Actually, Ashcroft’s slave state of Missouri stayed in the union and pro-confederates like himself often found themselves driven out of Union troops in the conflict that the U.S. army officially called the War of the Rebellion. Indeed, Republicans in 1865 would have probably opened fire on Ashcroft and much of the Bush cabinet–certainly on anyone waving a Confederate flag.

The Civil War was about slavery, specifically about a rebellion of slaveholders who owned four million human beings, following the victory of the anti-slavery Republican party and its presidential candidate, Abraham Lincoln in 1860.

The slave states were dominated by the slaveholder class, and were far less democratic than the free states (most of these states paid no salaries to public officials, which insured that local government would be controlled by the wealthy, most of whom were slaveholders).

The secessionist state conventions that followed Lincoln’s victory were dominated by the large slaveholders, who used fears of slave rebellions and chauvinistic hatred of "Yankees," to win support.

In the war itself, large slaveholders were given exemptions from the army, just as wealthy men in the North–a clear example of its class character. Even before Lincoln’s victory, prominent Southern newspapers like the Charleston Mercury pointed to the sharp drop in "market value" of slaves on the New Orleans slave market as an example of what the slave states might expect when Lincoln won

Finally, the first article of the Confederate constitution made it clear that the Confederate government could never intervene in the rights of the states and abolish slavery!

Yet, why is such sinister nonsense being bandied about by would-be cabinet members today, one hundred and 35 years after the end of the Civil War. First, the Republican Party today is dominated by the "conservative" successors of slaveholders, secessionists, and segregationists.

Along with five Supreme Court rightwingers, his brother’s henchmen and women in Florida, Bush owes non-elected presidency to these elements, which, until segregation crumbled in the wake of the Civil Rights movements victories in the 1960s, were the shock troops of a de facto Southern racist dictatorship.

The states rights ideology that slaveholders, confederates, and segregationists have peddled since the early years of the Republic and which Republicans picked up relatively recently, was always aimed at defending slavery and white supremacy. Just as support for dictators like Batista in Cuba, Chiang Kai-shek in China, and Diem in Vietnam, by the U.S. ruling class in the name of "the free world" and "democracy" was always aimed at defending capitalism and imperialism.

Indeed, it was so easy for the U.S. ruling class to embrace nearly every rightwing dictator in the world as a "democrat" because, decades before the Russian revolution, they had winked at segregation, accepted disenfranchisement and lynch law, and even permitted former slave states to wave the Confederate flag over their state capitals.

When Jorg Haider, whose Austrian "freedom party" says things about Nazis that Ashcroft and other Bush nominees say about Confederate slaveholders, joined a conservative Austrian government, there was a general outcry in Europe and the U.S. and diplomatic sanctions followed.

The least that Senate Democrats can do is make sure that Ashcroft is sent packing back to Missouri or further South, where he can reminisce about Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee.