Just when did John Ashcroft join the Nazi Party?

Over the holidays, I had the opportunity to visit with some of my more progressive friends in Kansas City, and several alerted me to a rather scary development: U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft has become a Nazi – "another Hitler" as one fretfully described our former governor and senator.

This all came as news to me. Although I do not know Ashcroft personally, I did sit next to him at a dinner just a few years ago, and he exhibited no signs of latent Nazism: no heel-clicking or arm-thrusting, no anti-Semitic slurs or "sieg heils," no quiet yearnings for the Fatherland. I wondered, too, how a man of such presumed extremes could manage to win five statewide races in America's most indicative state.

Still, I could not just dismiss those alarms. At least, three of my friendly Cassandras were prominent Missourians. Perhaps they knew something I did not. To test their suspicions, I did a quick online search and got a jolt of confirmation. Some 18,400 web postings link "Ashcroft" and "Nazi," at least two-thirds of which accuse Ashcroft of being a Nazi.

"Americans have every right to be up in arms against John and his Patriot Act," reads a typical online jeremiad. "Many of us have been warning that it is a deadly assault on constitutional rights – part of the broad fascistic pattern of the Bush junta."

Another blames Congress for letting "Ashcroft walk all over the Constitution without stirring from their somnambulance as he and his gang of nazi-fascists began implementing Patriot II." One site serves as an unofficial Ashcroft songbook. It posts the lyrics of more than 70 songs, all of which alert the innocent to the suspected reign of terror at Justice. Indeed, it must have taken an act of deep courage to pen a ditty like "The Obnoxious Right Wing Nazi Pig Dog From Missouri" (sung to tune of "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy") knowing that the aforementioned "pig dog" was creating "Dachaus" for his political opponents.

I could not write off these suspicions as mere Internet blather. On one even more damning site, America's "most trusted man," the still-living Walter Cronkite, denounced Ashcroft as the "Torquemada of American law." Torquemada was the proto-fascist responsible, according to Cronkite, for the unholy methods of the Spanish Inquisition, "including torture and the burning of heretics – Muslims in particular." Egads! No wonder my friends were upset.

To be fair, progressives do not upset easily. During World War I, the Espionage and Sedition Acts allowed Woodrow Wilson's progressive administration to prosecute those reckless enough to voice anti-war sentiments. Socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs spent 10 years in prison as a result. He was one of 2,000 so prosecuted. During World War II, the always progressive FDR interned – by executive order – 120,000 ethnic Japanese with the full-throated support of the American Civil Liberties Union. The even more progressive Eleanor wanted to draft the entire nation.

My progressive friends uphold that finely tuned tradition of situational libertarianism even today. Although sensitive to civil rights, they are hardly squeamish about them. When, for instance, Ashcroft's predecessor as attorney general, Janet Reno, launched a tank assault on a religious community outside of Waco, killing 80 people – more than half of them minorities, 20 of them children – my friends kept silent. They understand that governments sometimes have to break a few eggs to sustain the omelet of orderly government. Ditto when Reno sent her troopers to liberate Elian at gunpoint from his Miami family and send him back to Cuba where, unlike America, no little boy goes without health coverage.

Closer to home, my friends prudently held their tongues when Missouri's Democrat Attorney General Jay Nixon imprisoned 15 so-called "paper terrorists" in the late '90s for conspiring to place a lien on the house of a state judge. Seven years in a state penitentiary may seem a little tough for a lien that was immediately expunged, but our local progressives understood that a line had to be drawn before these terrorists moved from paper to some more durable substance.

Given their historically measured response to issues of national security, I had to take my friends' outsized anxieties about John Ashcroft seriously. So I decided to do a little investigating. How, I wondered, had Ashcroft managed to impose a law as frightening as the USA-Patriot Act on the American people? Attorneys general, I reasoned, are supposed to follow the law, not make it.

Here is where things got sticky. It seems that Ashcroft did not exactly make the law. Nor did Bush issue the Patriot Act as an executive order. As it happens, in October 2001 Sens. Clinton, Kerry, Edwards, Lieberman, Kennedy and 93 of their colleagues resoundingly passed the Patriot Act through the Senate and into the law books for Ashcroft to enforce. The final Senate count, in fact, was 98 to 1.

I also learned that the federal courts, even the liberal ones, have in almost every case supported Ashcroft's interpretation of the anti-terrorism policy he was enforcing. Were the courts also part of this fascist junta, I wondered? As to the most subversive of Ashcroft's tools, the library-snooping Section 215, this section of the act does not even mention libraries and has never been invoked in any case.

One other detail confused me. From what I learned in my investigation, Nazis are "National Socialists," big-government statists with a fondness for eugenics, vegetarianism, leather, and the homoerotic trappings of Germany's pagan past. What the Nazis did not much cotton to were smoking, gun ownership and people of faith – Christians as well as Jews

In checking Ashcroft's senate record, however, I discovered that the American Conservative Union had awarded him a 98 percent rating. The rating acknowledged Ashcroft's consistent votes in support of small, decentralized government, gun rights, America's Judaeo-Christian traditions, Israel, "life" in all its manifestations and even big tobacco.

Something wasn't clicking here. In inquiring more deeply, I learned that his opponents had begun to label Ashcroft a "Nazi" even before Sept. 11, indeed even before he was confirmed as attorney general. The one scribe who had warned of another Dachau wrote tellingly, "We tried to stop this religious fanatic fundamentalist from ever getting the job."

Walter Cronkite was only slightly more circumspect. "What makes this administration's legal bloodthirstiness particularly alarming," he writes in his denunciation of Ashcroft, "is the almost religious zeal that seems to drive it." Even the composer of "The Obnoxious Right Wing Nazi Pig Dog From Missouri" penned his immortal lyrics before 9-11, due largely to Ashcroft's unapologetic Christianity and the lyricist's phobia about the same.

The celebrated wordsmith Jesse Jackson helped me understand progressive logic as it applies to a traditional Christian like Ashcroft. "In South Africa, we call it apartheid," warns Jackson. "In Nazi Germany, we'd call it fascism. Here in the United States, we call it conservatism."

As I learned, the equation between such diametrically opposed philosophies as conservatism and Nazism has a specific provenance. Before Pearl Harbor American conservatives generally opposed American entry into World War II. So did America's communists. At the time, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were allies. As brutal totalitarian states they had a lot in common, including their respective halves of Poland.

In May 1941, however, Nazi Germany turned on the Soviet Union, and the sophisticated Soviet propaganda machine turned on America's conservatives. From the Soviet perspective, anyone who continued to resist America's entry into the war had to be a fascist, and so was born the "brown smear."

As I began to see, the smear has outlived the Soviet Union and continues to mutate. Contemporary progressives now consciously extend it to serious Christianity. Through relentless media propaganda they have made a direct connection – in their own minds at least – from Adolf Hitler to "the Church Lady" and are now busy scaring themselves with their own mindless stereotypes.

That's a shame. No administration in world history has handled an internal threat of this magnitude with so much respect for civil liberties. No one has even come close. Hell, even Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War.

The Patriot Act and its offshoots are far from perfect, but at least Ashcroft is using the laws he has been handed against real terrorists, not "paper" ones. He does not deserve such absurd abuse, especially from people who would have scrapped the whole dang Constitution had the perpetrators of Sept. 11 worshipped the same God as John Ashcroft.

Jack Cashill is an Emmy-award winning independent writer and producer with a Ph.D. in American Studies from Purdue.

Dean talked about how as a boy he had delivered newspapers on the street where the Hardings had lived, so he must have grown up in Marion, Ohio, and that could be why he was sufficiently interested in Harding to write a book about him. He mentioned love letters Harding had written to another woman with whom he had had an affair...it is possible that Nan Britton never had an affair with Harding, but had access to those love letters and made up a story on the basis of what she had learned from them. The love letters didn't come to light until much later, and some material is still off-limits to researchers.

at the risk of being called a homophobe

One should not worry about such trivial risks. I have come to find that if they want to call you one, they will regardless of how hard someone tries to avoid being called one, nor regardless of how much someone knows themselves not to be one. Nor to be a racist, or a bigot of any kind.

In the eyes of many gay people, since I disagree with their form of alternative lifestyle, I am therefore a homophobe. Note I did not say all, just many. I can accept this. After all I am not interested in changing the way they think or feel. It's a free country, however, my demeanor changes just a bit when they call me a "breeder".

So go on, be proud, stand tall and be the homophobe they will make you out to be regardless of your ability to accept them and their lifestyle. For it is they, that cannont accept the fact that you don't quite accept them. Which means they don't accept you either. Confused yet?

>>It [Nazi] has become nothing more than a cheap insult that the uneducated masses throw out whenever they need a quick out of a lost argument.

If you are not familiar with Godwin's Law, you should be. It should be invoked every time "John Ashcroft is a Nazi" gets used by Liberal fools.

Godwin's Law
http://info.astrian.net/jargon/terms/g/Godwin_s_Law.html

He mentioned love letters Harding had written to another woman with whom he had had an affair...it is possible that Nan Britton never had an affair with Harding, but had access to those love letters and made up a story on the basis of what she had learned from them. The love letters didn't come to light until much later, and some material is still off-limits to researchers.

From what I've read, there are a lot of letters that have been researched. The other affair was with a woman named Carrie Phillips who was a family friend of the Hardings, the two couples socialized and vacationed together. The affair has been pretty exhaustively documented. As for Nan Britton, she had a daughter named Marion who apparently was accepted as his own by Harding. Don't forget also that crates and crates of papers were destroyed by Florence Harding after her husband's death; in addition, he'd left instructions for certain private papers to be destroyed by his office assistant, so probably we will never know the whole story. There is a pretty good biography of Florence Harding by Carl Sferraza Anthony that sheds light on some of this stuff.... but now we're getting way off topic on this thread, sorry!

The best line in the article. It shows that LEFTISTS (they're NOT liberals) don't even have any core beliefs when it comes to their own "liberalism."

I dunno. Read the Unabomber Manifesto and Modern Fascism: Liquidating the Judeo-Christian Worldview. It's fragmented, for sure, but there are ideological underpinings that tie it all together.

>>After all I am not interested in changing the way they think or feel. It's a free country, however, my demeanor changes just a bit when they call me a "breeder".

FWIW, I've been making arguments with Libs that government encouraging heterosexual family formation with marriage and laws favoring "breeders", is more than justifiable on a societal Darwinism basis. It is much more effective than throwing Biblical arguments at them. Their heads start spinning around and steam comes out there ears; quite amusing.

The love letters didn't come to light until much later, and some material is still off-limits to researchers.

In Francis Russell's "Shadow of Blooming Grove," there were quotes from letters originally slated for publication. When the book came out, those sections were printed with dashes instead of words. I don't know if this is the same material as in contention now, but one would think so. The Russell book is the best Harding bio I have read, and I've read them all.

I'd call it the definitive bio, but that's not my job.

I didn't realize Britton has become so throughly put out of the official story. I remember that the plates for her book, "The President's Daughter," were destroyed or something like that, and that the book was suppressed to the point it was sold from door to door. I used to have a copy of it and a pretty nice Harding collection but got rid of everything when I last moved.

Anyway, Britton's book is so treacly you'd think Peggy Noonan wrote it as a teenager. Maybe the whole Britton thing is malarkey and maybe Bill Clinton didn't rape anybody. But there are a lot of quite detailed stories in both scandals that no one would be expected to fabricate on spec. Thing is, Harding comes off as an amiable oaf with lax morals who shouldn't have been able to get away with a secret sexual life.

Whereas Clinton has no self control, a pattern of indulging rapaciousness, and the arrogance to think he can force acceptance of patent lies because of who he is. Harding lacked the vicious arrogance of Clinton and the careless disregard Clinton has for the women around him, truth, the welfare of anything other than himself, and what anyone thinks about it.

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