Have you crapped your pants while thinking about John Ashcroft lately? No? Well, read on:

...In his fierce four-day confirmation battle in the Senate, he received 42 negative votes, the most ever cast against a nominee for attorney general. However, it would have helped, for example, if more people had realized that Ashcroft routinely compares himself to Christ in his 1998 memoir, Lessons from a Father to His Son, in which he refers to his campaign victories as "resurrections." Conversely, his political defeats are compared to "crucifixions." Ashcroft's determination to liken his political career to the life and death of Christ is a sign of "narcissism — without question," says Washington, D.C., therapist William Demeo. Despite reams of information dispensed by his opponents at the time of his Senate confirmation, no one seemed to know the complete Ashcroft. No one outside his home state of Missouri, anyway.

Ashcroft was the second of three sons of J. Robert Ashcroft, a Pentecostal preacher and president of Evangel College (now Evangel University) in Springfield, 220 miles south of St. Louis. J. Robert led the institution to accreditation. "A great speaker who used a lot of good, flowery words to paint pictures" is how Bud Greve, who teaches education at Evangel, remembers him. But John Ashcroft, although equally admiring, gives a different side of J. Robert, an amateur pilot, in his memoir. It opens with the words "John, I'd like you to fly this plane for a while," a command issued when John, all of eight, found himself placed at the controls of a flimsy 1940s Piper Cub in midair.

The impact of this experience was indelible. The plane went into a swoon over a Springfield farm while the boy gaped, helpless, frozen with terror: "My stomach came up to my throat and I lost all sense of time or place as fear gripped my insides." His father, John recalls, "had a good chuckle."

"And I had a good lesson: actions have consequences," he continues. Even the two-month absences of J. Robert during summers, when he went preaching around the state, yielded salutary consequences, his son believes. Young John became "stronger" and self-reliant. Besides, "Jesus Himself faced family dislocation. Remember when He cried out to His heavenly Father, 'My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?'

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Some 15 years ago, Missouri state senator Harry Wiggins, a Democrat and the spokesman for a bipartisan group trying to get funding restored for a Kansas City home for AIDS patients, met with Ashcroft in the governor's mansion. The Good Samaritan home, as it was then called, had received a $900,000 state grant, but, says Wiggins, "Governor Ashcroft vetoed it. I think twice."

Wiggins tried to explain the home's purpose. "This is a place they go, Governor, but they don't come back," he began. "Many of them, their families have rejected them."

"I understand. You got my attention," Ashcroft said with interest. "This is the place where it is cheapest for me to send them to die."

"Governor, these are human beings who have to have a place to live," protested Wiggins, "or they'll live in boxes under bridges."

Wiggins remembers Ashcroft's reply: "Well, they're there because of their own misconduct, and it wasn't very reputable misconduct, either."

Wiggins was puzzled. "When does misconduct become reputable? When disreputable?"

"That's beside the point," snapped Ashcroft.

(more in link. ganked from mike & boingboing)