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You're missing my point. With the frequency I hear people complaining about Romney having been called a fascist, I'd expect there to be innumerable examples out there, as if it was something that was unavoidable at the time of the election. Instead, all you can come up with is an NPR article that doesn't directly call him a fascist, comments from three people you couldn't pick out of a police lineup (one of whom apologized), and comments made after the election about not Mitt Romney by a comedian who is known for making edgy remarks. What's even more curious is that you seem invested in defending this point, but you're almost certainly relying on the internet for your examples; I doubt you came to the conclusion that Romney was called a fascist because you read that NPR article upon publication or were paying attention to what Dick Harpootlian was saying in 2012.
More importantly, though, I don't know what the importance of pointing this out is. So five people called Romney a fascist in 2012, so what? What relevance does it have on contemporary politics. It's nowhere near the number of Republicans who were calling Obama a socialist or Marxist at the time, so it's not like one side has a monopoly on political hyperbole. The most common response I get is that people can't trust the Democrats when they call Trump a fascist because they said the same thing about Romney. Okay, and if these five examples didn't exist you would trust the Democrats and would have voted for Clinton, Biden, and Harris solely to prevent the rise of fascism in America? Come on, give me a break.
I assume that he came to that conclusion because there were a lot of things said like that, rather than because he saw those specific examples.
Obviously it would make no sense to track down the exact examples that he had actually seen.
Particularly if observations were not in an internet-capturable format... and if the ease of finding internet-captured variations by Democratic party officials, media allies, and high-visibility commentators stands alone as a point of 'yeah, this was a thing that did happen.'
The attempt to frame trivial-to-find examples as if they were the limit of instances is itself an example of the deny / downplay / dismiss technique which has long been used to complimentary effect of the false accusation strategies. Who accused Romney of being fascist, only five people accused Romney of being a fascist, the five examples are irrelevant because you wouldn't trust the Democrat accusations if they hadn't made them...
Well, yes, for the same reason that you would otherwise trust a robber if they didn't have a history of robbery.
If the Democratic party was the sort of party whose party members did not falsely accuse Romneyy of being a fascist, and also were not the sort of party members to later deny / downplay / dismiss that they falsely accused Romney, I might indeed put more weight in their warnings of fascism. But this would be because they would, by their nature, also be the sort of party that did not falsely accuse generations of opponents, and the deny / downplay / dismiss that they had falsely accused generations of opponents, and wouldn't be in thhe position as a party to now be falsely accusing people of fascism.
It's not the single instance, or even five instances, that make a pattern that ruins credibility. But the subset of examples only exist because the pattern of behavior exists. If the removal of the examples is the result of the removal of the pattern of activity, there would be no reason to hold the non-existent pattern of activity against the people who, in the imaginary hypothetical, didn't do it.
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