Demonic_ How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America - Ann Coulter [22]
What if we had treated the top leaders of al Qaeda the way a completely innocent bystander was treated in the L.A. riots? Would Maxine Waters defend it?
Other “corrective” techniques used against top-ranking al Qaeda members included facial slaps, abdominal slaps, facial holds, and “attention grasps.”45 If you can’t quite picture “the grasp,” think back to every department store you have ever been in where you saw a mother trying to get her misbehaving child’s attention.
Reginald Denny will never again be able to drive a truck or operate heavy machinery.46 (Whereas Abu Zubaydah feels uneasy whenever he sees a butterfly.)
But Maxine Waters, who ferociously defended Damian Williams, remains an honored guest at MSNBC, where Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann were convinced that once Americans found out the CIA was depriving al Qaeda terrorists of sleep, there would be a revolt.
Contrasting the treatment of Reginald Denny and Abu Zubaydah makes no sense to liberals. They can’t see contradictions, so their minds go blank. You might as well be speaking to them in Urdu.
But for breathtaking cognitive dissonance, nothing beats the Left’s comparative ranking of Attorneys General Janet Reno and John Ashcroft. Ashcroft was regularly referred to by liberals as the worst attorney general in human history—and that was in his honeymoon phase, before they started saying he was as bad as Osama bin Laden.
The New York Times’s Paul Krugman called Ashcroft “the worst attorney general in history”47—less charitable than even Anthony Romero of the American Civil Liberties Union, who said Ashcroft “will turn out to be one of the worst attorney generals in American history.”48 Rutgers University law professor Frank Askin said Ashcroft was “the worst attorney general in my memory,” adding, “There’s nothing good I can say about him. I’m glad he’s gone.”49
Ashcroft was repeatedly called a fascist—in the pages of The Nation magazine, by elderly protesters at Ashcroft’s speeches, and in college faculty lounges. Handgun Control Inc. compared Ashcroft’s positions to those of “convicted mass-murderer Timothy McVeigh,” and the Los Angeles Times ran a cartoon with Ashcroft in the white robe and hood of a Klansman.50 Presidential candidate Howard Dean proclaimed that Ashcroft was “not a patriot” and, of course, compared him to Joe McCarthy.51 John Edwards accused him of trying “to take away our rights, our freedoms, and our liberties.”52 Legendary New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis compared him to Osama bin Laden.53
All in all, it was the worst celebrity roast I’ve ever attended.
How about we compare Ashcroft to Janet Reno? It’s not as if you have to go back to the Garfield administration to find an attorney general who was arguably worse than Ashcroft. Let’s look at the attorney general he succeeded.
Attorney General Reno’s military-style attack on a religious sect in Waco, Texas, led to the greatest number of U.S. civilians ever killed by the government in the history of the United States. The sect’s leader, David Koresh, may have run a weird cult, but that falls under “I don’t approve,” not “This is a threat to the domestic tranquillity of the nation.” Reno wanted to target religious fanatics, and the ATF wanted a military confrontation as a demonstration of their manliness, so Americans had to die.
More Americans were killed at Waco than at any of the various markers on the Left’s via dolorosa—more than at Kent State (4 killed), more than as a result of the Haymarket Square prosecutions (4 executed), more than at Three Mile Island (0 died).
SCORE
• American civilians killed by Ashcroft:
0
• American civilians killed by Reno:
80
As Dade County (Florida) state attorney, Janet Reno made a name for herself as one of the leading witch-hunters in the notorious “child molestation” cases from the eighties, when convictions of innocent Americans were won on the basis of heavily coached testimony from small children. In 1984, Reno’s office charged Grant Snowden with child molestation and convicted him of molesting a child,