http://www.humanevents.com/rightangle/index.php?id=24665&title=chaos_aamp_disorder&tb=1&c=1
Chaos & Disorder
by D.R. Tucker — 09-15-2007 @ 03:31 AM
Few things are more frightening about a Hillary Clinton Presidency than the prospect of former Clinton Administration figure Deval Patrick being appointed Attorney General.
Patrick, currently stumbling through the first year of his first term as Governor of Massachusetts, served as the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights from 1994 to 1996. During his tenure, he demonstrated a zealous commitment to quota-based affirmative action, engaged in shameless demagoguery during the 1996 "church arson" controversy, and generally turned the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department into a hotbed of left-wing partisanship. Sen. Orrin Hatch once denounced him as a "liberal civil rights ideologue" who "used statistical racial imbalances and the vast resources of the Justice Department to extract race-conscious settlements from businesses and governments, large and small."
Obviously, Patrick is still a member in good standing of "Clinton Inc."; it's not hard to imagine Hillary nominating him to be her Attorney General, and Patrick subsequently being confirmed. Patrick would surely leap at the chance to escape his tenure as Massachusetts Governor, a tenure that has already become a comedy of errors.
Patrick was elected Governor partially due to political correctness and partially due to the public perception of his Republican opponent as less than competent. However, it is Patrick who has proven less than competent during his initial months as governor, demonstrating remarkable ineffectiveness and a political tin ear. He has a gift for gaffes and rhetorical mistakes, the latest of which occurred on September 11, 2007, when he gave a bizarre speech characterizing the attacks of September 11, 2001 as a "failure of human understanding." One cannot blame Patrick for wanting to bail out as the Massachusetts electorate's sense of "buyer's remorse" continues to snowball.
Considering his extreme partisanship during his previous tenure in the Justice Department, and his political tone-deafness as Massachusetts Governor, Patrick would be a disaster and a half as Attorney General. The Justice Department would once again become an ultra-liberal shop, taking express orders from Moveon.org, People for the American Way and numerous other left-wing political and legal groups. For Americans who believe in the principle of color-blindness, a Patrick-led Justice Department would be a grotesque nightmare, as businesses that weren't perceived to be "diverse" enough would be subjected to endless legal harassment. It's not difficult to imagine conservative organizations being targeted for unwarranted scrutiny by a hard-left partisan such as Patrick.
As Attorney General, Patrick would make Janet Reno look like Ed Meese. We'd have a Justice Department that would be in reality what the Ashcroft-era Justice Department was in left-wing theory: a lawless enterprise where civil liberties would be ignored, the Constitution would be scorned, and political expediency would be valued above morality. The prospect of President Hillary Clinton selecting Patrick as Attorney General is a profoundly distasteful one. Let's be mindful of this prospect--and work aggressively to prevent this scenario from becoming reality.
