Cheney's got a gun, Ashcroft still sucks

So Dick Cheney shooting a 78-year-old man on some sort of rich people's psuedo-hunting adventure was bad, and the attempted cover-up of Cheney not having a proper license to hunt, the waiting until the old man was stable and no longer likely to die, and the idiotic stone-walling by Scott McClellan was bad, too. But a smaller story on NPR this morning was worse.

John Ashcroft gave a speech yesterday in defense of the possibly illegal Guantanamo detention center. His justification for keeping all those people prisoner without bringing charges against them, and without having any intention of charging them, is that during World War II, if you recall, as he said, the U.S. keep thousands of people in detention centers just to get them out of the population and prevent terrorism.

I have to admit, I'm not an expert on terrorism, like Ashcroft, or Cheney (who apparently has to pay people so he can be driven to where birds are, so he can step out of his car and shoot at them), but my understanding of the Japanese internment camps Ashcroft was referring to is that they were a very bad thing, an embarrassing episode in a supposedly noble war. Of course, this comes from the same line of thinking that has attempted to glorify McCarthyism as somehow getting a bad reputation, when McCarthy was actually a great American. Ok, sure.