Those lazy, hazy, days of Ashcroft...

It's an extraordinary sign of how far the Bush administration have strayed towards authoritarianism that one finds oneself longing for the good old days of John Ashcroft, a man whose hobbies included covering up women's breasts on statues and visiting churches where he liked to partake in that lovely religious ritual of talking in tongues.

However, with Gonzales on his present quest to give the President, not so much advice, but rather anything that he wants, then one finds oneself looking back to the days of Ashcroft as a heady time of liberalism.

It now transpires that Ashcroft occasionally said "No" to the President, a concept that is completely lost on the current Attorney General:

In addition to rejecting to the most expansive version of the warrantless eavesdropping program, the officials said, Ashcroft also opposed holding detainees indefinitely at the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, without some form of due process. He fought to guarantee some rights for those to be tried by newly created military commissions. And he insisted that Zacarias Moussaoui, accused of conspiring with the Sept. 11 hijackers, be prosecuted in a civilian court.

Of course, within the mindset of the Bush administration, a person who promotes such concepts was considered about as heretical as Galileo was to the Catholic Church when he announced that the Earth revolved around the sun.

And who led the movement to have Ashcroft excommunicated for preaching this sort of heresy? Well, wouldn't you just know it...

These internal disputes often put Ashcroft at odds with Vice President Cheney and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, said the officials, who recalled heated exchanges in front of the president. In the end, the officials said, the conflicts contributed to Ashcroft's departure at the conclusion of Bush's first term, when the president replaced him with a close friend from Texas, Alberto R. Gonzales, who presumably would be more deferential to the White House.

Every time this administration finds itself mired in shit, the fingerprints of Dick Cheney can always be found on the steering wheel.

What does it say about the present administration if they found John Ashcroft too liberal for their tastes?

Here is a taster of what Ashcroft promoted:

He championed a broad expansion of government power to investigate possible terrorist cells through the USA Patriot Act, authorized the detention of hundreds without charges in the days after Sept. 11, pushed immigration agents to fully use their power to deport foreigners, secured new authority to peer into private records even in libraries, and oversaw legal interpretations that opened the door to harsh interrogation techniques that critics called torture.

And yet this man was considered too dangerously liberal for the Bush hawks who replaced him with Gonzales, literally: A Man Who Just Can't Say No.

Ralph G. Neas, president of the liberal group People for the American Way and one of Ashcroft's strongest critics over the years, said the incident told more about his successor, Gonzales, who was one of the two Bush aides at the hospital that night.

"I did not think it was even possible to make John Ashcroft into a civil libertarian," Neas said in an interview. "But somehow Alberto Gonzales for at least one moment managed to make John Ashcroft into a defender of the Constitution."

It takes some doing and deserves to be recognised as the unique achievement that it is. All Hail Alberto Gonzales, the man who makes us long for the "liberal" days of John Ashcroft.

That is how extreme this regime has become. That's how far removed they are from the Constitution. That's how much these thugs have slipped into blatant criminality.

Suddenly Ashcroft, having been viewed by many as Caligula, has been transformed into Tiberius, such is the awfulness of what has followed him.

Who would have thought that things could slip so far that we would find ourselves longing for the return of a man who enabled torture?

Out of loyalty to Bush, former aides said, Ashcroft did not make these dissents public.

"He was a voice for moderation on a wide range of issues that he never got credit for because he did it the right way, behind the scenes," said another former official who asked not to be named. "On many, many issues the administration has gotten itself in trouble on, if they had listened to his advice, they would have been better off."

Now there's a line you never thought you'd see in print...

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Tags: Ashcroft, Gonzales, Justice Department, eavesdropping, wiretapping, torture, US Constitution, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld