John Ashcroft Needs to be the Next to Go...

I hope you caught the news coverage of the Senate hearings yesterday. The man on the stand: John Ashcroft. The subject: a White House lawyers' report saying that the Bush administration was not bound by international law against torture in certain cases. The interrogator: Sen. Joseph Biden.

Through clenched teeth, Sen Biden chewed up and spit out Ashcroft. Paraphrasing Biden's comments: "Here's why we can't do what this report says we can do Mr. Ashcroft - because of my son who is stationed in the Middle East. We can't be doing this to our prisoners, because they'll do the same thing to my son - do you understand that?"

And then in a response that perfectly characterizes why Ashcroft lost his Senate seat to a dead man: "I have a son too who has been there twice in the last year."

This "compassionate conservative" could care less about his own son apparently, much less our military and private citizens who are in foreign countries. He couldn't connect the dots, even with his own flesh and blood at risk. The United States, previously in the vanguard of the treatment of war prisoners after the experiences of WWII, has in three short years now come to the point of justifying torture.

Ashcroft didn't catch one other irony of his testimony - it's the same sort of thinking Saddam Hussein would have used 15 years ago when using chemical weapons on the Kurds: international law be damned. The rights of foreigners be damned. And with the Patriot Acts: The rights of U.S. citizens be damned.

That's why John Ashcroft needs to resign - now.