GOP Playing on Fears: The Worst Kept Secret in Washington

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My fellow Americans,

It seems that the liberal press is once again working overtime to create a tempest in a tea pot regarding some silly memo regarding campaign strategy used by the Republican National Committee.

Evidently, this so-called memo promotes the use of fear-based tactics, character assassination, racial hysteria, and muckraking in campaigns, and urge republican candidates to portray the president and other democrats as driving the country to socialism.

Leaving aside the likely truth that this so-called memo is a fake, fabricated by the left-wing conspiracy in order to paint true and loyal Americans as dishonest (or at least unethical), the bigger question is why this is news at all?

Have all of you people been in a coma for the past 100 years?  Every important political campaign since John Adams smeared Thomas Jefferson as a slave loving fancy-lad has involved playing on the voters' fears. Whether it's me questioning my opponent's patriotism by making baseless accusations that they're a communist; George HW Bush raising the ghosts of racial horror by using a mug-shot to imply that Michael Dukakis will set free wild eyed negroes to feast on the tender flesh of the nation's pure white daughters; or George W Bush terrorizing people with the looming apocalypse of their christian civilization at the hands of bloodthirsty muslim zealots, poltics is a lowest-common-denominator business.

 

You gonna get raped

And the public are lemmings - either too drunk or too stupid to ever catch on.  Paradoxically, the bigger and more outrageously one creates the fear, the more the dopes believe it, because only then does it seem plausible.  The rubes out in the cornfields who cling to their bibles and hold guns and NASCAR sacred need this.  Fear breeds hate, and hate is a great motivating factor.  When you get people to hate something, you can use that to your advantage. The Nazis understood this, and it's something we republicans have adopted as our own. It doesn't matter who you make the threat: communists, homosexuals, hippies, minorities, illegal immigrants, students and intellectuals, muslims, the French - all you have to do is pick a group to blame for all the current problems, then associate your opponent with them. 

This so-called memo isn't news.  It's the republican way.

Nixon is: Confused About the Fuss

Sen. Jim Bunning: A Profile In Courage

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My fellow Americans,

It isn't often that we get to witness a lone man display extreme tenacity in the face of adversity.  Particularly not in the world of politics, where one's integrity is often compromised several times in an hour in order to help expedite a lunch order.

Happily, today we get to see a supreme example of a man who absolutely does not care about anything but himself.  A man whose narcissism and delusion are so grand that it defies description. A man who perfectly exemplifies the attitude of "I don't care about you.  Fuck you."

Senator Jim Bunning, (R. KY) is nothing if not a giant middle finger to every American who is struggling during this long recession.  By single-handedly holding up the passage of a bill to extend unemployment and COBRA benefits to more than a million needy Americans, Sen. Bunning is showing a level of disdain and contempt for the common man not seen since Marie Antoinette.

 

This is the world's smallest violin playing just 

for the unemployed slobs out there.

And why should Sen. Bunning give a wet rat's ass about you, your kids, or that guy down the street who lost his job? Sure, it's easy to simply categorize him (as the Democrats and liberal press are doing) as a heartless a man who has nothing but hatred and scorn for people out of work. And my comment about that is, so what?  I applaud Jim Bunning for standing up for himself.  Whether his cause is right or not doesn't matter.  Every now and then a politician has to stand up and remain strong, regardless of what the issue is.  Even if it means dragging the country through prolonged agony.

However, the most delightful aspect of all is when Sen. Bunning read a letter from "Robert in Louisville" who is supposedly out of work, but supportive of Bunning's stalling the unemployment assistance bill.  It's one of the oldest lies in the book (and one I used with great success in my Checkers speech): you fabricate some poor slob without two nickles to rub together to represent all those working class Joes who will get screwed by your policy, and claim they wrote you to say that even though you're making them suffer, they support you and will sacrifice for you because you're doing The Right Thing.  And the rubes buy it every time. It's sublime.  It's elegant.  It's the Nixon way. 

Of course, ultimately Sen. Bunning will lose his crusade, and the bill will pass.  And he'll slink back to the hills of Kentucky, where he'll dream of the good old days of lounging on a porch, sipping Juleps while listening to the dulcet sounds of the darkies working the fields, and dreaming of spending half an hour in the dusky embrace of his octaroon housekeeper.  But in the mean time, Jim Bunning has reminded us all of what America once was.  A nation of God Fearing White Christians who could do what they wanted without concern over sacrificing the poor, the colored, or the immigrants, and who could have any who disagreed labeled a communist and thrown in jail.

Ah, nostalgia!

Nixon Approves