running the Justice Department because he lost his Senate seat in the 2000 election. To a dead man. The reward for failing to beat the deceased Mel Carnahan was the job of Attorney General. It was the first example of what became all too common: for Bush, our MBA president, no failure is so great that it doesn't deserve a promotion . . . .

Ashcroft's nomination told us all we needed to know about the coming administration - its contempt for brains, for integrity, for competence, its true-believing zealotry.

This is true, but it's important not to forget that Ashcroft lost in no small part because he stood up on the Senate floor in October 1999 and denounced Ronnie White, a judicial moderate who had been nominated for a federal district court position. In his bizarre and ultimately successful campaign against White's nomination, Ashcroft distorted the Missouri Supreme Court Justice's record and engaged in just enough race-baiting to bring the state's black voters out in what Eric Boehlert later described (in a fine piece about the whole affair) as "one of the clearest cases of retaliation voting" in recent political history. Ashcroft simply made shit up about White's views on crime and the death penalty and then -- even though he could have crushed the nomination before it reached the Senate floor -- allowed White to be humiliated, as he became the first District Court nominee in fifty years to be defeated in a full Senate vote. Then he lost to a dead guy.

Every now and then, I hear someone remarking that for as bad as Ashcroft was, Alberto Gonzales was surely worse. That's true so far as it goes, but therein lies the essence of Bush's greatness; just when you figure you've scraped the bottom of the well, there was always something even more infuriating a few clicks down the road.



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