579Yay! John Ashcroft will never come to my house

 

• Jun. 8, 2002

   

  He is afraid of Calico Cats!
  ======================================
  http://www.andrewtobias.com/newcolumns/011120.html
  Turns Out It's Not the Black Cats You Have to Watch Our For
  Published on November 20, 2001
  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.)
  
  I reveal this tidbit not to belittle John Ashcroft's faith or his
  prudishness, which are his own
  business, but because he has begun to meddle with my business.
  
  In the middle of the war on terrorism, he has somehow found time to
  move to overturn Oregon's
  twice-passed referendum on assisted suicide, to assure that an
  Oregonian in his final days
  should be forced to agonize as God intended.
  
  Likewise, for those nauseous with chemotherapy or in chronic pain, he
  works to overturn
  California's referendum on medical marijuana, because - when you
  think of it - what right have
  the people of California to decide a matter of such importance for
  themselves? Where in the
  constitution does it permit people the right to grow or smoke
  whatever they want, even if it will
  ease their chronic pain?
  
  Forgive the sarcasm, but really - how dare he? Hasn't he more
  important things to do? How dare
  he say to those in pain - not op-ed-page pain or hypothetical pain,
  but you-almost-want-his-
  children-to-feel-it-to-be-sure-he-understands-the-import-of-what-he's-
  doing pain - "Tough. You'll
  just have to suffer."
  
  And if his judgment on these matters, and on calico cats, is so far
  from humane or rational, how
  reassured should we be as to the rest of his program?
  
  "Under [Oregon's] Death with Dignity Act," reports the New York
  Times, "a terminally ill patient
  may take the lethal drugs if two doctors agree the person has less
  than six months to live and is
  mentally competent to make the decision to end his or her life. Since
  the law took effect in 1997,
  at east 70 people have killed themselves in this way . . . Many more
  have obtained lethal
  prescriptions but have died of natural causes before taking the
  drugs."<
  
  Note that many of those people who died of natural causes obtained
  from this law a great benefit
  as well. No, they didn't wind up using the drugs. But by knowing they
  could get them, and by
  having them, they retained the option. They retained control of the
  decision, and of their lives. If
  it got too bad, they knew they had a way out.
  
  Dr. Jerome Groopman, the eminent Harvard Medical School professor,
  was quick to express the
  alarm of what must be a large segment of the medical community over
  Ashcroft's action.
  
  "Not long ago," his Times op-ed began, "a cancer specialist I know
  faced a situation that chilled
  those of us who care for people with terminal illness. A young woman
  close to death lay suffering
  in a hospital bed, her husband at her side. Her leukemia had defied
  bone marrow transplant and
  experimental drugs. She had begun to bleed into her lungs and was
  gasping for air. Months
  earlier, following common practice, the oncologist had had a frank
  discussion about dying with
  the woman and her husband. The greatest terror for her, as for most
  other patients, was that the
  final days of her life might be spent in unrelenting pain."
  
  So the patient and her family and her doctor agreed that, if the time
  ever came, no heroic
  measures would be taken to prolong her agony, and enough morphine
  would be used to
  minimize her pain, even if it speeded her death. (As, Dr. Groopman
  went on to explain, this it
  would have to do, because morphine suppresses breathing.)
  
  The time came, the morphine was prescribed - but a respiratory
  therapist at her bedside
  "vehemently objected." Both husband and doctor were shocked; the
  doctor went on to fulfill his
  promise to ease the patient's pain. Within a day, Dr. Groopman
  recounts, the patient had
  peacefully died. But the therapist - a man after John Ashcroft's
  heart - accused the doctor of
  having committed a crime and the husband of being an accomplice.
  Neither charge was
  sustained, but now John Ashcroft has rushed in to do battle with the
  devil, to try to right such
  wrongs in the future and prolong the patient's suffering.
  
  He has authorized the Drug Enforcement Administration to suspend
  medical licenses of doctors
  who prescribe lethal drugs for terminally ill patients.
  
  "This action," writes Dr. Groopman, "represents a striking lack of
  understanding of how
  physicians help patients to die, and it risks making the last days of
  the terminally ill a time of
  panic and pain rather than calm and comfort . . . Mr. Ashcroft
  endangers what has become a
  compassionate, if tacit, mode of dying throughout the United States."
  
  "If the Justice Department's action is a political bone thrown to
  religious conservatives," he
  concludes, "it shamefully miscasts health professionals as disciples
  of the devil rather than
  angels of mercy."
  We are blessed to live in a time when those who choose Novocain can
  have it; when those who
  choose anesthesia during operations can have it. Neither of these
  miracles is natural, and no one
  should be forced to avail themselves of them. People should be free
  to believe in the devil, to
  fear calico cats, and to endure, for themselves, unimaginable pain.
  But for John Ashcroft to tell
  me that I have to endure unimaginable pain? Or that a loved one must?
  
  And just in time for the holidays.
  
  Coming Soon: Conservatives Who Part Ways with Ashcroft On This One.<
  
  
  http://www.guardian.co.uk/bush/story/0,7369,661458,00.html
  
  Staff cry poetic injustice as singing Ashcroft
  introduces patriot games
  
  Julian Borger in Washington
  Monday March 4, 2002
  The Guardian
  
  Since John Ashcroft became US attorney general last year, workers at
  the department of justice
  have become accustomed to his daily prayer meetings, but some are now
  drawing the line at
  having to sing patriotic songs penned by their idiosyncratic boss.
  Mr Ashcroft, a devout Christian and a grittily determined singer,
  went public with one of his works
  last month, when he surprised an audience at a North Carolina
  seminary with a rendition of Let
  the Eagle Soar, a tribute to America's virtues, which continues:
  "Like she's never soared before,
  from rocky coast to golden shore, let the mighty eagle soar," and so
  on for four minutes.
  The performance (which can be seen and heard at
  cnn.com/video/us/2002/02/25/ashcroft.sings.wbtv.med.html) was
  accompanied only by taped
  music, but Mr Ashcroft's staff are complaining that printed versions
  of the song are being
  distributed at meetings so that they will be able to join in.
  When asked why she opposed the workplace singalong, one of the
  department's lawyers said:
  "Have you heard the song? It really sucks."
  A group of Hispanic justice department employees were recently
  summoned to see the attorney
  general, and went along hoping that their boss might be making a
  special effort to promote
  diversity in the department's higher ranks.
  Instead, they were asked to provide a hasty Spanish lesson to give
  the secretary a few phrases
  to use on a foreign delegation the next day. The Hispanic staff were
  then handed printed copies
  of Let the Eagle Soar and asked for volunteers to translate it.
  This is not the first time Mr Ashcroft's subordinates have realised
  that this attorney general is
  unlike ordinary politicians. Each time he has been sworn in to
  political office, he is anointed with
  cooking oil (in the manner of King David, as he points out in his
  memoirs Lessons from a Father
  to His Son).
  When Mr Ashcroft was in the Senate, the duty was performed by his
  father, a senior minister in a
  church specialising in speaking in tongues, the Pentecostal
  Assemblies of God. When he
  became attorney general, Clarence Thomas, a supreme court justice,
  did the honours.
  In January, a pair of 12ft statues in the atrium of a justice
  department building were covered by a
  blue curtain, on orders from Mr Ashcroft's office because the female
  figure Spirit of Justice was
  bare-breasted, and the body of her male partner, Majesty of Law, was
  not sufficiently covered by
  his toga.
  The cover-up has provoked an anti-Ashcroft campaign by the singer and
  film star Cher, who has
  toured the media circuit denouncing his puritanism. She asked the
  Washington Post: "What are
  we going to do next? Put shorts on the statue of David, put an 1880s
  bathing suit on Venus
  Rising and a shirt on the Venus de Milo?"
  Perhaps the most bizarre wrinkle in the Ashcroft enigma emerged in
  November when Andrew
  Tobias, the Democratic Party treasurer and a financial writer,
  published an article on his website
  accusing the attorney general of harbouring superstitions about tabby
  cats.
  According to the Tobias article, advance teams for an Ashcroft visit
  to the US embassy in the
  Hague asked anxiously if there were tabby cats (or calico cats as
  they are known in the US) on
  the premises.
  "Their boss, they explained, believes calico cats are signs of the
  devil," Mr Tobias reported.
  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.
  
  
  http://www.snopes2.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
  
  http://www.democraticunderground.com/articles/02/04/p/02_calico.html
  Calico Cats Admit Fear of Attorney General
  April 2, 2002
  By Gil Christner
  A new poll of calico cats across the country reveals that a great
  majority of them are deathly afraid of
  Attorney General John Ashcroft, many of them stating that he is, in
  fact, a sign of the Devil.
  A poll conducted by CNN/Time/Cat Fancy Magazine show that over 52% of
  the calico cats questioned
  feel very afraid of the Attorney General, and 36% are somewhat
  afraid. In addition, cats of other varieties
  and colors also admit to a high "disliking or feeling of avoidance
  towards" Mr. Ashcroft.
  "Most calicos, while not necessarily religious by nature, just feel a
  tremendous fear when confronted with
  the idea of John Ashcroft," said Kitty Kelly, author of Pussy Galore
  to Socks: The History of Felines in
  Political Intrigue. Miss Kelly, who is not related to, but often
  confused with the unofficial biographer of
  Nancy Reagan, insists that while very few cats even believe in the
  Devil, the image of the Attorney
  General unrestrained by the Constitution or other laws of the land is
  enough to send most felines into a
  Pentecostal delirium.
  "I've seen calicos lose control of their bowels when confronted by
  the idea of meeting Mr. Ashcroft," Miss
  Kelly said. "And for a creature that habitually buries its feces,
  that can be a very embarrassing situation.
  Even worse, there have been reported cases of young kittens actually
  dying of fear when Ashcroft appears
  on television in the same room. Luckily for them, they have nine
  lives. I'm just afraid they'll have to use
  most of them in the next 3 years of the Bush administration."
  The poll also revealed that other breeds, including Persians, short
  hairs, and even Siamese get their
  hackles raised when Mr. Ashcroft's name is mentioned. "Strangely
  enough, only those funky hairless cats
  that look like skinned weasels seem immune to the Attorney General,"
  mused Miss Kelly. "I guess when
  you look like that, you don't have much left to worry about."
  The results of the CNN/Time/Cat Fancy Magazine Poll:
  
  
  Q. How Afraid are You when You see Attorney General John Ashcroft?
  
  Very Afraid 52%
  Somewhat Afraid 36%
  Kind of Nervous 10%
  Not too Concerned 1%
  Bored Stiff 1%
  
  
  Q. Do You think Attorney General John Ashcroft is a Sign of the
  Devil?
  Yes 13%
  Maybe 62%
  No 9%
  I'm A Jewish Cat and We Don't Believe in the Devil 16%
  
  
  
  Q. Do you think Attorney General John Ashcroft would Cover a Nude
  Statue of a Cat, and if so,
  Would he be Justified in Doing so?
  Yes 67%
  No 21%
  Never Mind, just keep Moving that Pencil around in Circles and let Me
  try to Catch It 37%
  
  
  Q. Does it Bother you that the Numbers in the Last Question Add up to
  Way More than 100%?
  Yes 8%
  No 14%
  I'm a frickin' Cat, what do I know about Percentages? Sheesh, Get a
  Clue 78%
  
  Gil Christner is an actor and writer living in Los Angeles. He's the
  guy on the IBM commercial running
  around yellig "Ned, the servers, they stole all our servers!"