Should we be surprised that GW Bush (and perhaps Cheney) manipulated the terror threat in the weeks leading up to a very close election? Hardly. It has been the hallmark of the GOP since Lee Atwater that dirty tricks are fair game in politics, so long as you win in the end.
Should we be incensed? What, again? As Joe Klein writes today on Time.com, the GOP has become the party of nihilism, but this also is nothing new:
There was McCarthyism in the 1950s, the John Birch Society in the 1960s. But there was a difference in those times: the crazies were a faction — often a powerful faction — of the Republican Party, but they didn't run it. The neofascist Father Coughlin had a huge radio audience in the 1930s, but he didn't have the power to control and silence the elected leaders of the party that Limbaugh — who, if not the party's leader, is certainly the most powerful Republican extant — does now. Until recently, the Republican Party contained a strong moderate wing. It was a Republican, the lawyer Joseph Welch, who delivered the coup de grâce to Senator McCarthy when he said, "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?" Where is the Republican who would dare say that to Rush Limbaugh, who has compared the President of the United States to Adolf Hitler?
One hopes that the GOP will eventually collapse under the tremendous weight of its own archaic and dangerously anti-equality platform. We live in a new time. If the GOP doesn't acknowledge this and take a serious step towards reforming itself, they will, as I have repeatedly predicted, the Christianist Party. Christian Nihilism...heh.
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