By the second day of Senate Judiciary Committee’s “questioning” Attorney General-nominee John Ashcroft on Wednesday, two things became clear: Ashcroft is going to be confirmed — as he should be — and senators were becoming hard-pressed to find legitimate questions to ask the former U.S. Senator from Missouri.
At one point, Ashcroft had to “apologize” for a joke he once made about political moderates and skunks.
In the past, Ashcroft has joked: “The only thing you find in the middle of the road is moderates and dead skunks.”
It seems as though Sen. Herbert Kohl, who is a self-described “moderate Democrat” from Wisconsin, found that too “offensive” to let slip by, so — of course — he “questioned” Ashcroft about it, prompting the nominee to apologize: “I really regret it if anyone is offended by it. … I mean no injury or disrespect to those individuals who don’t have my views.”
So “important” was this “issue” that Reuters felt compelled to craft an entire article around it — like the news agency has nothing better to report.
Is this what Ashcroft’s Judiciary Committee hearings have come to — whining about a joke?
Seems to me the joke is on this entire process involving Ashcroft, not on some clever little comment he made at some point in time.
Kohl, like most other Democrats on the committee and elsewhere in Congress, have moved past the level of hypocrisy over Ashcroft and into a comedy of errors whereby self-serving partisanship is disguised as legitimate inquiry, and phony outrage is portrayed as genuine “concern.”
But the fact is — as Kohl admitted yesterday — Ashcroft will be confirmed because every single senator on Capitol Hill knows this man is no racist, is no shirker of responsibility, and is eminently qualified for the job President-elect Bush has selected him to fill.
Nevertheless, the sanctimonious absurdity persists among partisan liberals who cannot find a real reason to reject Ashcroft on his merits, so they must resort to fabrication of his record and personal attacks to get any traction.
Take Sen. Ted Kennedy’s, D-Mass. chastisement of Ashcroft on Tuesday. Such deceit obviously plays well to the majority of socialist constituents in Boston, but to the rest of the country, Kennedy’s “outrage” and “concern” are about as legitimate as his Chappaquiddick excuse.
On Tuesday, during opening statements, Kennedy criticized Ashcroft’s Second Amendment views: “Sen. Ashcroft is so far out of the mainstream that he has said citizens need to be armed, in order to protect themselves against a tyrannical government. Our government? Tyrannical?”
First of all, Kennedy has killed more people with his driving — namely, Mary Jo Kopechne — than Ashcroft or millions of other Americans have with their “assault” weapons, handguns, and shotguns combined.
Secondly, you bet your assets, Sen. Kennedy — tyrannical, at times. Every agency from the INS to the BATF to the FBI has become more militant and tyrannical under the Clinton administration than at nearly any other time in U.S. history. And “leaders” like you are (which is to say, socialist liberals) are the most responsible for creating this atmosphere of tyranny with your support for overbearing, overreaching, and unconstitutional laws, mandates, rules and regulations.
Now that’s “extremist” and “out of the mainstream” — like Kennedy’s buddy from New York, Sen. Charles Schumer. It is because of these kinds of people that the founders wrote the Second Amendment in the first place.
Between absurd questions over “jokes” and obvious, blatant partisanship, Ashcroft’s confirmation process has turned into little more than a farcical demonstration of why most Americans believe the political process in this country is as productive as a generation of welfare recipients and as valuable as fool’s gold.
Blathering on about “unity” while undermining perhaps one of the most decent men ever to serve the U.S. government is SOP for Democratic socialists, liberals and assorted political “moderates,” but at times the hilarity is worthy of notation.
After all, if it looks, acts and smells like a skunk, that’s probably what it is.
