ASHCROFT NEEDS NEW WRITER!!

[mburbank]

From Ashcrofts prepared text:

"The illegal drug trade is a billion-dollar illegal industry targeted on exploiting human weakness in order to reap billions in illegal profits. However, it is not only the sellers of the drugs themselves who are profiting from the drug trade. There is another illegal industry that is integrally linked to the drug trade. It is the Drug Paraphernalia business - a multi-million, perhaps billion-dollar industry that sells illegal products to facilitate and enable the use of various illegal drugs."

Other's might want to question the zeal with which Ashcroft is persuing internet Drug paraphenalia, wasting precious time which could be spent clothing statues or finding new ways to invade privacy.

I instead choose to focus on an educated man who allows this kind of writting in his office.

In a single paragraph the word 'illegal' appears six times. Three of those uses are wholly redundant. The word 'drug' appears seven times. At least three and perhaps four times, the word is redundant. 'Trade' illegal or not, is always intended to 'reap profits'. A 'Billion Dollar Industy' must reap at very least a billion in profits if not 'billions', or it is not a'billion dollar industry'. In the context of the last sentence 'facilitate' and 'enable' mean the same thing.

This opening pargraph would not have passed muster with my sixth grade Englsih teacher and there is no excuse for a Cabinet level official to sanction such excrable english. Whoever wrote this (and was pid for it!) should be forced to take any of the Sate achievement tests the "No Child Left Behind" act wants as requirement for highschool graduation.