Democrats Demonize

The Left trashed former Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft as some kind of religious Neanderthal once he became a member of the Bush administration, conveniently erasing his years of stellar service as a Senator and Governor, elected repeatedly by the people of Missouri. Now that they find him useful to bash the Bush administration he is a "great patriot". Jonah Goldberg in the Trib:

First, the attacks on Ashcroft were always grotesquely unfair. As a presidential candidate, Howard Dean -- who often decries how Republicans question the patriotism of Democrats -- saw nothing wrong with flatly asserting that Ashcroft was "not a patriot. He's a direct descendant of Joseph McCarthy." A second lesson is that the Christian scare that has been spooking liberals often amounts to mass paranoia. In 2001, USA Today's former Supreme Court reporter asked, sincerely, "Can a deeply religious person be attorney general?" The bigotry of the question should be self-evident, and the answer equally obvious. In almost every way, Ashcroft was the Bush administration's most exemplary Cabinet official. An undisputed hawk on the war on terror, he was nonetheless immune to the groupthink that has plagued the Bush White House.

Daniel Henninger, WSJ with more commentary on the perils of a permanent opposition.

I would date the polarizing talk to the early 90's, when Republicans and people of faith were branded as extremists by the Democrats at every level of politics. If you questioned whether welfare really helped more people than it hurt, you were an extremist. If you thought maybe your school should spend less dollars on consultants, and more in the classroom, or wondered why the school hired so many subsitute teachers on Mondays and Fridays, you were an extremist. If you believed in God and the sanctity of life, you were an extremist.

When he came to Washington President Bush tried to be a uniter, not a divider. And he has always been gracious in his speech, no matter the provocation and slander, the grotesque BushHitler comparisons. The Democrats criticize and demonize, they offer nothing constructive. They would rather destroy their opponents than debate them. Democrats engage in character assassination, while our real enemies plot to assassinate us all.

That's why the Democrats will never get me back. Never. They lost me in the Carter administration due to his self-pitying incompetence, and they're still losing me by forcing Joe Lieberman out over Iraq, and by their esteem of Jimmy Carter, one of their leaders to this day, who engages in anti-Semitic hate speech and says unpardonable things about our current president.