From the 4.19.04 Virgin Islands Daily News

This week Attorney General John Ashcroft appeared before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States and revealed, to an astonished America, that the 9/11 attacks were the fault of (gasp!) Bill Clinton.

In doing so, Ashcroft was adhering to the most sacred organizing principle of the Bush Administration, which can best be phrased as, "The Buck Stops Back There." Blaming Bill Clinton has supplanted baseball as the national pastime among certain groups of conservative politicians. There is no end to it. One Republican legislator actually made a public statement suggesting that the Enron scandal occurred as a result of the failure of moral leadership from the White House. This prompted The New Republic to comment on the ludicrousness of the notion that a major corporation was looted by its management because Bill Clinton was the recipient of extra-marital fellatio.

Clinton has not actually been blamed for Original Sin or the attack on Pearl Harbor, but Republican strategists are reportedly working to develop plausible scenarios. Ashcroft seems to be banking on the notion that the public will believe that a man who had an affair and lied about it must necessarily be responsible for the overall decline of Western Civilization. Perhaps he is unaware of the adage that holds that you can't fool all of the people all of the time.

Listening to Ashcroft, I was struck by the confluence of circumstances that allowed him to become attorney general of the United States. Many do not remember that he was only available for the job because he lost a Missouri senatorial election to Mel Carnahan, who had actually died in a plane crash two weeks before the election. The voters of Missouri are to be congratulated on their discernment.

It is also worth recalling some of the major accomplishments of Ashcroft's tenure as attorney general. He has presided over his department's bumbling prosecution of Zaccarias Moussaoui, whom they seem unable to handle even though a great part of the time he is not represented by a lawyer. There was his announcement of the arrest of "Dirty Bomber" Jose Padilla, despite Padilla's conspicuous lack of the technology or materials to build a dirty bomb. There is the subsequent detention of Padilla, a U. S. citizen arrested on U.S. soil, for over a year without being charged or having access to counsel. There was the successful prosecution of a "terror cell" in the Pacific Northwest, whose members tried to go to fight in Afghanistan, but were unable to actually find Afghanistan. I suggest that a better alternative to prosecution would have been to take them to Afghanistan and leave them there.

For my part, I think that some of the criticism that conservatives have leveled against Bill Clinton are a little unfair. Yes, he had the personal morality of a feral cat, but he tried hard to be a good President, presided over an era of peace and prosperity. Also, in his eight years as President, he never actually led us to war over nonexistent weapons of mass destruction.

And Ashcroft's efforts to deflect the mounting criticism of the Bush Administration onto Bill Clinton make me wonder if perhaps we wouldn't be better off with someone else holding the office of Attorney General. I wonder if Mel Carnahan is available?