Latimer on Law & Politics

Fear & Loathing On The Campaign Trail 2010

                                                        Fear & Loathing On The Campaign Trail 2010

                         - GOP Demagogues Admit  They've Got Nothing To Offer But Fear Itself

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

     "So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. . . ."                                     -F.D.R., First Innaugural Address, March 4, 1933.

 

"We are turning into a nation of whimpering slaves to Fear -fear of war, fear of poverty, fear of random terrorism, fear of getting downsized or fired . . . , fear of getting evicted for bad debts. . . . "

                               -Hunter S. Thomspon, "Extreme Behavior In Aspen,"  February 3, 2003

 

                                                                                   Visceral Giving

                                                                                           -Fear

                                          -Extreme negative feelings toward existing administration. . . .

                                                                                  -Reactionary

                       -Flow chart for motivating rank & file GOP donors, RNC Fundraising Plan, March 2010

 

            Professor Gordon Ourside returns with another timely selection from his anthology Songs of Morning Again In America, entitled "Demagogue Rag."  This selection coincides with the recent inadvertent leak of the Republican National Committee's fundraising plan for the upcoming mid-term elections, presented in power-point format, which one of the truly brilliant committee members accidently left in a hotel room after checking out.

http://www.youtube.com/user/gordonourside#p/a/u/0/5TUmotaGYI8

Here, Professor Ourside captures the essence of post-Reagan Republicanism in song, a simple tune to be sure, but highly appropriate for the simplistic ideology on which today's GOP agenda is founded.

              It's fun to watch GOP officeholders scurrying around these days, like so many little rodents fleeing from a tabby cat, as they try vainly to distance themselves from the RNC recipe that their party administrators have concocted to get them re-elected this November.  I'm sure they'll be the first ones to object to the forthcoming RNC television ads and mass mailings that will be based on those talking points for  "visceral giving" as seen  in the following link. 

   http://www.politico.com/static/PPM136_100303_rnc_finance_leadership.html

So, true to form, the hypocritical GOP hacks in Washington say they disagree with their party's strategy for the upcoming mid-term elections, but they do exactly what the strategy dictates.  Can you spell Grand Old Phonies?

             You remember last spring, don't you, when top GOP hacks like DeMint were telling each other they were going to make health care reform President  Obama's "Waterloo?"  Then there was Congressman Joe Jim Crow Wilson from South Carolina yelling "liar" at President Obama. But that stuff wasn't negativism toward the administration was it?  Reactionary?  Nah -of course not.  It was. . . statesmanship!  Yeah, that's the ticket.   And now all those malevolent GOP clowns  are making like the RNC game plan for this fall is way beneath their high minded standards.  What a hoot!

             It's even more hilarious to read through the transcript of Sarah Palin's keynote address to the first annual Teabagger  convention, checking off all the talking  points she mixes in taken directly from the RNC recipe for demagogue chowder -not to be confused with quahog chowder which is both good tasting and good for you. 

   http://themoderatevoice.com/62060/sarah-palins-keynote-speech-at-national-tea-party-convention/

You remember Palin, don't you, the GOP's most recent vice- presidential candidate and their brightest rising star before Senator Cosmo Boy's sudden ascent from the back benches on Beacon Hill. 

              The three major ingredients  of the RNC's approach to "visceral" voters, i.e. the so-called "values" voters and the Teabaggers, is to play upon "fear," upon negativity toward the Obama administration  and upon the "reactionary" impulses of such voters.  So let's see how well our little Miss Sarah has learned the GNP recipe   - quoting from her Teabagger speech.

               We can start with a full measuring cup  of right wing fearmongering, then dropping in a heaping tablespoon of anti-Obama negativism:

 Now in recent weeks, many of us have grown even more uneasy about our administration's approach to national security, the most important role entrusted to our federal government. . . . Americans deserve to know the truth about the threats that we face and what the administration is or isn't doing about things,

Scared, yet?  Angry?   Please note that Ms. Palin herself emphasized the word "more" here, just to let everyone know they should already be as afraid as she is, and she's just begun stirring the pot.  Here's some more home cooking from the American right wing's darling demagogue doll:

New terms used like "overseas contingency operation" instead of the word "war."  That reflects a worldview that is out of touch with the enemy that we face.  We can't spin our way out of this threat . . . to call the devastation that a homicide bomber can inflict a "manmade disaster."  And I just say, come on Washington.  If nowhere else -national security-that's one place where you got to call it like it is.

Yes, yes, we're getting the flavor now -like when Bush and Cheney called their invasion and occupation of Iraq "Operation Iraqi Freedom," not to mention their "fixing the intelligence to the policy," as the MI6 Downing Street memo so politely put it, to start that, um, operation.  But at least they didn't call it an "overseas contingency operation," so they were calling it like it is, right?

                Moving right along, here, there's lots more fear and loathing that needs to be mixed in and  served up before this November, so:

And in that spirit, we should acknowledge that on Christmas Day, the system did not work.  Abdul Mutallab passed through airport security with a bomb, and he boarded a flight hell-bent on killing innocent passengers.  This terrorist trained in Yemen with al Qaida.  His American visa was not revoked until after he tried to kill hundreds of passengers.  On Christmas Day, the only thing that stopped this terrorist was blind luck and brave passengers.  Really, it was a Christmas miracle, and that is not the way the system is supposed to work.

Now that was a really nice display of demagogic pot stirring, with three Christmases and two terrorists thrown in -so obviously  the system did not work on Obama's watch. 

              But this was nothing like shoe bomber Richard Reid, so don't even think about that, just keep blaming Obama ‘cause Reid wasn't  an al Qaeda connected terrorist who tried  blow up an airplane full of innocent civilians on Christmas Day.   Not even close -it was on  December 22^nd, remember,  not Christmas Day.  So, right there, the system worked back then on Bush's watch in ‘03, see?  It's only now, that Obama's in office, that it doesn't work.  But wait -there's more.

            Our gal Sarah's just been warming it all up so far with fear and loathing , but now she stirs a heaping cupful of "reactionary" into the RNC chowdah:

What followed was equally disturbing.  After he was captured, he was questioned for only fifty minutes.  We had a choice in how to do this.  The choice was only question him for fifty minutes and then read his Miranda rights. . . . (T)here are questions we would have liked this foreign terrorist to answer because he lawyered up and invoked our U.S. Constitutional right to remain silent. . . . Our U.S. Constitutional rights.

M-m-m, m-m!  That's real nourishment for all you gourmand reactionaries, like the folks in Palin's Teabagger audience, with a tablespoon of xenophobia -the "foreign" terrorist invoking "our" constitutional rights, plus gobs of lawyer bashing with "Miranda" and  "lawyering up."    

             Now, please remember that this was nothing like what happened right after 9/11, when the Bush administration let fifty or so close relatives of Osama bin Laden board a plane back to Saudi Arabia, never to return, without asking them any questions about what they might know -what bin Laden may have told them about where he was, about his connections, about where he was getting his money and irrelevant stuff like that.  No, it was nothing like that because those folks didn't lawyer up and invoke their Miranda rights, right?

           Shotgun  Sarah's got the old chowder pot boiling on the GOP campfire now, and she  just keeps on stirring in all that nutritious fear and loathing:

The events surrounding the Christmas Day plot reflect the kind of thinking that led to September 11th.  That threat then. . . as the U.S.S. Cole was attacked . . . our Embassies were attacked . . . It was treated like an international crime spree, not like an act of war.  We're seeing that mindset again settle into Washington.  That scares me for my children and for your children.  Treating this like a mere law enforcement matter places our country at grave risk.  Because that's not how radical Islamic extremists are looking at this.  They know we're at war.  And to win that war, we need a commander -in-chief, not a Professor of Law Standing at the Lectern!

Let's take a teaspoon, now,  and savor that for a moment.  Are we talking about the "mindset" of the Bush administration after the U.S.S. Cole bombing in October 2002?  The Reagan administration after the bombing of our embassy in Beirut in 1983?  The Bush administration after the embassy bombing in Yemen in September 2008?  Don't be silly.

           Or are we talking about the "mindset" of the Bush administration that did nothing for nine months after veteran security analyst Richard Clarke first warned of an imminent attack by al Qaeda on American soil right after  Bush took office in January 2000, and still ignored it after it was repeated in a White House briefing memo in August 2001?  Is that the "mindset" Palin means?  Nah!  All that stuff's  irrelevant because Reagan, Bush and Cheney weren't law professors standing at the lectern, see?  And with all the combined combat experience those three shared they had to know a lot more about "war" than Professor Obama, fer sure!

           Ms.  Palin just keeps stirring the pot, with some more scrumptious "reactionary" about Obama "reaching out to hostile regimes," some more tangy "fear" with North Korea testing nuclear weapons and telling everyone that, sorry, but she had to skimp a little because all that was "just a short list."  But, come November, you can be sure that the RNC will be giving her an even longer list of ingredients for their thick, glutinous, right-wing demagogue chowdah -along with all the other GOP hacks that are pretending today that they don't really  cook it up themselves, gallons of it,  when they're the ones serving the faithful at Republican campaign events trying to get re-elected.  The one thing it's sure to lack, however, is any real substance.

              It's just like Professor Ourside sings in "Demagogue Rag," and it's been that way with GOP pot-stirrers ever since Ronald Reagan:

                              Liberals are traitors!  Evolution's a lie!

                             Ketchup's a veggie, and there's pie in the sky!

                             So I want to be your demagogue.

Frankly, one must begrudgingly admire at least the constitutional fortitude of the hardcore American right, if not their idiocy, with their capacity to keep on swallowing the swill the GOP keeps dishing up to them without gagging on it -as clearly illustrated by the leaked RNC fundraising  plan.  But then, maybe that's just because of the idiocy. You betcha!