Oh yeah, fear.

Paul Krugman wrote a good piece on it today and how it's being used in this election.

Fearing Fear Itself

Some excerpts:

 Quote:
In America’s darkest hour, Franklin Delano Roosevelt urged the nation not to succumb to “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror.” But that was then.

Today, many of the men who hope to be the next president — including all of the candidates with a significant chance of receiving the Republican nomination — have made unreasoning, unjustified terror the centerpiece of their campaigns.


Which is the very defenition of "terrorism" actually...

 Quote:
[b]Consider, for a moment, the implications of the fact that Rudy Giuliani is taking foreign policy advice from Norman Podhoretz, who wants us to start bombing Iran “as soon as it is logistically possible.”


Or just call it having another wargasm.

 Quote:
Mr. Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary and a founding neoconservative, tells us that Iran is the “main center of the Islamofascist ideology against which we have been fighting since 9/11.” The Islamofascists, he tells us, are well on their way toward creating a world “shaped by their will and tailored to their wishes.” Indeed, “Already, some observers are warning that by the end of the 21st century the whole of Europe will be transformed into a place to which they give the name Eurabia.”

Do I have to point out that none of this makes a bit of sense?


"Islamofascists". heh.

To me, it's at the point where someone uses that phrase that it becomes crystal clear that they're one of those extremist loonies.

Krugman goes on about that idiotic phrase:

 Quote:
For one thing, there isn’t actually any such thing as Islamofascism — it’s not an ideology; it’s a figment of the neocon imagination. The term came into vogue only because it was a way for Iraq hawks to gloss over the awkward transition from pursuing Osama bin Laden, who attacked America, to Saddam Hussein, who didn’t. And Iran had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11 — in fact, the Iranian regime was quite helpful to the United States when it went after Al Qaeda and its Taliban allies in Afghanistan.


Plus it's a way to try to mold simple pliable minds into equating Al Queda with what else? Hitler.

 Quote:
Beyond that, the claim that Iran is on the path to global domination is beyond ludicrous. Yes, the Iranian regime is a nasty piece of work in many ways, and it would be a bad thing if that regime acquired nuclear weapons. But let’s have some perspective, please: we’re talking about a country with roughly the G.D.P. of Connecticut, and a government whose military budget is roughly the same as Sweden’s.


Global domination? Not likely. That it may have regional goals, certainly. Still, it's hard to take warnings of WMD's seriously from the Administration who cried wolf.

 Quote:
Meanwhile, the idea that bombing will bring the Iranian regime to its knees — and bombing is the only option, since we’ve run out of troops — is pure wishful thinking. Last year Israel tried to cripple Hezbollah with an air campaign, and ended up strengthening it instead. There’s every reason to believe that an attack on Iran would produce the same result, with the added effects of endangering U.S. forces in Iraq and driving oil prices well into triple digits.


We're almost there. When we get to $100.00 a barrel , will that make George W. Bush, Jimmy Carter?

 Quote:
Mr. Podhoretz, in short, is engaging in what my relatives call crazy talk. Yet he is being treated with respect by the front-runner for the G.O.P. nomination. And Mr. Podhoretz’s rants are, if anything, saner than some of what we’ve been hearing from some of Mr. Giuliani’s rivals.


It's the only card they have left. Scare scare scare and hope they get a fraction of the poll numbers from when people believed George Bush would save them from the evildoers.. That being Osama Bin Laden of course...

 Quote:
Thus, in a recent campaign ad Mitt Romney asserted that America is in a struggle with people who aim “to unite the world under a single jihadist Caliphate. To do that they must collapse freedom-loving nations. Like us.” He doesn’t say exactly who these jihadists are, but presumably he’s referring to Al Qaeda — an organization that has certainly demonstrated its willingness and ability to kill innocent people, but has no chance of collapsing the United States, let alone taking over the world.


But I thought they were like Hitler.

 Quote:
And Mike Huckabee, whom reporters like to portray as a nice, reasonable guy, says that if Hillary Clinton is elected, “I’m not sure we’ll have the courage and the will and the resolve to fight the greatest threat this country’s ever faced in Islamofascism.” Yep, a bunch of lightly armed terrorists and a fourth-rate military power — which aren’t even allies — pose a greater danger than Hitler’s panzers or the Soviet nuclear arsenal ever did.

All of this would be funny if it weren’t so serious.


Again. Vote Democratic and DIE. Only we can save you from the terrorists!!! The Democrats want to give them therapy etc.

 Quote:
In the wake of 9/11, the Bush administration adopted fear-mongering as a political strategy. Instead of treating the attack as what it was — an atrocity committed by a fundamentally weak, though ruthless adversary — the administration portrayed America as a nation under threat from every direction.


And to this day they continue.

 Quote:
Most Americans have now regained their balance. But the Republican base, which lapped up the administration’s rhetoric about the axis of evil and the war on terror, remains infected by the fear the Bushies stirred up — perhaps because fear of terrorists maps so easily into the base’s older fears, including fear of dark-skinned people in general.

And the base is looking for a candidate who shares this fear.




Do I really want to open that particular can of worms here?? Sure, why not!

 Quote:
Just to be clear, Al Qaeda is a real threat, and so is the Iranian nuclear program. But neither of these threats frightens me as much as fear itself — the unreasoning fear that has taken over one of America’s two great political parties.


We have nothing to USE but fear itself.

Fear too IMO is so UnAmerican. Which is why I think people refuse to be manipulated thru and by it anymore. That Gulliani and the rest of the gOP frontrunners continue to try to use terrorism as if ONLY they understand it, onlyy they can do something about it. Only they are equipped to face it when 9/11 happened on their watch and after adequate warnings (which were dismissed) of the seriousness of the threat by several sources. Now suddenly they're the tough on terrorism party because they like to wage war on nation-states that had NOTHING to do with 9/11??