Unseemly Alliances
Commentary by Bob Herbert for The New York Times

George W. Bush is a nice guy, right?

A uniter, not a divider.

So why does he keep such bad company?

While running for president, Mr. Bush proclaimed again and again that he was a new kind of Republican. He would reach out, he said. And he did. He's probably hugged as many black children as anyone since Mother Hale. But he took a detour from his nice-guy itinerary to drop by Bob Jones University in Greenville, S.C., where he touted what he described as "our ideas, Republican ideas, conservative ideas."

Maybe he didn't know where he was.

Bob Jones was the focus of a furious legal fight in the early 1980's that ended when the Supreme Court ruled emphatically that private schools practicing racial discrimination could not receive federal tax exemptions. The school gave up its claim to tax-exempt status rather than change its segregationist ways.

There was an interesting sidelight to that fight. The Nixon administration, in accordance with court rulings, had barred tax exemptions to schools that discriminated. But President Reagan — at the urging of none other than Trent Lott, then a congressman, and Senator Strom Thurmond, who was a trustee of the university — changed the policy in 1982. Bob Jones, racist to its core, became eligible for an exemption. Until the Supreme Court stepped in.

It was a shameful episode, and a huge embarrassment for Mr. Reagan.

George W. Bush could have distanced himself from such venues, but he chose not to. By speaking at Bob Jones himself, and by selecting John Ashcroft, who also spoke at Bob Jones and is a champion of the old Confederacy, to be his attorney general, Mr. Bush has dismayed many millions of Americans, black and white, who have tried hard to move away from the corrosive policies and customs of the past.

Mr. Bush either does not understand this, or does not care.

The Senate may confirm Mr. Ashcroft, but nothing will change the fact that his nomination is a slap in the face of those who feel strongly about racial justice. He fought like someone possessed against all efforts to desegregate the public schools in and around St. Louis when he was attorney general and then governor of Missouri. And he spoke glowingly of Southern Partisan Quarterly Review, a gruesomely racist magazine.

As the watchdog publication Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) has said: "When Attorney General nominee John Ashcroft praised the neo-Confederate magazine Southern Partisan, he was endorsing a publication that defends slavery, white separatism, apartheid and David Duke."

Southern Partisan is a sick magazine. It giddily celebrates the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Joyful references to his murder can be found in issue after issue. Of John Wilkes Booth, one writer said, "His behavior was not only sane, but sensible." Another writer referred to the Emancipation Proclamation as "an invitation to the slaves to rise up against their masters."

Leaders of the Ku Klux Klan are praised. And a wide range of ethnic groups are slurred.

One contributor wrote: "As the genetic racial pool in the United States from which the democratic government originally derived is dissipated in successive tides of immigration, our country is being overwhelmed."

So what does John Ashcroft have to say about this publication? I quote:

"Your magazine also helps set the record straight. You've got a heritage of doing that, of defending Southern patriots like [Robert E.] Lee, [Stonewall] Jackson and [the Confederate president, Jefferson] Davis. Traditionalists must do more. I've got to do more. We've all got to stand up and speak in this respect, or else we'll be taught that these people were giving their lives, subscribing their sacred fortunes and their honor to some perverted agenda."

Questions about Bob Jones and Southern Partisan came up at Mr. Ashcroft's confirmation hearing yesterday. He said he rejected racial and religious intolerance. But the man who should be called to account for this appallingly divisive nomination is George W. Bush, whose inaugural festivities get under way today — at the Lincoln Memorial.

"If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, it's a duck" - Al Sharpton on Ashcroft's record of being a racist

"If I am hit by a car leaving here today, it does not matter if the car ment to hit me...if it was going forward or back; it does not matter. What matters is that I am on the ground bleeding" - Al Sharpton on a Newsday question, "Was Ashcroft's actions in blocking that nominee racialy motivated?"

--- U.S. Press Club Meeting

White is the most anti-death-penalty judge on the Missouri Supreme Court. This point is incontestable." Not so. Judge White affirmed the death sentence 41 times and reversed it 18, and in most of those reversals he was concurring with judges appointed by Governor Ashcroft

--- U.S. News and World Report

Ashcroft's record on civil rights also will be assailed. As Missouri's attorney general in the 1980s, Ashcroft successfully urged White House counselor Edwin Meese to persuade the Reagan Justice Department to oppose a school-desegregation plan in St. Louis. Affirmative action will be another issue. Former Attorney General Meese says Ashcroft is opposed to any discrimination. "If affirmative action is a form of discrimination on the basis of color, then, yes, Senator Ashcroft is opposed to it,"

--- U.S. News and World Report