I’d like for everybody who made fun of me in the first couple of weeks after 9/11, when I was nervous about Republicans overreaching and making up enemies lists and harkening back to the good old days when men were men and foreigners could be put in camps, I’d like everybody who called me paranoid and said I was just being a liberal killjoy to write me a note telling me they’re sorry:
“Bradley J. Schlozman is systematically attempting to purge all Civil Rights appellate attorneys hired under Democratic administrations,” the lawyer wrote, saying that he appeared to be “targeting minority women lawyers” in the section and was replacing them with “white, invariably Christian men.” The lawyer also alleged that “Schlozman told one recently hired attorney that it was his intention to drive these attorneys out of the Appellate Section so that he could replace them with ‘good Americans.'”
Because, “good Americans?” In my wildest, reddest, craziest fantasies about what the world would come to look like in the following half-dozen years, I never once imagined they’d actually be that bald about it. Good Americans. It still staggers me, sometimes, and I don’t know why that is, because it wasn’t like I didn’t have a front-row seat for what was going to go on, while unemployed jackholes painted their chests red white and blue and high-fived their buddies while they beat up Sikh cabdrivers. I mean, it wasn’t like this was unprecedented, either, what with living through the Clinton years. But still. Good Americans. You never expect them to just come right out and say it anymore.
Via the crack den.
A.