http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_1127.shtml
John Ashcroft's Amerika
By DOUG THOMPSON
Nov 22, 2002, 08:47
Sadly, the fate of America, along with a little document called the Constitution of the United States, now seems to lie in the hands of a incompetent politician who was so inept as an incumbent Senator he couldn’t even beat a dead man at election time.
Attorney General John Ashcroft is getting what he wants – a totalitarian government free to spy on its citizens, destroy the first and fourth amendments of the Constitution and undermine the very foundations of the Republic.
Armed with ominous tools like the USA Patriot Act and the Pentagon’s Total Information Awareness System, Ashcroft and his legions are turning this country into a police state where every American is a file number, every citizen is a suspect and every action a reason for suspicion.
Even worse, a lot of supposedly-smart people down at 1600 Pennsylvania are letting this airhead get away this rampant destruction of the Constitution and individual rights.
Ashcroft became attorney general because he couldn’t hold on to a job on his own. Elected to the Senate in 1994, he lost to the very dead Mel Carnahan in 2000, leaving the Senate with a 50-50 tie before Jim Jeffords bolted and put Tom Daschle in charge. Instead of a 51-49 margin that could have survived Jeffords’ decision to split, we got Carnahan’s wife in a Senate version of affirmative action. Two years later, Jim Talent did what Ashcroft couldn’t do – win the seat at the ballot box.
So Dubya caved in to conservatives who wanted Ashcroft in Washington, even if the voters of Missouri did not, and named him attorney general, a move that had most legal scholars shaking their head. Everybody knew Ashcroft as a bad senator, but the legal community also knew he was a lousy lawyer with Draconian views on long-standing American traditions of individual rights, privacy and due process.
Most expected Ashcroft to be a short timer but most didn’t expect Osama bin Laden to send his goons to the U.S. to hijack American airliners and crash them into buildings. In the wake of 9-11, anger has replaced reason, the need for revenge overshadows judgment and the John Ashcrofts of the world now have carte blanche to ride roughshod over the very freedoms that bin Laden and his thugs wanted to destroy all along.
Ashcroft has emerged as a power in the Bush Administration because he is willing to do what others find both unthinkable and unacceptable – tear up the Constitution and unleash the massive information gathering capability of the federal government on average American citizens.
The attorney general is a zealot and zealots are always dangerous – even if they are supposed to play on your side of the fence.
Since 9-11, Ashcroft has expanded the ability of the U.S. Department of Justice to spy on ordinary Americans, authorizing more wiretaps and surveillance than any attorney general in modern times.
He has authorized the creation of massive databases to track American gun owners, American travel and the day-to-day financial transactions of all Americans. The new databases will allow Uncle Sam to know how much money you have in the bank, how you spend it, where you go on any given day of the week, what guns you own, what cars you drive and when and where you buy gas, groceries or condoms.
“This brings back the old days of Hoover and his personal hit lists,” says retired FBI agent Alan Matthews. “Most of us had hoped those days were long gone.”
Terrorism succeeds when the victims of terrorists change their way of life, when fear dictates policy and hatred replaces reason. Terrorism wins when freedom becomes secondary to the cause.
Welcome to John Ashcroft’s America. It ain’t the America envisioned by the founding fathers in the past but, sadly, it is the America of the future.
