Thanks to a handy link via Making Light: here’s the full text of the Vanity Fair article profiling John Ashcroft, we can all read about how frelling scary the man is. It’s a likely copywrong… but for the right reasons. And I intend to buy the magazine while it’s still on the stands, anyway.

Since the link may be dead soon, here’s my personal Scariest Thing About Ashcroft:

Some 15 years ago, Missouri state senator Harry Wiggins, a Democrat and the spokesman for a bipartisan group trying to get funding restored for a Kansas City home for AIDS patients, met with Ashcroft in the governor’s mansion. The Good Samaritan home, as it was then called, had received a $900,000 state grant, but, says Wiggins, “Governor Ashcroft vetoed it. I think twice.”

Wiggins tried to explain the home’s purpose. “This is a place they go, Governor, but they don’t come back,” he began. “Many of them, their families have rejected them.”

“I understand. You got my attention,” Ashcroft said with interest. “This is the place where it is cheapest for me to send them to die.”

“Governor, these are human beings who have to have a place to live,” protested Wiggins, “or they’ll live in boxes under bridges.”

Wiggins remembers Ashcroft’s reply: “Well, they’re there because of their own misconduct, and it wasn’t very reputable misconduct, either.”

Wiggins was puzzled. “When does misconduct become reputable? When disreputable?”

“That’s beside the point,” snapped Ashcroft.

The other Scary Thing About Ashcroft is that he apparently thinks calico cats are creatures of the Devil, or his staffers think he does and must be protected from them, which is even scarier.

The least scary cat in the world is a calico named Spike, and she now lives in Washington D.C.

She is slimmed down from when she was in my care, but she still resembles a furry volleyball. She’s coming to get you, Johnny – boogedaboogeda.