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["Thomas C. Meggs" <tom AT plik.net>]

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Rowland Smith wrote:

| John Ashcroft is the most dangerous man on the planet as far as I'm
concerned.

A couple of things of varied ammusement, depending on your outlook. I
got these forwarded to me today.

http://www.cnn.com/video/us/2002/02/25/ashcroft.sings.wbtv.med.html
http://johnmonty.com/ [tears Ashcroft to shreds in several of his rants]

- ---- From URL:http://www.snopes.com/critters/gnus/calico.htm ----
Claim:   Attorney General John Ashcroft believes calico cats are a sign
of the devil.
Status:   Undetermined.

Origins:   This has to be one of the most bizarre items we've had to
tackle in recent memory.

The "Attorney General John Ashcroft believes calico cats are a sign of
the devil" claim began with a 20 November 2001 article by Democratic
Party treasurer and financial writer Andrew Tobias, in which he wrote:

Shortly after becoming Attorney General, John Ashcroft was headed
abroad. An advance team showed up at the American embassy in the Hague
to check out the digs, saw cats in residence, and got nervous. They were
worried there might be a calico cat. No, they were told, no calicos.
Visible relief. Their boss, they explained, believes calico cats are
signs of the devil. (The advance team also spied a statue of a naked
woman in the courtyard and discussed the possibility of its being
covered for the visit, though that request was not ultimately made.)

As  unusual as this passage may sound, note that the parenthetical
comment was written a full two months before ABC News reported that
Attorney General Ashcroft had ordered the Spirit of Justice and Majesty
of Law statues in the Great Hall of the Department of Justice be covered
because he didn't like being photographed in front of them. (The Spirit
of Justice statue is a female figure with one exposed breast.)

A week later, Tobias' column explained where he had obtained the
information about Ashcroft and calico cats from:

I've written for a variety of magazines over the last 30 years,
including a column in TIME for several years, and have some appreciation
of the need not to publish allegations as true unless I've checked them
out. I got this odd story from someone who was definitely in a position
to know and then confirmed it with someone else, also in a position to
know. That said, it's certainly possible that Ashcroft doesn't actually
believe calico cats are signs of the devil, even though his aides said
he does. And it's possible that his aides were kidding, or overly
sensitive, when they discussed covering the naked statue.

Then again, the Attorney General does not hide his deep religious faith
- -- one need only read his remarks at Bob Jones University to get some
appreciation of that -- and a lot of deeply religious people do believe
in a heaven and a hell and the devil. So it may not be as odd as the
story of Nancy Reagan consulting her astrologer before letting Ronnie
make important decisions. Who knows?




The UK newspaper The Guardian noted:


When asked about the veracity of the report, the justice department said
that it had made Mr Ashcroft laugh. There has been no further comment on
the matter.



What the game is here -- if indeed there is one -- we can't fathom.

Last updated:   6 March 2002


- --
$Id: .sig,v 1.17 2002/08/21 13:12:32 tom Exp $

pub  1024D/87F1C20F 2001-11-15 Thomas C. Meggs <tom AT plik.net>
Key fingerprint = 5E9A D535 B9DA A889 984B  9654 2025 409B 87F1 C20F

"It was funny with coffee.  Sometimes it did nothing for
him, and actually made him weak. But sometimes it really
made him feel like God."
        - from "Miguel", short story by Dan Bern

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