THE CUDDLY, obsequious warmth between John Ashcroft and the racist right is quite up front in his 1998 interview with Southern Partisan, a journal that glorifies the Confederacy and views people of color as mosquitos swarming onto the veranda to ruin the evening's mint julep.
In the precede to the interview, Southern Partisan said that Ashcroft, the nominee for attorney general, is ''a champion of states' rights and traditional values. He is also a jealous defender of national sovereignty against the New World Order. His bold leadership on these issues and others makes this Border State senator a natural for the pages of Southern Partisan.''
If Southern Partisan considers Ashcroft a ''natural,'' then his nomination by President-elect George W. Bush should be declared a natural disaster. After winning the political civil war, Bush has chosen to shoot the defeated in the back by elevating a man who praises the traitors of the real Civil War.
In Southern Partisan, Ashcroft praised the journal's defense of the Old South. He said, ''You've got a heritage of doing that, of defending Southern patriots like Lee, 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. ... The right of individuals to respect our history is a right that the politically correct crowd wants to eliminate, and this is not acceptable. Take those history standards: the standards make no mention of Lee's military genius!''
Never mind that the sacred fortune of the Confederacy and the United States was slave labor. Never mind that by not ending slavery in the formation of this nation, the Founding Fathers left in place a white supremacy that still haunts us 226 years after the Declaration of Independence.
Ashcroft said, ''Revisionism is a threat to the respect that Americans have for their freedoms and liberty ... when we see George Washington, the founder of our country, called a racist, that is just total revisionist nonsense, a diatribe against the values of America.''
It makes you wonder what kind of revisionist nonsense Ashcroft would attempt at Justice. He probably would look at a briefing on DWB and assume it not to be Driving While Black but instead a list of old black men who are Driving W. Bush. One has to wonder, when he fawns over a journal where articles have claimed that former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke is ''a populist spokesperson for a recapturing of the American ideal.''
One has to wonder when the journal has articles that say: ''Negroes, Asians, and Orientals (is Japan the exception?), Hispanics, Latins, and Eastern Europeans have no temperament for democracy, never had, and probably never will.''
''No one can doubt the effectiveness of the original Ku Klux Klan. Without it we might never have shaken off the curse of the carpetbag, scalawag governments that bound us hand and foot.''
''Slave owners ... did not have a practice of breaking up slave families. If anything, they encouraged strong slave families to further the slaves' peace and happiness.''
Ashcroft is under fire most notably for his rejection of a black judge to the federal bench. He has defended himself by saying he approved of two dozen other black appointees and that he signed the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday into law when he was governor of Missouri.
But the nation's top law enforcer cannot be someone who vacillates between civil rights and Civil War fantasies. It cannot have someone who accepted in 1999 an honorary degree from Bob Jones University, which then banned interracial dating, described Catholicism as a cult, and bans gay alumni from its grounds. A new book last year reported that university founder Bob Jones Sr. was an active Klan sympathizer and once received $1,600 from the KKK after a speech.
During the primaries last year, Bush spoke at the school and said nothing about its segregationist policies or religious bigotry. Shortly after Bush's accommodationist appearance, the school dropped the dating ban. Now we have a president who befriended racists appointing an attorney general who befriended racists. That leaves little doubt that Ashcroft is much more likely to befriend the perpetrators of racism, sexism, and homophobia than the victims.
When Ashcroft says the traditionalists must do more, America should tremble. The nomination is so perverted, it should follow the final path of his Confederate heroes. It should be driven off in a scorched-earth campaign.
© Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company
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