Politics:How Much We Can Stand To Lose?
TalkLeft's Jeralyn Merritt, guesting for Eric Alterman over at Altercation lays out a good impact analysis of the indictments John Ashcroft announced yesterday. The point is well made that this series of arrests stems from Ashcroft's pioneering use of intelligence information that was previously off-limits to domestic law-enforcement. While the domestic law enforcement agencies can't go spying, listening in on phone calls and whatnot, the intelligence services have no such restrictions. Essentially, the handing-off of this information between intelligence gatherers and law enforcers renders the ban on using US intelligence resources against American citizens for law enforcement purposes moot. Welcome to a new era of domestic spying.
There has to be a limit, doesn't there? I don't think there are any better ways to raise the red flag on this. America's leaders are acting as if they enjoy unchecked freedom to threaten, intimidate, arrest, deport, jettison and terrorize people based on a lunatic guiding force of good that is derived from their Sunday-school prayer breakfasts. They employ a passive level of racism far more invasive and frightening than the Jim Crow nightmare America should be working to leave behind right now. They are destroying the freedoms America is supposed to represent for people who come here expecting more of us. These are the rights of people who are very much like us: A college professor from Florida who has lived in this country for 25 years. A Canadian loan officer who was harassed and threatened by U.S. INS agents at O'Hare airport then sent to India instead of home to Toronto. The president of a non-profit organization from Chicago.
They are all 'catches,' it seems, in the view of modern crusader John Ashcroft. It is his racist narrow-mindedness, patronizing religiosity, and his capacity to bend the truth when it suits his needs that makes him such a formidable foe. In the end, because of bigots like Ashcroft who don't have the ability to see the error of their ways, America will be consumed in a devastating spasm of race-baiting, ethnic violence and institutionalized racism. If there is another terrorist attack in these United States, it will be over for law-abiding Americans who happen to be Arab descendents. There will be camps, or more mass registration drives backed up with the heavy hand of Ashcroft's thugs, or new powers to spy on every Arab based on the belief that we're all terrorists until proven otherwise.
Ashcroft will see that this disastrous future comes to pass because he is driven by an amalgam of a personal and flawed view of Christian doctrine, combined with evangelical beliefs, neo-conservative dogma, confederate revisionism and just plain stupidity, He, like President Bush, believes that there are simple lines between good and evil in the world. Ashcroft honestly thinks that every time he can bring together some racist hunches, some illegal snooping and a couple of white lies to make a connection between enough dots to land someone on the wrong side of that line, he's got an 'evildoer' and that's that.
But nobody ever asks the questions about good and evil that will drop Ashcroft like a rock. Somehow, for years, he has managed to avoid answering these questions. Try them on for size:
1. Is slavery evil, Mr. Ashcroft?
2. During an interview in Southern Partisan magazine, you praised the publication and said that it "helps set the record straight." You then added, "You've got a heritage of doing that, of defending Southern patriots like Lee, [Stonewall] Jackson and Davis. Traditionalists must do more. I've got to do more. We've all got to stand up and speak in this respect, or else we'll be taught that these people were giving their lives, subscribing their sacred fortunes and their honor to some perverted agenda." Did you mean that there was something wholesome and true about defending the right of millions of white folk to own, buy, sell, beat and kill black people solely on the basis of their skin color?
3. Should black public school students be allowed to attend the same schools as white public school students?
4. So why did you fight a federal order to desegregate St. Louis public schools when you were Missouri Attorney General? Why, exactly, were you threatened with a contempt charge for failing to comply with federal orders to file a desegregation plan for two urban school districts?
5. Should African Americans be allowed to hold public office alongside white people?
6. So why did you work so hard and expend so much capital to ensure that the Senate rejected the federal court nomination of Missouri's first African American supreme court justice?
7. What about inter-racial dating? Should that be allowed?
8. So, when you accepted an honorary degree from Bob Jones University, a school that lost its tax-exempt status because it refused to abandon its racist policies, were you endorsing those racist policies?
9. Should people be free of intimidation and exclusion in the workplace on the basis of their religious beliefs?
10. So how do the Muslim, Hindu and Jewish staff members of the Justice Department feel about your Christian prayer meetings on federal property, inside the Department of Justice? Is there any chance that your position as the nation's top law enforcement officer should preclude you from engaging in activity which could violate the establishment clause of the Bill of Rights?
There are ten questions for Attorney General Ashcroft. I'll be glad to take more. But the point of this is not what John Ashcroft has been willing to do. Bad people do bad things. What is at issue here is how much this country can stand to lose. How much progress on equal respect and treatment can we sacrifice to this bloodless madman's crusade? How much racism are we willing to see written into our nation's laws? How can we maintain a single shred of dignity with men like this at the ship's helm?
Bob said it: "So many roads, so much at stake / So many dead ends, I'm at the edge of the lake / Sometimes I wonder what its gonna take / To find dignity"
TalkLeft's Jeralyn Merritt, guesting for Eric Alterman over at Altercation lays out a good impact analysis of the indictments John Ashcroft announced yesterday. The point is well made that this series of arrests stems from Ashcroft's pioneering use of intelligence information that was previously off-limits to domestic law-enforcement. While the domestic law enforcement agencies can't go spying, listening in on phone calls and whatnot, the intelligence services have no such restrictions. Essentially, the handing-off of this information between intelligence gatherers and law enforcers renders the ban on using US intelligence resources against American citizens for law enforcement purposes moot. Welcome to a new era of domestic spying.
There has to be a limit, doesn't there? I don't think there are any better ways to raise the red flag on this. America's leaders are acting as if they enjoy unchecked freedom to threaten, intimidate, arrest, deport, jettison and terrorize people based on a lunatic guiding force of good that is derived from their Sunday-school prayer breakfasts. They employ a passive level of racism far more invasive and frightening than the Jim Crow nightmare America should be working to leave behind right now. They are destroying the freedoms America is supposed to represent for people who come here expecting more of us. These are the rights of people who are very much like us: A college professor from Florida who has lived in this country for 25 years. A Canadian loan officer who was harassed and threatened by U.S. INS agents at O'Hare airport then sent to India instead of home to Toronto. The president of a non-profit organization from Chicago.
They are all 'catches,' it seems, in the view of modern crusader John Ashcroft. It is his racist narrow-mindedness, patronizing religiosity, and his capacity to bend the truth when it suits his needs that makes him such a formidable foe. In the end, because of bigots like Ashcroft who don't have the ability to see the error of their ways, America will be consumed in a devastating spasm of race-baiting, ethnic violence and institutionalized racism. If there is another terrorist attack in these United States, it will be over for law-abiding Americans who happen to be Arab descendents. There will be camps, or more mass registration drives backed up with the heavy hand of Ashcroft's thugs, or new powers to spy on every Arab based on the belief that we're all terrorists until proven otherwise.
Ashcroft will see that this disastrous future comes to pass because he is driven by an amalgam of a personal and flawed view of Christian doctrine, combined with evangelical beliefs, neo-conservative dogma, confederate revisionism and just plain stupidity, He, like President Bush, believes that there are simple lines between good and evil in the world. Ashcroft honestly thinks that every time he can bring together some racist hunches, some illegal snooping and a couple of white lies to make a connection between enough dots to land someone on the wrong side of that line, he's got an 'evildoer' and that's that.
But nobody ever asks the questions about good and evil that will drop Ashcroft like a rock. Somehow, for years, he has managed to avoid answering these questions. Try them on for size:
1. Is slavery evil, Mr. Ashcroft?
2. During an interview in Southern Partisan magazine, you praised the publication and said that it "helps set the record straight." You then added, "You've got a heritage of doing that, of defending Southern patriots like Lee, [Stonewall] Jackson and Davis. Traditionalists must do more. I've got to do more. We've all got to stand up and speak in this respect, or else we'll be taught that these people were giving their lives, subscribing their sacred fortunes and their honor to some perverted agenda." Did you mean that there was something wholesome and true about defending the right of millions of white folk to own, buy, sell, beat and kill black people solely on the basis of their skin color?
3. Should black public school students be allowed to attend the same schools as white public school students?
4. So why did you fight a federal order to desegregate St. Louis public schools when you were Missouri Attorney General? Why, exactly, were you threatened with a contempt charge for failing to comply with federal orders to file a desegregation plan for two urban school districts?
5. Should African Americans be allowed to hold public office alongside white people?
6. So why did you work so hard and expend so much capital to ensure that the Senate rejected the federal court nomination of Missouri's first African American supreme court justice?
7. What about inter-racial dating? Should that be allowed?
8. So, when you accepted an honorary degree from Bob Jones University, a school that lost its tax-exempt status because it refused to abandon its racist policies, were you endorsing those racist policies?
9. Should people be free of intimidation and exclusion in the workplace on the basis of their religious beliefs?
10. So how do the Muslim, Hindu and Jewish staff members of the Justice Department feel about your Christian prayer meetings on federal property, inside the Department of Justice? Is there any chance that your position as the nation's top law enforcement officer should preclude you from engaging in activity which could violate the establishment clause of the Bill of Rights?
There are ten questions for Attorney General Ashcroft. I'll be glad to take more. But the point of this is not what John Ashcroft has been willing to do. Bad people do bad things. What is at issue here is how much this country can stand to lose. How much progress on equal respect and treatment can we sacrifice to this bloodless madman's crusade? How much racism are we willing to see written into our nation's laws? How can we maintain a single shred of dignity with men like this at the ship's helm?
Bob said it: "So many roads, so much at stake / So many dead ends, I'm at the edge of the lake / Sometimes I wonder what its gonna take / To find dignity"
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