Letters to the Editor
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"All you have to fear is fear itself."
Jason Burke the chief foreign correspondent of The Observer, defines terrorism as 'the use or threat of serious violence' to advance some kind of 'cause'.
Thanks John McCain for giving us a photo to put beside the definition.
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Funny thing is
If you change Islamic Terrorists with Right Wing Conspiracy, You get Clinton's main campaign argument against Obama.
-- Seems they are all playing from the same ol book that the american people already threw away
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Think it will stop at just ads?
Perhaps the Republican candidates are running ads filled with terrorist attacks because they have an inside line on what will be happening in the real world between now and Election Day. Not that the current administration -- which very much needs a Republican, and not a Democrat, receiving custody of the evidence of their criminal wrong-doing on January 20, 2009 -- would actually stage a Reichstag Fire. But they sure could act in ways that made such attacks more likely. And no matter how aggressive and provocative our attack on, say, Iran, that provokes them to unleash the terrorist acts on us in retaliation; once we are attacked, it will be politically impossible to blame our side for the original provocation. That should be the main take-home lesson from the political response to 9/11.
Look at this another way. The current administration has so overused terrorist alerts, and used them so often for naked political effect, that the public has learned to shrug them off for years now. In fact, this credibility gap has forced the administration to stop issuing new alerts, because they no longer do any good at creating the fear in the electorate that the administration, and Republicans in general, wish to create. But if the alerts don't work any more because of the credibility gap, why would the Republican strategists think that the ads will still work? These folks don't spend the big money on commercials without good reason. Think maybe they know that things will soon happen in the real world that will give them a good return on the investment in commercials terrorizing the electorate over terrorism? The investment looks so bad if you only factor in things that the general public is privy to right now, that you have to wonder if there isn't some insider knowledge guiding this strategy.
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The right wing need a new Pearl Harbor to inspire (scare)
us into supporting their disasterous, expensive, bloody policies. Watch for that Pearl Harbor even folks.
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I don't see anything different then what the GOP normally does...
They've always relied on a "them" to scare people into voting for them. For decades it was communists, for the past decade it was gays, now it's immigrants and terrorists. Fear of others is all the conservative movement has to offer. This article doesn't surprise me in the least.
Throw up a few more "Children of Men" style commercials and watch their base rally to the polls like the same sheep they've always been.
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"I am scared to death if the Democrats get in"
Or maybe just scared to death. Period.
Amazing how a few thousand fanatics with primitive weapons has paralyzed those who call themselves part of "the greatest nation on earth".
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Democrats the same in a different way
I understand why people would see that the Republicans are using fear of terror as a motivator. The Democrats do the same thing but the issues are different. Just a few things from the recent debate:
-Clinton scares people with the new jobs report that had unemployment at 5%. Don't know about you, but I am old enough to remember when 5% unemployment was considered impossible. 6% would ahve been great. And, to think that unemployment is this low when there are ~10 million illegals taking jobs and corporations outsourcing everything to India. These facts don't exactly fit together.
-Edwards goes off on his normal thing about insurance companies withholding treatments and letting people die. No mention that the case he cites involves an organ transplant and that people are denied transplants all the time not by insurance companies but by the rules of the transplant bureaucracy.
I think that is one thing about Obama that people like. He doesn't seem to be trying to motivate by fear. Now, I happen to disagree with him on a lot of things but I at least believe he is trying to be minimally objective and not cry wolf on everything.
Oh, and one other thing: The fears the Republicans are bringing up actually have the merit of being real. Terrorists actually are trying to attack America and kill its citizens. Now, while people can have a good debate about what the right tactics should be, it is hard to dispute that the threat is real.
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Fear is only one tactic
It's not surprising that fear is being used to sell this field of candidates. It represents one of several favorite tactics of the neoconservative movement that has become dominant under the current president.
This use of fear in the campaign is just a continuation of the fear used to sell the war, the fear used to continue the war, and the fear used to justify radical expansions of executive power. Fear is also the justification for an ominous change to a fundamental principle in our foreign policy: the shifting from a just war doctrine to one of preemptive war.
Fear transcends these candidates. It's one tool in the arsenal of the broader movement used to shape public opinion. Think of the calls to patriotism that silenced dissent in the run up to war. Think of the policies that went unchallenged because our president claimed a religious conviction for his actions. Even the call to spread values that many judge to be positive to the human environment, like democracy, have now brought public support for aggressive military actions to meet these ends throughout the globe.
Fear. Patriotism. Religious conviction. Democratic values. These four tools have been applied to the collective conscience so that we now accept the United States as an aggressor nation and willingly relinquish individual freedoms as demanded by our government.
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All They Have Is Fear
This is all they (Republicans) have had (with certain significant exceptions) for the most part, since the McCarthy era, and it seems even the most timid of Americans are finally burning out on this crap. You can only live in fear of "war and rumors of war" for so long, only exist in a chronic state of dread til the adrenaline is all gone and the mind kicks back in.
When The People start thinking again, which it seems they may be, there will be hell to pay. The right will have to pay the price, and as a lifelong member of the Party of Lincoln I look forward to the dismemberment of this old, tired, rusty, anti-human Fear Machine once and for all. None of us can be free and afraid at the same time. We have to give up one to have the other. We have given up peace of mind for the majority of my lifetime, and I rub my hands together in anticipation of getting back not only my country, but my party and the ability to have sane conversations with my own relatives and friends, uncontaminated by the spectre of dread personified as a Negro, an Asian, a Russian, and, lately and most vague of all, a Muslim extremist. And all the while the fires of fear (and hatred -- can't have one of those without the other) stoked by professing "Christians", which gives me somthing else to get back from Them: my native belief system.
Everything hijacked by the mofos who have held us hostage with their images of death-doom-destruction have run out of ideas. There is nothing under the bed, nothing in the closet, and nothing left in the arsenal of hate except word/image of fear.
The nightmare ends when we as a people wake up. The awakening has begun. We can reasonably expect one last, all-out assault on sensibility, one final wave of the obscene and hideous.
It really is all they have, and they bring it to the "desolate marketplace" they have themselves created and nobody is buying anymore.
The party really is over.