Don, you're going to have to help me with this one. I Googled exactly what you said, "Fourteen Characteristics of Fascism", and the trail's running cold on page 7 or so of the search without finding what you're refering to. The article is referenced a gazillion times, but usually as originally published, no one adding any siginificant detail to what Dr. Britt published at the Council of Secular Humanism.

I did find the same article on two different sites that had a two comments apparently meant as evidence, but they weren't made by all those distiquished people you mention and they'd be hard pressed to be considered conclusive. Surely you don't think that people putting US flags on their car antennas is a priori evidence of Fascism? That's absurd. I can see how the example of Halliburton might apply, but to paraphrase Freud, sometimes corruption is simply corruption. The Teapot Dome scandal wasn't a sign of Fascism was it? It doesn't necessarily follow that a corporate corruption scandal is automatically evidence of Fascism.

As soon as I can get to a computer where I have email, I'm going to write Dr. Britt for his original study. I can appreciate his points, he certainly found these characteristics in Fascism. The problem is I find nothing to suggest he ever tested the predictive ability of his characteristics. To put it simply, he seems to generate a huge number of false positives. There are too many things that would indicate a particular regime in a given country was Fascist when no reasonable person would accept it was. You've fallen into a false syllogism:

All Fascists are corrupt;
The Bush Administration is corrupt (even if this were universally accepted as true);
Therefore the Bush Administration is Fascist.

The logic is wrong, that kind of error that's one of the first things they teach you in Fundamentals of Logic. It would be correct only if the order of the second and third clauses were reversed, but that isn't what you're saying. As it is, this doesn't prove anything. Making the same first year mistake in logic over and over doesn't make what you say true, no matter how much you want it to be.