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.

[george]

not to mention the subject is just plain stupid.

sigh. or did you mention that.

hell, i dont even care about this topic, and i could have written something at least as bad just for fun. but instead it would have come out:

John Ashcroft is an asshole.

over and over.

[El Blanco]

This is why Ashcroft was never supposed to be AG in the first place. He was just available when Team Bush was putting the cabinet together.

I'm telling you, before the 2004 election, Ashcroft out, my boy Rudy in.

[mburbank]

I think you're wrong. While Juliani has national credability and a soft spot for constitutional disregard, Ashcorft delivers the far right Christian base simply be being in the cabinet.

None of this is any excuse for not holding at VERY least the professional writers in this administration to some sort of standard. It is extreme hypocrisy to demand highschool students be functionally literate while accepting official documents like that one.

It's one thing to let them get away with a really stupid law enforcement initiative. Have any of you met someone so casual in their drug use they would let a lack of access to parphenalia stand in their way? It's an entirely other thing to foist this kind of language abuse on the public.

[El Blanco]

Are you sure this wasn't a first draft or something? You know, give him an idea to kick around.

[mburbank]

The document notes at the top that Ashcroft frequently departs from preprd statements, but it's copy of what they handed out to the press directly prior to the briefing.