Author: Ed Weathers

IF A DRUM BEATS IN THE FOREST . . .

Correction: In last week’s column I said that Wesley Clark had voted for George W. Bush in the last presidential election. I was wrong. By his own account, Clark voted for Gore in 2000 and for Clinton in the two elections before that. The last Bush he voted for was George H.W. Bush in 1988. Such mistakes have a way of taking on a life of their own, so please correct this one with anyone you might have sent the column to. I’m sorry I screwed up.

–Ed Weathers

My friends in the Wesley Clark campaign are getting all excited. My friends in the Howard Dean campaign have been excited for months. I don’t have any friends in the Kerry or Gephardt campaigns, but I’m sure the good folks there are excited too. Each of these groups is caught up in their own candidate’s meetings or meet-ups or speeches. As a result, they are now disposed to believe that most everyone else out there–at least every Democrat–is as enthralled by their candidate as they are.

I have a friend in New York City who has not been very politically active in the past, but now he’s been to several meet-ups for Dean and he’s convinced that a whole new political movement is underway, that the world of American politics is being revolutionized by the Internet and by a new kind of grassroots organizing and by the charisma of his candidate.

I admire my friend’s enthusiasm. I believe that kind of enthusiasm is absolutely essential if our democracy is going to work. But now I want to drag him back to earth.

It’s time for everyone beating the drums for any particular Democratic candidate to step back for a reality check. Here’s reality, people: The vast majority of American voters don’t care about your candidate, one way or the other. They don’t care about any candidate. In fact, a goodly portion of Democrats don’t care, either. If a drum beats in the forest . . .

Some facts: In a CBS News poll taken less than five weeks ago, two-thirds of all registered voters could not name a single Democratic presidential candidate off the top of their heads. That’s right, more than 60% of voters didn’t know the name of a single Democratic candidate. Not Dean. Not Kerry. Not Clark. I suspect that that hasn’t changed much in the last five weeks.

In another poll taken just this past week, 41% of registered voters said they are paying “no” or “almost no” attention to the 2004 presidential race. Another 41% claim to be paying “some” attention–a lukewarm commitment at best. That’s 82% of voters who pretty much have other things on their minds than how Howard is dealing with Wesley or whether Richard is drawing voters from John.

As for all you Dean and Clark enthusiasts, listen to this: As of last week, 70% of Democrats had not “heard enough” about either of your candidates. That’s a nice way for the pollsters to say your candidates haven’t even entered the realms of consciousness of your own party.

This isn’t to say you shouldn’t get excited about your candidates. It’s just to say that you need to pace yourselves a bit and, to employ a common sports metaphor, keep your focus. Like a college football team, you don’t want to peak in the pre-season or use up all your adrenaline in your excitement over a locker-room speech.

You also need to remember that your job is still to reach all those undecideds out there–not just those undecided Democrats you want to attract to your candidate in the primaries, but, even more important, those undecided Independents whom you need to lure away from George W. Bush in the 2004 election. Don’t go around congratulating yourselves on your fund-raising and meet-ups.

There just aren’t that many of you out there, no matter how crowded the high school gym where your candidate gave his last speech. Remember the big picture: Beating Bush is far, far more important than getting your particular candidate elected. Millions of Democrats, whether yet engaged in the primary campaign or not, are all agreed that Bush needs to go and just need to be encouraged. Meanwhile, millions of Independent voters are waiting to be convinced. They–the distracted and the Independent–are your market. They are the audience you need to reach.

Your job may be to plump for your favorite candidate. But your mission is to defeat George W. Bush and his reckless, repressive, elitist, opaque, cronyist, thoroughly polluted administration. To do this, you must marshal your facts. Make sure you know what Bush and his gang have done to the Clean Air Act. Make sure you know what they’ve done to the Freedom of Information Act. Make sure you know whom they’ve nominated to federal judgeships and what narrow minds those nominees have.

Learn how Bush, Rumsfeld and Ashcroft have used the terrorist attacks and the resulting U.S. Patriot Act and Homeland Security Act to lead us closer to a police state than at any other time in our history. Learn the facts about the cost, in humanity and resources, of the Iraq War and the Mad George tax cut. Arm yourselves with facts, facts and more facts. Then find a bunch of Independent voters and pepper them with those facts. Be nice, but make them listen.

Speaking of facts, here’s a polling fact that should encourage us all. It’s important enough to put in bold type: In last month’s CBS News poll, only 38% of all registered voters predicted that George W. Bush will be reelected in 2004. Fifty percent said a Democrat could win. That’s an amazing pair of numbers. The president who shortly after 9/11 had the highest approval rating in U.S. history is now eminently vulnerable in the next election, according to the American electorate.

Compare that to a poll in November, 1991: At that time, a year before the 1992 presidential race, 47% of registered voters expected George H.W. Bush, fresh from his Desert Storm “triumph,” to win the next year’s presidential race. In other words, George the Baby is now doing worse than his father was doing at about the same time relative to the election 12 years ago. And we all know what happened to George the Grown-Up in 1992.

Democrats have reason, then, to hope. And reason to work. So whether you’re aligned or unaligned when it comes to particular Democratic candidates, keep fighting the good fight. Just remember that the fight is not against Dean or Clark or Kerry or Gephardt. There’s a dragon to be slain.

PASSIONS AND INTERESTS

from the New York Times

“…When you actually talk to people on both sides…you find that they still desperately want choices– even if their leaders tell them they have none. I interviewed young fighters from Yasir Arafat’s Tanzim militia. What I remember most was when one of them, Anas Assaf, became emotional. Once was when I asked him what would happen if Israel threw out Mr. Arafat. Palestinians would turn the area into a ‘hell’ for Israel, he shot back. The other was when he talked about his dream of going to the University of Memphis, where his uncle lived, ‘to study engineering.’….That is the whole story: Anas is ready to die for Yasir Arafat but wants to live for the University of Memphis. He has interests and passions, and it is possible to alter the balance between them….”

To read balance of article, CLICK HERE. (Or go to http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/02/opinion/02FRIE.html)

Over-40s will recall the “Golden Fleece Awards” handed out by William Proxmire, the former Wisconsin Senator best remembered for having conducted a decades-long, one-man crusade against government waste, particularly in the military.

Proxmire, remember, would regularly publish monthly lists of government funding foul-ups, usually focused on over-spending on simple things. He particularly enjoyed railing against the Defense Department for its expenditures on such items as $5 nuts, $50 bolts, $500 screwdrivers, and $5000 toilet seats.

Perhaps President Bush should bring the former Wisconsin Democrat, now 87, out of retirement, and ask him to scrutinize the nuts and bolts of this Administration’s whopping $87 billion budgetary request for funds to “reconstruct” Iraq. For surely, this request deserves Golden-Fleece-level scrutiny.

We at the Flyer could go on and on — and have — about how the Bush Administration’s decision to launch a pre-emptive war against Iraq was singularly bone-headed. But that will get us nowhere. Neither will our wishing-and-hoping that other developed nations bail us out with troops and/or money. For better or worse, the rest of the world views Americans as bulls in a china shop. We were the ones who threw caution to the wind, and went charging into Iraq. We broke the vase. Now we own it.

That vase comes with an $87 billion price tag, $66 billion of which is earmarked for the Pentagon. What details we so far know must be giving the retired Wisconsin Senator the willies. Wonder what Proxmire thinks, for example, of the $4 million we’ve set aside for developing telephone area codes in Iraq, or of the $19 million we supposedly need to establish wireless Internet service? And what would he say about the $100 million we’ve set aside for a couple of thousand sanitation trucks, at $50,000 apiece?

Back in April, the Financial Times reported that our all-conquering army was purchasing diesel for its tanks (from American-owned private companies, of course) at roughly $150 a gallon. Hopefully, though, the Defense Department can cut a better deal this time around, since the Administration, in this budget, is earmarking $900 million – we’re not making this up –for the importation of petroleum products into Iraq!

Frankly, we’re surprised that little nuggets like this haven’t sent former Senator Proxmire, despite his years, out screaming into the street. And we’re even more amazed that all Americans aren’t asking the same kind of questions about the Iraq budget so far being asked by only a handful of enterprising reporters.

Just last week, on a Baghdad website, an anonymous Iraqi engineer noted that he and his colleagues had estimated the reconstruction cost of a damaged bridge in his neighborhood at $120,000, only to find out that Bechtol, the American contractor, had already put a price tag on the project: $1.4 million.

Perhaps this story is apocryphal, but the issues it raises certainly are not. Given its track record and its cozy relationship with so many of the reconstruction corporate players, how can one not view Bush Administration requests for funding with anything but extreme skepticism?

And as for the $66 billion earmarked for the Pentagon, how can Congress possibly approve this funding without insisting upon a leadership change at the Department of Defense? By unnecessarily antagonizing potential allies, by grossly underestimating his troop needs in “liberated” Iraq, and by allowing the near-complete destruction of that country’s infrastructure in the aftermath of our April “victory,” Donald Rumsfeld has already shown himself to be historically inept. The idea of giving so incompetent a Defense secretary responsibility for distributing $66 billion of taxpayer funds in Iraq is ludicrous to the extreme.

Only after President Bush has given Rumsfeld his walking papers should Congress even begin to consider the Administration’s Iraq budget. And only after that budget is gone over with William Proxmire’s fine-toothed comb should its approval even be contemplated, by either the House or the Senate.

(Kenneth Neill is publisher/CEO of Contemporary Media, Inc., parent company of The Memphis Flyer.)

IS WESLEY THE ANSWER?

So let us now consider Wesley Clark.

If you are a Democrat, here are the questions you should be asking yourself:

1) Can a general–a lifelong military man whose career, let’s be honest, has largely been devoted to figuring out ways to have people killed–properly represent the Democrat Party?

2) Can a man who voted for Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan (twice) and George H.W. Bush for president; who served in Gerald Ford’s White House; who just two years ago praised the current Bush administration as a “great team” at a Republican fundraiser; and who only lately declared his political affiliation be a real Democrat?

3) Does a man famous for his single-minded ambition and long accustomed to having people say “Yes, sir!” to his every command have the personal warmth, humility, and people skills to attract independent voters and later work with Congress as president?

4) Does a Johnny-come-lately who has never held political office and who hasn’t yet fleshed out his positions on many issues (the budget deficit, health care, the death penalty) deserve to get the support of Democrats–especially Democrats who have already placed themselves in either the Dean or Kerry camps?

5) Is he just a stalking horse for Hillary?

6) Is he electable?

7) Should you start working for him?

As a lifelong left-wing pacifist-leaning Democrat, I hereby offer my own my answers:

1) Yes. 2) Yes. 3) Let’s hope so. 4) Yes. 5) Of course not. 6) Yes. 7) Yes, if you want a Democrat in the White House in 2005.

Let’s take the issues one at a time.

1) A Democratic general? Sure. Why not? True, as a party, the Democrats have always sat far across the room from the military-industrial complex and eyed it with distrust. For Democrats, speaking softly has always been more important than swinging the big stick. But with his experience in negotiating the Dayton accords that ended the killing in Bosnia, and with his credentials as Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, Clark has learned the importance of going into battle only after you have the support of the international community. Given that the current Republican Party has no respect whatsoever for a true internationalist (see how they’ve marginalized Colin Powell), where else is a politician who believes in multilateralism to go except to the Democratic Party? In fact, think of it this way: If Colin Powell himself asked, wouldn’t you, as a Democrat, welcome him into the party, even now, with open arms? Yes, generals think a lot about having people killed. But they also think a lot about ways to avoid having people killed. That puts them well ahead of Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush.

2) He voted for Republicans in the past? So what? Good for him for admitting it. At last week’s debate, Clark addressed the issue of his “Democratic” credentials to my satisfaction when he said, “I am pro-choice. I am pro-affirmative action. I am pro-environment, pro-health. I believe the United States should engage with allies. We should be a good player in the international community. And we should use force only as a last resort.” For me, that’s as solid an anti-Bush platform as I’ve yet heard, and the guy deserves credit for coming right out and declaring his support for policies (abortion choice, affirmative action) that will immediately alienate many slightly-to-the-right voters who would otherwise have been attracted to him as a military man. All this just proves that Clark is a man who thinks outside political boxes. Indeed, given his chummy-with-Republicans history, he might, just might be able to return a measure of nonpartisan politics to Washington–which could be the most revolutionary thing to happen there in decades. (A note to conspiracy theorists: If you believe Clark is a Trojan horse planted by Republicans to sabotage the Democrats’ presidential campaign next year, please send your cards and letters to Bill and Hillary Clinton, as well as liberal U.S. Representative Charles Rangel of New York–all of whom seem to be convinced of Clark’s Democratic bona fides.)

3) Campaign skills? As for this, we’ll have to wait and see. Clark is no Eisenhower. He is not kindly, he is not modest, he was not beloved by his subordinates in the military. Nor is he a Bill Clinton; it is not clear whether he feels anyone else’s pain. What Clark is, however, is smart, articulate, and (as long as he doesn’t fall prey to political handlers) refreshingly frank. In all this–both the vices of ambition and the virtues of brains–he has much in common with Howard Dean. They seem to be two of a kind. Does either of them have the ability to compromise when in the White House? We won’t know until one of them is there.

4) A Johnny-come-lately? Clark did start campaigning late. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a good thing. The other Democratic candidates have been campaigning for months, even years, and that’s too long. It wastes their time, and it wastes ours. As for his supposedly uncertain position on issues, forget his supposed flip-flopping in his first days on the campaign trail, when he said he would have voted in October of 2002 for the Congressional resolution giving the president the power to act militarily against Iraq, then seemed to back off on that stance. He was facing a hypothetical question with any number of hypothetical answers (Do you mean, if I knew only what we knew at the time? Do you mean, knowing what we know now?), and he made the mistake of seeing the complexity inherent in the question. He tried to give something other than a pre-fab sound bite that would have amounted to Monday-morning quarterbacking. For that, he should be congratulated, not pilloried.

In truth, Clark has a strong, clearly stated philosophy about the three issues a president can most influence: economic fairness, the environment, and civil liberties. He believes tax cuts for the poor and middle class do more for the economy than tax cuts for the rich. He believes that caring for the environment and protecting the Bill of Rights should be the absolute highest priorities of any administration. None of the other candidates places such an emphasis on those last two issues. Given that the current Democratic candidates have such similar positions on most issues, the question of what they will emphasize as president is paramount for me. Clark’s emphasis, in everything he’s said and written, is on the environment, the need for transparency in government, and civil liberties. In reverse order, those are my Big 3 issues, and he’s right on target on each of them. Bottom line: As president, he’ll nominate the right kind of judges.

5) A stalking horse for Hillary? Nonsense. Like the rest of the candidates, he’s too egotistical to be a stalking horse for anyone. Besides, Hillary and Bill are astute enough to know that Hillary can’t win next year. She’s still too divisive. She needs at least four more years to soften her image in the Senate.

6) Electable? Clark is a dashing, Purple Heart- and Silver Star-winning military hero who says all the right things to liberal Democrats and also appeals instantly to the hardware store clerk in Tennessee who believes in four-star American patriotism and the truck driver in Michigan who believes in four-square American military power. Clark has no experience in Congress or in a state house–a huge plus, since he, like Ike, has no political record to be held against him. Yet he can claim international experience and executive savoir faire. Heck, in a sense, he was commander of all of Europe. He takes the wind out of the Bush administration’s so-called lead on defense issues without alienating those (like me) who think civil liberties and the environment are at least as important as the war on terrorism. Electable? After his first week of campaigning, he led all Democratic candidates in the polls and fared far better in a hypothetical race against George W. Bush than any other Democrat. If he doesn’t flop or start flip-flopping as a campaigner–a big if–he’s easily the most electable of the Democrats.

7) Should you start working for Clark? If you’ve been working for Dean or Kerry, stick with your man. Each deserves a shot in the primaries and may turn out to be a better campaigner than Clark. But don’t let them turn their campaigns against the general. He’s too promising to be made the enemy. Keep aiming your criticism at George Bush. And don’t be shy about jumping to Clark if your candidate begins to flag.

And if you’ve been working for any of the other candidates besides Dean or Kerry, get realistic. None of them is going to win the nomination–not Lieberman, not Edwards, not Graham. Shift to Clark right now. If he is as good on the campaign trail as he is on CNN, he’s our best chance of beating Bush and turning the country back toward nonpartisan political sanity. In fact, he’s the best chance by a military mile.

LOOKING OUT FOR NUMBER ONE

In an unprecedented tax grab, downtown’s power elite plans to corral as much as $250 million in property taxes over 30 years for the exclusive benefit of downtown at the expense of the rest of Memphis.

The plan working its way through the City Council is known as a Tax Increment Financing District, or TIF. Here’s how it works: Over the past 25 years, the Center City Commission (CCC) has granted property-tax freezes as an incentive to downtown development and property ownership. Several properties are now “rolling off” their 20- or 30-year freeze and are supposed to start paying full freight.

But now the rules are being changed in the middle of the game. Instead of going into the city’s general fund, downtown property taxes would be earmarked for downtown projects under the guidance of the CCC. The general fund would be left with less revenue, and city taxpayers, who already pay 50 percent higher property taxes than Nashville residents, will likely face a property-tax increase after the upcoming election.

It’s a measure of the clout downtowners have that the TIF proposal has gotten this far. If the residents of Central Gardens or River Oaks or Zip Code 38117 banded together and proposed hoarding their property taxes (less 24 percent for public debt service, as the TIF proposes), it would be branded as the betrayal of the spirit of democracy that it is. Only downtown has the clout, push, and publicity machine to pull it off.

An influential downtowner candidly told me that, given a choice between sending his taxes to his neighborhood or my neighborhood, he will quickly and gladly choose the former. The CCC has prepared a nine-point defense of the TIF and given it to politicians who will vote on it, probably within the next few weeks.

It says CCC research, based on a “block-by-block analysis,” indicates only 30 percent of downtown’s redevelopment has been completed. My own research, based on a walking/driving tour from the north end of Mud Island past Harbor Town, down Front Street, along the Bluff Walk, and up Riverside Drive to the old bridge, found almost no blight. Just the opposite, in fact. And if downtown is 30 percent redeveloped, what of Frayser, Midtown, Whitehaven, Hickory Hill, the Fairgrounds, the Mall of Memphis, and Raleigh Springs Mall? None of them even has an agency that can afford to do a block-by-block needs analysis.

The CCC says a “$615 million public investment Master Plan has been drafted to leverage billions of dollars in private investment.” There is no evidence that incentives work that well. In the past 15 years, Memphis has spent roughly $600 million on The Pyramid, riverfront, trolley, mall, convention center, and FedExForum. The CCC has granted tax breaks currently worth $6.2 million a year. The incentives have not brought one out-of-town corporation downtown. They couldn’t lure FedEx from Southwind and Collierville. They couldn’t stop Union Planters and Baptist Hospital from moving to East Memphis and leaving white elephants behind. And they couldn’t keep the First Tennessee Bank building from falling into bankruptcy.

Downtown’s best success story is residential development, thanks largely to the efforts of Henry Turley and Jack Belz and the unique opportunities presented by Mud Island and the South Bluff. The single most cost-efficient incentive, hands down, was the $10 million Auction Street Bridge that enabled 5,000 people to move to Mud Island since 1987. Thank you, C.H. Butcher Jr., and rest in peace.

The CCC’s TIF plan counts “PILOT roll-offs” (expiring tax freezes in layman’s terms, but wrapping a proposal in jargon helps keep it under the radar) as “new growth.” That’s the “increment” in TIF. In fact, an expiring tax freeze is a completely predictable accounting entry, akin to the Memphis Grizzlies getting a key player off the injured list.

Downtown tax freezes were granted with the understanding that their recipients would eventually become full-fledged taxpayers. On older projects such as the Shrine Building, that is exactly what happened, to the benefit of downtown and the city. With a few exceptions, the CCC’s case-by-case approach of giving real dollars to real deals has worked well. Some of the worst downtown blight is not due to a lack of incentives but to ex-downtowners like Baptist Hospital which simply abandon their old buildings. It could be that what’s needed is not more carrot but more stick.

Now several big properties are facing loss of their privileged status. Downtown’s power brokers have their eyes on the loot. They have campaign contributions, contracts, free tickets, advertising, board appointments, and other goodies to pass out. Neighborhood groups have potluck-supper invitations.

In such circumstances, it will take political courage for elected officials to suppress their sycophantic tendencies. Sure, a giant TIF would be good for downtown. The question that needs to be fully debated is whether it would be good for the rest of Memphis.

THE PATRIOT ACT, ROUND TEN

John Ashcroft is fighting out of his weight class. Compared to your local librarian, our U.S. Attorney General is a pipsqueak, a flyweight.

Last week in Memphis, Ashcroft revealed himself to be utterly ignorant of the principles of civil rights. In the process, he managed to insult every librarian in the country. Don’t worry, his roundhouse punches just glanced off the librarians, whose counterpunches landed squarely on Mr. Ashcroft’s glass jaw.

Speaking to police and prosecutors on September 18, Ashcroft claimed that reports declassified last week proved that his Justice Department had never yet used the U.S. Patriot Act to monitor the records of bookstores and libraries. “No offense to the American Library Association,” he said, but the FBI and others assigned to seek out terrorists “just don’t care” about the reading habits of the average American. He went on to say, “The charges of the hysterics are revealed for what they are: castles in the air built on misrepresentation; supported by unfounded fear; held aloft by hysteria.”

So now, according to Mr. Ashcroft, librarians who are worried about the federal government checking what books you read are “hysterics.” (No offense.) And those of us worried that if we take out a chemistry book the FBI might think we’re building a bomb or if we take out the Koran they might think we’re members of Al Qaeda–well, we’re obviously in the grip of “unfounded fear” and “hysteria.” (No offense.)

Once again, Mr. Ashcroft has utterly missed the point. As many commentators have patiently tried to explain to him–we must, after all, talk to him as one talks to a punch-drunk fighter–the point is not whether federal authorities have yet started checking what we read; the point is that the U.S. Patriot Act gives those authorities the right to monitor what we read. Giving anyone that right is exactly what’s wrong, Mr. Ashcroft. If we are hysterics, then you, sir, are a dangerous dimwit. (No offense.)

Ashcroft and George W. Bush say it is our patriotic duty to trust them–trust that they care only about preventing terrorism, trust that they won’t start snooping in our credit card accounts or our emails or our library’s computer records, trust that the only people they care about are suspicious people–terrorists. (Of course, they never talk about the number of innocent people whose library records they might sift through to find a terrorist.)

What Bush and Ashcroft refuse to acknowledge is the central principle of American democracy: Never trust those in power. It is that principle that is at the heart of the U.S. Constitution. It is why we have what are called “check and balances.” You have heard of those, Mr. Ashcroft? Never trust those in power. That is why so many of us “hysterics” have such an “unfounded fear” of Section 215 of the U.S. Patriot Act, which allows federal agents to demand “any relevant tangible item (including books, records, papers, documents, and other items)” from any person or business or, yes, library in the supposed hunt for terrorists. And it is why we’re worried that those businesses and libraries are then bound by law to keep silent about any such demands, thereby cutting the press–the fourth check and balance of democratic government–out of the loop.

Never trust those in power. J. Edgar Hoover once asked us to trust him in his hunt for Communists, Mr. Ashcroft, and Richard Nixon asked us to trust his version of Watergate. Many people did. Then Nixon’s enemies list was revealed, and it turned out that Hoover was recording the bedroom conversations of such national “threats” as Martin Luther King Jr.

One reason we don’t trust you, Mr. Ashcroft, is that you have a history of misleading us. For example, you failed last week to explain why one of your own assistant attorneys general, Daniel Bryant, said in December 2002 that federal agents had in fact sought information from libraries as part of terrorism investigations. Or why Justice Department spokesman Mark Corallo said in March of 2003 that libraries had indeed become targets of federal surveillance. Or why yet another assistant attorney general, Viet Dinh, declared in May of this year that government agents had visited at least 50 libraries as part of terrorism investigations.

Did those agents visit the libraries to check out Charlotte’s Web, Mr. Ashcroft? Even this week, you carefully avoided saying whether the Justice Department had used another, even more sinister, tool to look at our library records. This tool is called a “national security letter.” It allows terrorism investigators to look at our records without so much as a nod from a judge. It is an open warrant for searches. Have you used NSLs to check our libraries, Mr. Ashcroft? You refused to say.

And now Mr. Bush, your boss, wants to expand the powers of his budding police state, allowing all kinds of searches without judicial oversight of any kind. This is Patriot Act II, which Bush announced earlier in September. It would allow federal agents to conduct any kind of search without a judge approving it, through the use of something called an “administrative subpoena”–which is a kind of last-minute, who-has-time-for-a-judge pass for federal agents to search for whatever they want whenever they want wherever they want.

All this, of course, is in the name of The War on Terrorism, which under this administration has become an all-out war on our privacy.

So how have the librarians handled these attacks? Ah, they continue to float like butterflies, sting like bees. They “welcomed” last week’s declassified documents, they said, pointedly noting that “[a]s librarians, we understand the importance of open access” to government information. Take that, Mr. Ashcroft. The librarians also gently noted that if the Justice Department has not needed to visit libraries in the war on terrorism since 9/11, then obviously there is no need to investigate libraries and so there would be no harm in exempting library records from searches in the future.

The librarians reminded Americans about Patriot Act II and those “administrative subpoenas” which would allow sudden library searches and the seizure of records without warrants. They suggested that citizens write their congressmen urging support of “Freedom to Read” legislation sponsored by Congressman Bernie Sanders of Vermont, which protects library records from police-state eyes. They noted that 48 states already have such legislation, which the Patriot Acts would try to supersede, and they have put the American Civil Liberties Union in their corner with a lawsuit against Section 215. Whop! Bam! Pow! This round goes to the librarians.

In the last month, Ashcroft has staggered from city to city in a free-swinging effort to save his own reputation. The Patriot Act has made him the most powerful attorney general since the Espionage and Sedition Acts of World War I, but taking on the librarians was a mistake. When it comes to integrity, intelligence and credibility, Mr. Ashcroft, you’re not in their class, and the American people know it.