I write what follows not only to clear the air once and for all, but on the advice of my lawyers: Boyle, Bain, and Downer, L.D.

The rumors of John Ashcroft's rampant, kink-ridden homosexuality - which, as far as you know, may well be false - amount to a disgusting attempt to impugn the morals of a great American and a God-fearing Christian.

Indeed, I want to state right here and right now that I may never have been John Ashcroft's gay lover, and that he is, in the strictest clinical sense, perhaps not "obsessed" with taking the passive role in anal sex. Contrary to reports, I do not affirm he yells "Bite the wax tadpole!" when in the throes of orgasm.

I categorically deny that I met John Ashcroft in (August of) 1976, when, supposedly, he was working as a gay prostitute in Zurich, wearing those cute lederhosen and that little cap with a feather. He rarely, if ever, bends over and yodels, then or now, though that has formed the basis of the vicious, persistent attacks on his sterling character.

John Ashcroft, as far as I know, does not always wear women's underwear or literally have a "needle dick." He does not, I believe, necessarily still regard particle board as an aphrodisiac or have an extremely unhealthy erotic fixation on peccaries. These rumors, widespread and plausible though they are given what we know about John Ashcroft, seem to me the attempts of a vast terrorist conspiracy to discredit Ashcroft's salutary though viciously repressive policies by attacking the messenger.

I admit that Ashcroft seems grim, humorless, even fascistic. He reminds me, as he does so many of you, of Francisco Franco. But that hardly entails that he licks whipped cream from the digestive tracts of 420-lb male shut-ins.

The people who purvey such slanders against the top law enforcement official of our great nation deserve to be drawn and quartered, or perhaps tickled slowly to death at a secret interment facility for terrorists. Al Qaeda operatives have, no doubt, helped to, as it were, spread the stories of Ashcroft's genital warts and chronic hemorrhoidal swellings. They hate our sacred way of life.

I want to make one thing clear: John Ashcroft is all man, 100% male. The testosterone thumps through his veins as though he's a paradigmatic American, a kind of combination of Rock Hudson and Doris Day in the screwball comedy we call government.

I love John Ashcroft in the deepest, truest, most spiritual sense. I respect his "intelligence," and above all his "manhood."

Thank you.