Thank You, John Ashcroft

Michelle Malkin:

He was the most underappreciated, most maligned, most ridiculed, and most demonized member of the Bush cabinet. He endured a brutal, vicious nomination process. After 9/11, he was damned for doing his job too aggressively, and damned for not doing his job aggressively enough. He withstood the secular Left's assaults on his deeply-held faith, and devoted himself to his tasks to the point of exhaustion.

In short, he bore all of the blame for the War on Terror's shortcomings, won little credit for its successes, and earned undeserved and largely uninformed scorn on both sides of the aisle. It will be the same way for whomever replaces him.

For reasons not worth describing, I ended up watching most of Hardball last night and the main complaint about Ashcroft was that he was so religious. Not that there were any examples of that causing a problem, it's just that it was so icky. Anyhow, he also gets my gratitude for an event that I suspect may be little remembered - turning in erstwhile 9/11 Commissioner Jaime Gorelick as the prime architect of the "wall" that prevented the pre 9/11 Justice Department from effectively investigating terrorists. It's the perfect example of what happens when you have PC tinkerers like Janet Reno and her clown posse running the shop.