Friday, February 25, 2005
Thanks John:
Okay, so it takes the Justice Department 13 months to conclude there are hookers in News Orleans. It takes about 13 seconds for amateur sleuths, once they tried to find something out about this guy Guckert, that initially had nothing to do with sex, to find a hooker in the White House. Is there a word beyond disbelief?
From Slate:
After a man is smeared the way John Ashcroft was during his Senate confirmation hearings last year, the reflexive reaction is to defend him. No one, after all, could be quite the demon that liberals portrayed—a racist, gay-bashing prude intent on transforming the United States into a Christian theocracy. But there's one problem with this contrarian desire to defend the attorney general: Ashcroft keeps getting in the way of it.
The trouble is, Ashcroft sometimes lives up to his critics' caricature—making it hard to object too strenuously to the substance of their complaints, even if those complaints are sometimes unfairly or sloppily drawn. Earlier this month, the Justice Department announced that it had conducted a more than 13-month investigation of a New Orleans bordello. The fruit of the investigation: 12 prostitutes, for a crime that is normally considered a local matter. As George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley put it in the Los Angeles Times, "Only the FBI could go to the French Quarter and find just a dozen prostitutes after a year of investigation."
Slate
Okay, so it takes the Justice Department 13 months to conclude there are hookers in News Orleans. It takes about 13 seconds for amateur sleuths, once they tried to find something out about this guy Guckert, that initially had nothing to do with sex, to find a hooker in the White House. Is there a word beyond disbelief?
From Slate:
After a man is smeared the way John Ashcroft was during his Senate confirmation hearings last year, the reflexive reaction is to defend him. No one, after all, could be quite the demon that liberals portrayed—a racist, gay-bashing prude intent on transforming the United States into a Christian theocracy. But there's one problem with this contrarian desire to defend the attorney general: Ashcroft keeps getting in the way of it.
The trouble is, Ashcroft sometimes lives up to his critics' caricature—making it hard to object too strenuously to the substance of their complaints, even if those complaints are sometimes unfairly or sloppily drawn. Earlier this month, the Justice Department announced that it had conducted a more than 13-month investigation of a New Orleans bordello. The fruit of the investigation: 12 prostitutes, for a crime that is normally considered a local matter. As George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley put it in the Los Angeles Times, "Only the FBI could go to the French Quarter and find just a dozen prostitutes after a year of investigation."
Slate
