Point

    Ideology disqualifies Ashcroft for position
    by Michael Kraft, reporter

    George W. Bush is trying to maintain an image of a centrist leader with conservative ideals, but his appointment of John Ashcroft as attorney general is a mistake designed to sate the ultra-right extremists in congress.

    Ashcroft is not fit to be attorney general. While his experience is not to be dismissed, his beliefs and ideologies are so narrow and extreme that he should not be the enforcer of this country’s laws.

    Ashcroft is a racist. In the ’60s as a member of the Missouri State Legislature, he blocked attempts to integrate schools and spoke against the Civil Rights Movement.

    Ashcroft recently granted a questionable interview to a racist southern magazine that recognizes the inherent superiority of the white race.

    Ashcroft is anti-abortion. He is firm in saying that regardless of circumstances, including rape and incest, abortions are wrong and should be illegal. If that were the case, imagine the rise in deaths from dangerous home abortions or trips out of the country for abortions.

    The right to choose and the right to privacy are important, personal issues that Ashcroft wants to take away.

    Ashcroft’s extreme views on these and other issues grew so tiresome to Missouri voters that in the recent election, Ashcroft was voted out of office in favor of a dead man. It is very telling when Ashcroft’s constituency would rather be represented by a dead man’s wife than Ashcroft.

    In recent Senate committee hearings, Ashcroft has been backpedaling quickly, saying that while he may disagree with certain laws such as Roe v. Wade, he will enforce them as his office dictates.

    But Ashcroft is so close to obtaining the office where he could, with the help of a Republican Congress and President, push his extreme views on the rest of us that he will say anything to quiet his detractors.

    Expect the next four years to show a massive reduction in minority rights in employment, erosion of a woman’s right to choose, loss of privacy from Ashcroft’s push for his War on Drugs and increased attempts to get the church into public schools.

    John Ashcroft is a cunning, evil, ruthless man, who will stop at nothing to impose his own demented, conservative Christian and totalitarian ideals on America.

    Ashcroft reminds me of a story that I heard about an old woman and a snake: A woman walking along a road one day comes across an injured snake lying in the road. She puts the snake in her basket and carries it home. She nurses the snake back to health, and the two become friends. They talk and do everything together.

    One day the lady is out with the snake when the snake bites her on the hand. As she is dying from the venom, she looks at the snake, horrified, and says, “Why did you bite me? I thought we were friends.”

    The snake looks at her and says, “Lady, you knew I was a snake when you picked me up.”

    If Ashcroft is confirmed, we know what we will get.

Counterpoint

    Bush nominee upholds high principles
    by Nick Tedford, reporter

    Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Vt.) has expressed deep concern about an interview Southern Partisan magazine conducted with John Ashcroft, attorney general designate.

    Basically, Biden said that Ashcroft would be “blinded by his ideology.”

    I wonder if Biden feels that the liberal interest groups out to thrash Ashcroft’s political throat are “blinded” by their ideology?

    Were those same groups blinded by their ideology when they opposed Clarence Thomas and Robert Bork for the Supreme Court?

    One should remember the remarks of Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) during the Bork hearings when he said, “In Robert Bork’s America … women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids.”

    Were these vicious and despicable words stemming from Kennedy’s blind ideology?

    Biden insisted throughout his diatribe that Ashcroft is a good man, one of integrity and honesty, but he is a conservative.

    These generously asserted qualities, in Biden’s narrow-minded liberal view, seem more the exception than the rule to the conservative philosophy.

    In other words, Ashcroft’s conservative attributes are negative (hence, he cannot possibly enforce the laws) whereas Ashcroft himself is positive (just a good ol’ guy).

    Biden’s premise is that Ashcroft’s conservatism impairs his pledge, mostly ability, to enforce all statutes on the books, particularly abortion and civil rights laws.

    Biden, through the mini-sermon, continuously claimed that many blacks “simply cannot support Ashcroft’s nomination” to the post of chief law enforcement official because of the Southern Partisan interview.

    Such an egregious claim does not hold well because of its intellectual dishonesty and popular myth implications.

    Biden and other liberal questioners ignore the principles that Ashcroft and the periodical hold in common: states’ rights and the 10th Amendment, not the institution of slavery.

    However, it must be noted that this despicable and atrocious institution used as argument advances liberal politics.)

    Biden and others must have forgotten that, as President Reagan once delightfully said, “The federal government didn’t create the states, the states created the federal government.”

    Thus, the liberal case against Ashcroft is based solely on the (implied) notions of insensitivity, harmfulness and racial rigidness of his conservatism as opposed to his law enforcement credentials.

    Those credential should withstand absurd allegations that Ashcroft favors segregation, racism, homophobia, oath-breaking, obstructionism, lying, distortionism and nearly all other liberal attack-line isms.

    This is a man who will hold his principles close to him. He will not force those beliefs on anyone else.