Fear-mongering at its worst

Greenwald takes great pains to go back and show us how former House Speaker Newt Gingrich employs the worst kind of hyperbole to generate the requisite fear that will motivate uninformed, uneducated voters to go Republican. Basically he's suggesting that the recent Supreme Court decision -- ruled 5-4 against the kinds of justices that a President McSame might nominate -- "could cost us a city" because of the fact that the government now needs to present the evidence against detainees.

I remember Gingrich talking about the use of language to frame a debate. He was the architect of the Republican "Contract for America" during the 1994 mid-term elections, when the GOP wiped out a decades-old Democratic majority in both houses of Congress. This was when the use of the word "liberal" had become a four-letter word. By connecting that word to "tax & spend," "weak on defense," and later "cut and run," Republicans tried to frame the debate about who was more suited to lead the country. What Gingrich has been doing since 2006, when the GOP was fighting to hold onto Congress in the wake of Bush's disastrous Iraq War, Katrina, Patriot Act, etc., is to conflate Democratic leadership with an imagined doomsday scenario. Simply put, if there's a big attack on us, it's now the Democrats's fault. If only the American people had seen that it was necessary to strip away their freedoms to preserve their way of life (?!?!?!), none of this would have happened.

Now read this vertically:

F T S

U H H

C A I

K T T

Keep in mind that this has worked before, when Condoleeza Rice invoked the mushroom cloud scenario if we didn't take out Saddam Hussein.

And, as I said last Friday, I believe that people who are certain to vote for McSame are stupid enough to buy that hook, line and sinker, the way they bought the Limbaugh/Hannity/Clinton bullshit about Obama being a Muslim. It's now our job to see that some who are on the fence, who have at least the potential for using brain cells they never thought they had, actually use their melons to see through this evil manipulation of their baser sensibilities.

As we have all seen all too clearly, blind faith is no way to elect a president.