Bush continues to polarize the nation
By Heidi A. De Vries
UCF News
Thursday, November 11, 2004

John Ashcroft, the gospel-singing son of a preacher, is leaving the White House. No longer will the most vocal champion of the Patriot Act be the attorney general of the Bush administration.

Detractors have said that Ashcroft, who encouraged his staff to participate in daily prayer meetings, blurred the line between religion and the government. In particular, Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer of New York told the Associated Press that he hopes "the president will choose a less polarizing attorney general as his successor."

If the president's acceptance speech on Nov. 3 is any indication, Bush has a desire to do precisely that.

He seemed to express a genuine desire to bring the two nations together: to marry the red states and the blue states into the United States yet again.

It could be construed that even Ashcroft was thinking that a more moderate man should be his replacement.

"The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved," he wrote in a five-page, handwritten letter to Bush dated Nov. 2, Election Day. "Yet I believe that the Department of Justice would be well served by new leadership and fresh inspiration."

After Bush's announcement yesterday nominating Alberto Gonzales as Ashcroft's replacement, it would seen he has done a bad job in trying to unite the nation.

Gonzales, a former White House counsel, is one of the most prominent Hispanics in the administration.

Gonzales has been linked with Bush for the past 10 years. He was a Bush-appointed justice on the Texas Supreme Court and a Texas secretary of state. The organization Texans for Public Justice also reports that Gonzales has accepted contributions from Vice President Dick Cheney's former company, Halliburton.

He was once a partner in a Houston law firm that represented Enron.

While serving as a general counsel for then-Texas Gov. Bush, Gonzales wrote 57 memos to Bush about the death penalty. The counsel that Gonzales provided "repeatedly failed to apprise the governor of crucial issues in the cases at hand: ineffective counsel, conflict of interest, mitigating evidence, even actual evidence of innocence," wrote reporter Alan Berlow in The Atlantic Monthly.   (Continued on original site).

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Thanks, EP, for your kind post.

A