Once upon a time, a group of people known as the “Democrats” expressed great fear of tyranny by government.

This was a time long, long ago, when a man from a place called Texas, representing a people known as the Republicans, occupied the White House. Leaders of the Democrats feared tyranny by the Republicans and called the man from Texas racist, oppressive and tyrannical.

To refresh your recollection, we offer a few examples from the distant past:

Billionaire Democratic contributor George Soros. He said the George W. Bush White House displayed the “supremacist ideology of Nazi Germany” and that Bush’s administration used rhetoric that echoed his childhood in occupied Hungary. “When I hear Bush say, ‘You’re either with us or against us,’” Soros said, “it reminds me of the Germans.” Soros later said: “The Bush administration and the Nazi and communist regimes all engaged in the politics of fear. … Indeed, the Bush administration has been able to improve on the techniques used by the Nazi and communist propaganda machines.”

Former Vice President Al Gore. He said: “(George W. Bush’s) executive branch has made it a practice to try and control and intimidate news organizations, from PBS to CBS to Newsweek. … And every day, they unleash squadrons of digital brownshirts to harass and hector any journalist who is critical of the President.”

Former two-time Democratic presidential candidate and civil rights leader the Rev. Jesse Jackson. After Congress passed new anti-terrorism laws following 9/11, he said: “We are in danger. The extreme right wing has seized the government. Tonight, (John) Ashcroft and the CIA and the FBI and Homeland Security and the IRS can work together. So look out, because without a definition of who is a terrorist, anyone can be. … Martin Luther King could have been. … The right-wing media, the FBI – they are targeting our leadership.”

Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., senior member of the House Ways and Means Committee. He said: “What we are dealing with right now in this country is whether we are having a kind of bloodless, silent coup or not. … (President Bush) is trying to bring to himself all the power to become an emperor – to create Empire America.” An Iraq War opponent, McDermott said, “The President of the United States will lie to the American people in order to get us into this war.”

Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., who sits on four Senate committees, including Armed Services and Commerce. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, she said, “George Bush let people die on rooftops in New Orleans because they were poor and because they were black.”

Entertainer and liberal activist Harry Belafonte. When asked whether the number and prominence of blacks in the Bush administration suggested a lack of racism on Bush’s part, Belafonte said, “Hitler had a lot of Jews high up in the hierarchy of the Third Reich.”

Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, former presidential candidate. He characterized the contest between Democrats and Republicans as “a struggle of good and evil. And we’re the good.” Shortly after the 9/11 terror attacks, Dean actually mused about an “interesting theory” he’d heard – that G.W. Bush had prior knowledge of 9/11 yet took no action to stop it!

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. In 2003, Albright said she thought Bush had already captured Osama bin Laden – but that Bush was not going to reveal this until just before the 2004 election to get maximum political benefit! She later claimed she was joking, but Morton Kondracke, who overheard the comment, said, “She was not smiling when she said this,” and that others in the room heard it, too, “and they didn’t think it was a joke.”

Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., sitting member of all six subcommittees of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. He compared the newly conservative-controlled Republican House of Representatives to “the Duma and the Reichstag” – referring to the legislature set up by Czar Nicholas II of Russia and the parliament of the German Weimar Republic that brought Hitler to power.

An anti-gun New York newspaper published a report and interactive map with the names and addresses of gun permit holders in Westchester and Rockland counties. Shorty after this, an anti-gun columnist for a prominent New Jersey paper said: “(I got) a nasty note from one of my most progressive friends who says … ‘You’re a fool because when the right wing takes over the government, we’re gonna need guns. … And then there won’t be guns to fight them back.”

“Words matter,” Obama once said.

During the Bush years, Democrats feared, or at least claimed to fear, the possibility of tyranny – precisely the purpose of the Second Amendment. If these Democrats were even remotely sincere, why wouldn’t any self-respecting patriot want the right to keep and bear arms to protect against thugs like that? Indeed, why not mandatory gun ownership – at least when Republicans control the White House?

You warned us. We believe you. The threat of tyranny is ever-present.

COPYRIGHT 2013 LAURENCE A. ELDER
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