If you're white, you're alright...

...but if you're brown, get out of town, and if you're black ... well, who cares?

("Sudan? People dying? People dying to sue Dan Rather? Is that what you said? Great idea. Tell Ashcroft to get on it.")

From the New York Times, June 22, 2004, Paul Krugman's column:

In April 2003, John Ashcroft's Justice Department disrupted what appears to have been a horrifying terrorist plot. In the small town of Noonday, Tex., F.B.I. agents discovered a weapons cache containing fully automatic machine guns, remote-controlled explosive devices disguised as briefcases, 60 pipe bombs and a chemical weapon — a cyanide bomb — big enough to kill everyone in a 30,000-square-foot building...

... it sounds over the top to accuse Mr. Ashcroft of trying to bury news about terrorists who don't fit his preferred story line. Yet it's hard to believe that William Krar wouldn't have become a household name if he had been a Muslim, or even a leftist. Was Mr. Ashcroft, who once gave an interview with Southern Partisan magazine in which he praised "Southern patriots" like Jefferson Davis, reluctant to publicize the case of a terrorist who happened to be a white supremacist?

More important, is Mr. Ashcroft neglecting real threats to the public because of his ideological biases?

But hey, those Good Ole Boys who rule through the Coup d'Fou of November 2000 aren't racists at all ... just conservative.


The one thing that makes me smile in the face of this sort of insanity is to remember that John Ashcroft will know, to his dying day, that the people of his home state chose to elect a dead man rather than him.

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