In testimony before the Senate yesterday, former deputy Attorney General James B. Comey did the unthinkable: he made us sympathetic to John Ashcroft. Wholda thunk?
As Ashcroft lay in an intensive care unit suffering from gallstone pancreatitis, Andrew Card and Alberto Gonzales raced to the hospital to ask him to sign the President's illegal warrantless wiretapping executive order. Ashcroft apparently thought the program was illegal -- who knew that all that time he secretly hated America as much as the Democrats! -- and refused, even in his weakened state, to change his mind.
Ashcroft "lifted his head off the pillow and in very strong terms expressed his view of the matter" -- that Comey was right. "And as he laid back down, he said, 'But that doesn't matter, because I'm not the attorney general. There is the attorney general.' And he pointed to me."
How dramatic! Ashcroft... defending privacy? It turns out we hate everyone who has worked for the Justice Department in any capacity over since the start of the Bush administration because now we can't figure out or remember who's shown the greatest amount of contempt for civil rights and the rule of law. Can we blame that first guy that quit for everything? Sampson or Simpson or whatever?
