Ashcroft the lightning rod

The Weekly Standard looks at the record of John Ashcroft and his critics.

One of the first things we learn is that the New York Times has access to a time machine:

In its attempt to place the onus of any controversy on Ashcroft, the Times argues that "Mr. Ashcroft himself set the tone for the division less than three months after the attacks when he said before a Senate panel: 'To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve.'" <snip> This statement in itself shows that the New York Times is fabricating the notion that it was Ashcroft's response to the September 11 attacks that caused all the controversy: if "Ashcroft himself set the tone for the division less than three months after the attacks," why on earth would there have been "a bruising confirmation battle in the Senate" in the previous year?

So what was the reason for the "bruising confirmation battle"?

The obvious reason is that the New York Times and the rest of the left despised Ashcroft from the start for his openly religious views.

There's a lot of that going around. I've talked with any number of people who have decided they hate Bush, for example. As near as I can tell, they decided they hated him before they knew anything about him. Their positions on any of Bush's policies then followed from this hate.

Bush's policies, and Ashcroft's, were wrong because people hated them, not the other way around.

One thing I seldom see addressed, though: Where were all the signs of Ashcroft's "divisiveness" when he was in the Senate?