When Republicans were Nazis ~ By Jack Cashill

Commentary from WorldNetDaily

By Jack Cashill Posted: November 26, 2009 ~ 1:00 am Eastern © 2009 I had the occasion this past week to meet with former Attorney General John Ashcroft. I asked him how he felt when Democrats express outrage about accusations of fascism against the Obama administration. Ashcroft smiled. He knows a little something about such accusations. Five years ago I wrote about the subject on these pages, and I thought it worth a revisit. Back then, one progressive friend after another alerted me to a rather scary development: U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft had become a Nazi – "another Hitler" as one fretfully described our former Missouri governor and senator. This all came as news to me. I had met Ashcroft a few times, and he had 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 politically indicative state. Still, I could not just dismiss those alarums. 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 linked "Ashcroft" and "Nazi," at least two-thirds of which accused Ashcroft of being a Nazi. One site served as an unofficial Ashcroft songbook. It posted the lyrics of more than 70 songs, all of which alerted the innocent to the suspected reign of terror at Justice. Indeed, it must have taken an act of deep courage to pen a song 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 erstwhile "most trusted man," the late 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. As I learned in my investigation, 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 Supreme Court. The Clinton years witnessed a renewal of the left's selective affection for civil rights. 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. [CLICK HERE TO READ MORE]