America's Chief Inquisitor Resigns

Oh, Happy Day!

Lady Justice, Themis to her friends, can bare her fair and balanced breast once more without fear of rude and ignorant cloaking by America's top cop. John Ashcroft, the man who put the most Orwellian twist of Newspeak on the Department of "Justice", has resigned.

His famous last words are wonderfully telling of just who was wearing the blindfold at the DOJ (hint: it wasn't the statue).

"The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved," Ashcroft wrote in a five-page handwritten letter to Bush.

I know I feel much safer with his departure but not for the reasons he's cited. Prior to his being picked as Bush II's national marshall, Mr. A had recently lost in bid for governor of Missouri to a dead man. Sadly, the corpse of Mel Carnahan would've made a better Attorney General as well. I don't think a dead man would've worked so hard fighting porn and prostitution that he never even considered domestic terrorism a threat until after 9-11. Nor would a dead man have even attempted to draft any sort of legalistic end run around the Geneva Conventions so we could get away with torturing prisoners in Abu Grhaib and Gitmo.

And so to Mr. Ashcroft let us not say "good-bye" so much as "good riddance"!