KRUGMAN: Hoping for Fear

From the New York Times via the Progressive American, Paul Krugman on the GOP's latest round of fear mongering:

We now know that from the very beginning, the Bush administration and its allies in Congress saw the terrorist threat not as a problem to be solved, but as a political opportunity to be exploited. The story of the latest terror plot makes the administration's fecklessness and cynicism on terrorism clearer than ever.

Fecklessness: the administration has always pinched pennies when it comes to actually defending America against terrorist attacks. Now we learn that terrorism experts have known about the threat of liquid explosives for years, but that the Bush administration did nothing about that threat until now, and tried to divert funds from programs that might have helped protect us. "As the British terror plot was unfolding," reports The Associated Press, "the Bush administration quietly tried to take away $6 million that was supposed to be spent this year developing new explosives detection technology."

Cynicism: Republicans have consistently portrayed their opponents as weak on terrorism, if not actually in sympathy with the terrorists. Remember the 2002 TV ad in which Senator Max Cleland of Georgia was pictured with Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein? Now we have Dick Cheney suggesting that voters in the Democratic primary in Connecticut were lending aid and comfort to "Al Qaeda types." There they go again.

Click here for the rest.

The real question here is how much longer this strategy will actually work.

The fear gambit was first employed on a grand scale by the Reagan administration. Until around '86 or so, the Gipper's rhetoric about the Soviet Union was all "Evil Empire," and the non-existent threat from the mildly socialist Nicaragua, whose rag tag army was "three day's march" from Brownsville, Texas, was trumpeted so loudly and continually that many Americans actually bought the bullshit and, in fear, voted against their own interests for GOP candidates. The reality, of course, was that the USSR was in the midst of the dramatic economic implosion that would eventually spell that other superpower's demise--there was never any threat at all from Nicaragua, or Cuba, either, for that matter; their "threat" was a total fiction. But just enough of the electorate was swayed by these self-serving politics to keep Reagan in the Oval Office with a mostly compliant Democratic Congress for eight years.

Flash forward to just before 9/11. The Bush administration, which had stolen the 2000 election, was unpopular and dropping in the polls. They had virtually no foreign policy of which to speak. Then, Al Qaeda gives them a gift. Almost overnight, the US was ripe for a revival of the old Reagan playbook, and Bush has never looked back. Since then, US foreign policy, in any real sense, has been completely incoherent: in terms of domestic politics, however, US foreign policy has been brilliant. As during the Reagan era, the threat of instant annihilation has been trumped up waaaay beyond reality, and it has paid off, again and again, at the ballot box as frightened voters cast ballots for politicians who are on record countless times as wanting to screw them over.

Many Americans continue to play the roles assigned to them by Karl Rove and others, but over the years it has become achingly obvious to the majority that not only has Bush done very little to actually protect them from the real but overblown threat from terrorists, but also his crazy wars of aggression in the Middle East have thrown gasoline on the smoldering flames of Islamic resentment of American policy in the region. That is, people are starting to figure out that instead of protecting them, Bush is making matters much worse.

I guess we're going to see in November if the fear gambit has any steam left in it. I sure hope not.

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