Contrarianism Justified

In light of the decision of the DOJ, discussed by various law-talkin’ people, to make prosecuting porn a “top priority”–apparently 9/11 “changed everything” by making counterterrorism less important–it’s hard not to see retrospective merit in Yglesias’ contrarian half-defense of John Ashcroft. Ashcroft was a bad AG because of his extremely reactionary views, but he was not a hack or an administration lickspittle. Gonzales, conversely, is a completely unqualified administration buttboy, and because he’s such a pandering hack he ends up having the same substantive problems as Ashcroft. The worst of all worlds.

This also seems like a good time to return to my own contrarian argument (see also here) that engaging in pandering about popular culture is not quite as harmless as people who see it as the Democrats’ road to victory would have you believe. Obviously, in any rational universe taking scarce resources away from fighting terrorism and other violent crime and putting it into suppressing porn would generate widespread derision and shred the administrations reputation for being “tough on terror” and “tough on crime.” The problem is that once you’re publicly committed to the position that Janet Jackson’s nipple is in fact an immense threat to the republic and that the federal government should be in the business of telling people what to watch (even if only through moral posturing and vague threats rather than censorship), it becomes rather difficult to make this case effectively.