BLAST ASHCROFT; CHECK!

BLAST ASHCROFT; CHECK! [KJL] Paul Krugman makes you stop reading with his opener today: “No question: John Ashcroft is the worst attorney general in history.”

I trust he suffers from selective amnesia and the name “Janet Reno” doesn’t even register with him. (And, yes, I’m ignoring any legitimate criticisms he may have—anthrax—because I stopped reading there….) Posted at 08:54 AM

That Krugman opener is a classic example of liberal historical amnesia. One gets the sense that Krugman didn't even bother to look at a list of former of AGs before he declared Ashcroft is the worst. It's the pragmatic liberal's use of history, if your version works, it's true enough. What about A. Mitchell Palmer? He was the architect of a massive society-wide clamp down on political dissent. Indeed, he was the mastermind of precisely the sort of clamp down Ashcroft haters falsely claim this administration is guilty of and which was far worse than anything that happened during the McCarthy "era." Or, for that matter, what about Bobby Kennedy? He was the one who bugged Martin Luther King -- which we are always told is the highwater mark of government perfidy (they just leave out who was responsible).

Meanwhile, maybe the reason Ashcroft hasn't had too many successful terrorist convictions on his watch is that he's too concerned with preventing more terrorist attacks. There haven't been any on American soil since 9/11 -- which would have shocked everybody three years ago, including Krugman. But I'm sure he's forgotten that too.

PAST THE HYPERVENTILATING [KJL] A few answers to Krugman’s “facts, from a well-informed reader: I must respond to your Corner e-mailer who agrees with Krugman, "minus the hyperventalating". This, from recent AG testimony before Senate Judiciary:

***We have leveled criminal charges against 310 individuals. To date, we have won 179 convictions.

***We have broken up terrorist plots all across America-from Virginia to Oregon, from Florida to New York, in the heartland and on both coasts.

***We have targeted the lifeblood of transnational terrorism, launching 70 investigations into terrorist financing.

But the most tangible measure of success is found in this fact for which we are grateful to God, [fellow] citizens, and law enforcement: For more than two-and-a-half years, we have not experienced a major terrorist attack on U.S. soil.

Well, John Mitchell went to jail for things he did in office. He was Nixon's AG. So forget Reno or Palmer (and, to be candid, jailing bolshie's never bothered me) isn't John Mitchell the gold standard of AG malevolence? You are right about liberals not even remembering where they were just yesterday.

RE: PALMER [John Fonte] The response from a reader to Jonah on A. Mitchell Palmer (he was okay because he "jailed Bolshies") was basically on target. Conservatives should not join the liberal-left in attacking Palmer and bemoaning the "Red Scare" after World War I. The so-called "Red Scare" was more accurately a "Red Threat," with bombs going off on Wall Street and a lot of alien subversives running around who deserved to be deported by the US government. By trashing Palmer, the liberal-left (and, alas, some on the right) seek to discredit anti-subversive activities in general, including the Red threat of the 1930s-1950s and the domestic Radical Islamist threat today. Posted at 01:19 PM

1) Surely you have no problem illuminating the inconvenient fact that the Red Scare was the product of a liberal Democratic administration. To listen to liberals talk about McCarythism, one would think that such episodes can and must spring forth only from Republican and conservative administrations and politicians. Surely, the fact that the Wilson administration was far more complicit in a far greater crackdown on dissidents, socialists, and "Bolshies" than anything which transpired on Eisenhower's watch or was done by Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn is significant.

2) When I condemn Palmer -- at least in this context -- I'm trying to illustrate that by the standards of the liberal-left Palmer was a very bad guy. For some reason, when the liberal-left commits heinous acts we're supposed to believe they were the product of America's fundamental badness. When "conservatives" do bad things, however, we're told such crimes are a direct and logical consequence of their ideology. In this way, liberals can (or try to) claim that they have always and everywhere been on the right side of history, which is utter nonsense.

Hence "America" failed when a liberal president interned Japanese-Americans. Hence America or, even better, "right-wingers" were responsible for the Red Scare under Wilson when in fact liberals and even socialists deserve much of the blame.

Industrialists, for example, may be partly to blame for the "rush to war" in WWI, but that explanation was in no small part put forward to hide the blame which deserved to rest squarely on the shoulders of pro-war socialists and liberals in America. Indeed, most liberals and socialists in America were very pro-war. And for all the grief conservatives get these days for being “haters,” we can’t hold a candle to those guys. Pro-war socialist Charles E. Russel declared that his former colleagues should be “driven from the country.” J.G. Phelps Stokes insisted that anti-war socialists should be “shot at once without delay.” Etc. Etc.

3) I do not dispute that during the witch hunts of the Red Scare there were real witches. But that doesn't absolve the Wilson administration of everything it did. Truth be told, the Palmer Raids and that stuff doesn't bother me nearly as much as the way Wilson and Creel manipulated the public into war. But that's a subject for another day.

RE: PALMER RAIDS [John Derbyshire] Jonah has a good point. If memory serves, it was that great Republican president Warren G. Harding who released lefty troublemaker Eugene Debs from jail (whither he had been sent by Wilson) on Christmas Eve 1921, saying: "I want thim to eat his Christmas dinner with his wife."

Harding's middle name was "Gamaliel." When I first encountered this fine man in my reading, I didn't know where to stress "Gamaliel," so I asked an American historian. Then I wrote a poem to help me remember.

Higgledy piggledy Warren Ga-MA-liel Quite unexpectedly Gave up the ghost. Taciturn Yankee, Woken from slumber, Sworn in by father, Took up the post.

[Kathryn: I have lots more poetry for The Corner, if there's a demand for it. Kathryn? Hello?] Posted at 03:14 PM

What about A. Mitchell Palmer? He was the architect of a massive society-wide clamp down on political dissent. Indeed, he was the mastermind of precisely the sort of clamp down Ashcroft haters falsely claim this administration is guilty of

What about Palmer? He shipped a load of anarchistic communist Wobbly creeps out of the country. Rather than unburden us with Islamic nut jobs by similar deportations, Ashcroft clamps down on American freedoms while waging a no-holds-barred War on Americans in the name of fighting the use of a vegetable growing wild all over the world.

the reason Ashcroft hasn't had too many successful terrorist convictions on his watch is that he's too concerned with preventing more terrorist attacks

Maybe if Ashcroft hadn't been denying frantic requests for more antiterrorism funding right up until 9/11, while lying to Congress that fighting terror was his job one, the FBI wouldn't have been ignoring warnings from their own agents.

I happen to think that John Ashcroft is one of the best A.G.'s we've ever had. The same goes for Rumsfeld, Rice,Powell and Ridge,(in their respective positions). If I mispelled some names do to the influx of Maker's Mark,I don't care. Someday people will recognize that this is one of the greatest cabinets of history. If not, we will all surely understand the meaning of sharia.

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