John Ashcroft.  You remember him…right?  The man who scared the steaming crap out of everyone when President Junior made him Attorney General, because of his bedrock fundamentalist contempt for all that civil liberties and religious pluralism stuff?  The man whose father, a traveling Pentecostal minister, anointed him with oil in the kitchen the day he took office?  The religious zealot who asked nominees for judgeships if they were faithful to their spouses, and whether they drank?  Who vetoed a bill while governor of Missouri to allow liquor sales on Sunday?  The sanctimonious jackass who said, "I don’t particularly care if I do what’s right in the sight of men. The important thing is for me to do right in God’s sight. The verdict of history is inconsequential; the verdict of eternity is what counts."  The self righteous prig who ordered a cover for the statue of the "Spirit of Justice" in the lobby of the Justice Department because one of her breasts was exposed?

Yeah…that John Ashcroft…

Former Attorney General John Ashcroft, who sent a letter this week to his successor Alberto Gonzales blasting the proposed merger of Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. and XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc., approached XM in the days after the merger was announced offering the firm his consulting services, a spokesman for XM said Saturday.

The spokesman said XM declined Mr. Ashcroft’s offer to work as a lobbyist for the company.

Mr. Ashcroft was subsequently hired by the National Association of Broadcasters, which is fiercely opposed to the merger. On its behalf he conducted a review of the effects on competition if the two satellite radio companies were allowed to merge.

See…all this time you thought what made Ashcroft dangerous was his moral fanaticism.  But people become fanatics precisely because they have no personal sense of the moral and decent.  Their inner lives are a vast unexamined wasteland where no personal sense of right and wrong ever had a chance of taking root.  So as they walk through their lives, they come to embrace a kind of idolatry that’s all performance and ritual and ostentatious humility, dress themselves up as the idol’s champion and commissar, wage righteous war on behalf of it, so they can appear to themselves, to each other, and to the world, as all they are not within.  Moral.  Honorable.  Decent.  They wear their religiosity on their sleeve like that because not having a conscience, it’s the only place they have to put it.

Which is why fanatics are so dangerous.  It’s not their moralizing.  Fanaticism is the opposite of moralizing.  They are incapable of moralizing.  They have no brakes.  They’ll do whatever that stone idol sitting silently in the middle of that vast inner wasteland tells them to.