...we don't need him as our Attorney General!John Ashcroft resigned today, citing as his reason that there is no more crime or threat of terrorism in the United States today. Really: "The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved." That must be why he was concentrating the FBI's resources on fighting interstate pornography.
I wonder what effect this will have on the Plame Affair investigation, which was said to actually be heading forward under Ashcroft's FBI. If Bush appoints a partisan replacement (not merely extremist), that'll be bottled up like the CIA under Goss, which wasn't able to leak a said-to-be damaging Sep11 report before the election. As for the real reason Ashcroft "resigned", I expect it has to do with the failures of most of the antiterrorism trials due to his Department's overreaching and routinely violating suspects' rights. In addition, Ashcroft's extremism relative to Bush (!) makes him political dead weight. With him gone, Bush can go back to being a "compassionate conservative" again.
Also gone is Commerce Secretary Don Evans. I'm afraid I don't know that much about him or why he'd be invited to give the axe to himself. My notes say he's the source of one report that Bush thinks he's the Messiah, but that was a while ago (I haven't kept notes for close to a year) and isn't really a big enough deal for him to be gotten rid of now and not then. If anyone knows something about what Evans might have done to tick off the top, post it in comments.
Evans has been a close friend of Bush for decades. What the heck is going on? Nobody ever gets fired from organizations like this Administration; everyone always retires for "personal reasons". It's entirely possible that Evans might really be retiring for personal reasons, but I'd like to hear about any possible controversy in this dearth of information. I recall that the last best friend of Bush was Ken Lay..
Posted by Warrior Tang at November 9, 2004 08:10 PM
I heard about Ashcroft's resignation earlier today.
It gave me my first politically-motivated smile since kat's "schadenfreude" post. :)
Posted by: asdfjkl at November 10, 2004 12:31 AM