Will the next terror attack help or hurt the GOP?

Depends on the timing, if it happens on a Democrat's watch, it'll be exploited and blamed on liberals, if it happens on bush's watch, who fucking knows?

Will the second attack work out as swimmingly as the first one?

than HAVING them give us a "nuclear, chemical, or biological" 9/11 (God Forbid) to scare us again and get us back in line.

Will it affect the thought process of the Right-Wing Auhtoritarians who make up the 26%? Of course not. Their weak minds will be overloaded by fear, and even if their weak minds were functional, they are exremely compartmentalized and illogical so they will see no problem with "deleting" the last six years of "but we haven't had an attack on homeland soil" in favor of "rally behind our noble, glorious and Christian Fuehrer".

No problem for weak minds like the Nazi Stormtroopers and the Loyal Bushies, who really are one and the same.

My grandfather was a Republican, and though we often disagreed on any number of topics, he was simply the best man I've ever known. Several of my friends are Republicans, and I love and respect them even in disagreement.

Republicans aren't the problem. Every single Republican I know despises Bush, hates him and his ilk with the fire of a thousand suns, hates everything about Bush and all his people, hates the base, hates the whole kit-and-kaboodle. They make my hate look kinda small and dim by comparison.

The problem is that most of the people currently running the GOP, holding high office under the GOP banner, and working within the GOP's activist base (including our funky freepy online counterparts)...simply can not be called "Republicans" according to any definition of that word I know or can imagine.

A Republican named Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, "Taxes are the price you pay to live in a civilized society." Can you imagine? A Republican named Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency. Amazing, no? A Republican named Eisenhower offered a dire warning about the massing power and influence of the military industrial complex he once served as General and Supreme Commander, Allied Forces, Europe...and further portended the ravaging of our rights at the hands of this new power base.

Those are Republicans.

Another attack won't help most Republicans, because most of them are patriots like us who love the Constitution. Those folks will be screwed along with the rest of us.

The others, the new guys, "Them," yeah, it'll help them. For a while.

Musings:

===

The 21st Century Sucks
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Columnist

Thursday 08 February 2007

It took an astonishingly stupid bomb scare in my town last week to really make me feel old for the first time.

"Old" isn't the proper word, I guess, since I am only midway through my 30s. I live in Boston, temporary home to nearly one million students from September to June every year, and so I am surrounded by kids all the time. I used to teach high school English to roomfuls of teenagers. Neither of these things made me feel old. The now-infamous Lite-Brite Bomb Fiasco of 2007 that unspooled here last week didn't make me feel old either, so much as it made me feel out of touch, for the first time, with those who are ten or fifteen years younger than me.

The gulf between my feelings and thoughts that day, and the feelings and thoughts of the twenty-somethings I talked to about it afterward, could not have been wider. Not to put too fine a point on it, that whole thing scared the almighty cheese out of me. The reports started coming in around noon - "suspicious items" that had "wires" and "electronics," which were found strapped to critical infrastructure all over the city, according to the news media - and for a few hours, I entertained the possibility that my darkest fears were becoming a reality.

My fears were inspired by all the stuff I've been trying to telegraph to people for the last several years. This Iraq occupation, I've been arguing since the fall of 2002, will inspire more terrorism. A ten year old girl in Baghdad gets blown sideways out of her kitchen, a mother gets blasted in a sectarian street-battle in Fallujah, a father has menstrual blood smeared on his face in a cement cage in Abu Ghraib by leering US troops looking to humiliate those of his faith, a son gets shot by a US sniper in Najaf ... and the families of those people are going to pick up a gun and volunteer to die that they might kill.

Combine this manufacture of terrorists with the legal aftermath of 9/11, the evaporation of Constitutional protections put in place "for our safety," and the rancid motivations of those in power, and you have a recipe for catastrophe. The terrorists we are manufacturing in Iraq are not going to the beach, or heading off to a camping trip at the local KOA. Play the tape to the end, and one has to operate under the assumption that, sooner or later, they are going to show up here. If and when they do, they will not need to take down buildings to create mayhem.

A few hand grenades at a mall in Duluth, a car bomb in St. Louis, or a few bridges blown up in Boston, and that's the ball game. We will see a declaration of "Red Alert," which is martial law, the suspension of habeas corpus, the suspension of posse comitatus, and the end of the rule of Constitutional law in America. This great experiment in government of, by and for the people, with all its flaws and all its strengths, will be shelved, and a great light will be, perhaps forever, extinguished.

That is what I thought I was watching here in Boston last week. The places they were finding these items - a main railway bridge, an overpass on the city's main highway, the hospital a few scant blocks from my apartment - are precisely the kind of soft targets that, if destroyed, would create chaos. Attacking infrastructure is one of the oldest and most effective tactics of warfare, and here it was in my neighborhood, or so I feared. I thought I was watching the Last Day, and it sickened me in a place within that words cannot touch.

This was not, of course, the case. Once images of those stupid little cartoon things made it to television screens, I was able to relax. When it came out that the whole mess was an advertising campaign for a cartoon, I thought my brain was going to leap out of my skull. The rest of the country saw those things and had a hearty laugh at our expense, especially the twenty-somethings who recognized it immediately.

So, was my fear an over-reaction? It is easy to say so in hindsight. How can anyone think one of those Lite-Brite things was a bomb? Easy. You spend a few hours watching the TV news people natter about "wiring" and "electronics" and things strapped to bridges and hospitals, but you're not shown the actual items by those same news people. It was hours before I saw what they were talking about, and in that simple fact, we find one of the central afflictions of our wretched estate.

That whole thing last week was of the media, by the media and for the media. An advertising agency pimps a television show, and the resulting nonsense becomes fodder for the TV news shows. Like Tinkers to Evers to Chance, this was the perfect example of the media serving itself at the expense of the people. If they had shown us one of those LED boards, no one would have thought twice. It served the news media better, however, to bluster about suspicious items for hours. Better ratings, you see.

The event also exposed a dissonance in our collective thinking, especially among the aforementioned younger set. For them, and to use their favorite word, the 21st century absolutely sucks. A twenty-one year old today was seventeen years old when we invaded Iraq, fifteen years old when September 11th happened, and fourteen years old when the Supreme Court decided to take over the duties and responsibilities of electing our public officials. Since then, they have been subjected to bogus terror scare after bogus terror scare, to lies without count about threats beyond measure, to a war seemingly without end that serves only itself.

The cynicism that breeds because of this is central to that dissonance. On the one hand, it is accepted as axiomatic that we are manufacturing terrorism in Iraq. On the other hand, it is also axiomatic that these Bush people deliberately frighten people for purely political purposes, and so the threat of terrorism itself becomes just another bag of nonsense, a fear tactic to be dismissed out of hand. Only a sucker falls for that game, and what happened in Boston last week feeds that cynical dismissal.

These two ideas, while correct on their own, cannot exist together in the same space.

If we are manufacturing terrorism, then one of these days, the warning will be real. It is one of the most searing crimes committed by Bush and his ilk - and yes, to my mind, it is a crime - that so many people are motivated to stand against this war because it is dangerous for us all, but at the same time scoff at one of the most dangerous potential consequences of the war. Why should someone who graduated from high school in this climate, who has begun to come of age as the walls of the castle crumble, who has been subjected to media-driven terror and state-sponsored murder, believe anything they are told?

I was reminded of the years I spent living in San Francisco. The threat of an earthquake was ever-present, but in no way dominated the attention of the citizenry. The threat occupied a corner of your mind; if it happened, you wouldn't be surprised, but if you walked around worried about it every second of the day, you'd go mad. So you didn't worry about it, but you always breathed a little easier once you drove off the Bay Bridge. It was what it was.

Today, it is what it is. Terrorism exists, and the threat of it has been made all the more pressing by the actions of this government. I thought I was watching the consequences of their activities arrive here last week, and was shaken by it. It was, to me, a dry run for the worst day ever. In the end, however, the worst part came later. It came when I heard people making fun of the threat.

Actions have consequences. What the Bush administration is doing in Iraq makes us far less safe, both over there and over here. The fact that they have so abused the sensibilities of the populace with their fear-mongering does not change this fact. If this situation in Iraq is allowed to burn on, or if we are foolish enough to attack Iran, the warnings we in Boston went through last week may well become commonplace all across the country.

Such is the way of things in the 21st century. We curse the fear while whistling past the graveyard. It sucks out loud.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/020807R.shtml

I'd hate to be hanging by my balls waiting for that.

The purge might happen, perhaps in a sideways manner. The GOP base, weaned on anti-immigrant polemics, is coming to see that the rhetoric of their officeholders isn't matching their votes. Those officials ran on die-immigrant-die platforms, but got to DC and started cashing checks from corporations that profit wildly from the cheap, no-need-to-insure pool of immigrant labor (especially the agriculture, hotel, and service corps).

The base got sold out. By the by, I also happen to believe the GOP will never, ever, ever pass anything killing Roe v. Wade, simply because that would kill their best fundraising hook. The base may come to see this, too, if I'm right. The Fundies have been politically active and involved for only around 25-30 years. There's no guarantee they'll stay involved if they keep getting shafted by their own people.

I've always admired the passion and single-minded dedication of the GOP base. I loathe what they work for and believe in and support, but you have to hand it to them: they're organized, they always vote, they keep it simple for the most part - abortion and guns, or abortion and taxes, or abortion and abortion - and they're still mostly in power. That minority faction within a minjority party, until recently, was running the whole show. Our base has passion, but theirs has more...The fanatic zealotry of their bastardized Christianity is what fuels them; we can't quite match that intensity, because nothing is more powerful than a madman for God, which is why we always have to overwhelm them with turnout to check their influence.

But there's an advantage there. If I'm correct above, and they all start to sense the degree to which they've been used as useful-idiot cultural shock troops, if they tally the board and realize they haven't gotten much of what they were promised from their leaders, and if they decide their leaders are no longer working for their God, they'll bolt. As fickle as our base is, we still mostly stick when the fat's in the fire. Cross the line with the Jesus crowd, however, and they'll spit when they hear your name and never give you a vote or a dime again.

On the flip-side, yeah, I do think a lot of real Republicans and conservatives are puking sick of the crew that took over their party. These upcoming primaries, perhaps, might break the stranglehold the GOP base has had on the party, at least somewhat. The February 5th primary, the Super Duper Tuesday thing, will have simultaneous primaries in something like 20 states. In the past, GOP candidates had to grovel for base votes in South Carolina and Virginia and north Florida and Georgia, one at a time and one after the other. That's not the deal this year.

This year, the big-delegate states - CA, NY and I think TX - all happen on the 5th, along with the base-heavy states that have less delegates. This year, the GOP candidates can totally afford to dismiss the base, so long as the show well in the more liberal big-delegate states. The sane Republican states, in other words, will more than match the base states. Guys like Huckabee and Brownback can run the table down South, and still wind up trailing Rudy or Mitt if they do well in the big states.

That may well mean Rudy gets the nomination despite being, according to the GOP base, a Yankee gun-grabbing abortionist. I'm no Rudy fan, but I hope he gets the nod, because it will mean the GOP will have to encompass a socally-liberal standard-bearer who has no use for the base. He must lose, but his nomination alone will do wonders for our politicis, and may help to clean out the Augean stables up there at GOP headquarters.

A few people--Cheney and whoever Poppy Bush answers to--will make millions of dollars off of it and the rest of us can go to hell some more.

bush, and by extension, the republics have kept us safe because we haven't had a terror attack on US soil since 9/11...

if/when we do have another, well, that sort of shoots the pooch on the above reason to keep republics in charge

the other sipping point has been a threat of a terror attack if we leave Iraq - i.e. they will follow us home - this implies that as long as we stay over there, we are safe over here. So that spin is out the window when we have another attack on US soil and are still in Iraq.

but not to worry - the republics will blame clinton for everything

They've spent years telling us we're safer with them in charge...a vote for a Dem is a vote for the terrorists...

So if we get hit again, it proves they're wrong. That makes two major attacks on their watch. How can they possibly expect anyone to believe them with that track record?

The fact is, we've spent billions over in Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, and have done almost nothing to make changes here in our own country to prevent further attacks. Few of the 9/11 Commission recommendations have been carried out.

Another attack over here will be death for the GOP, except for the Kool-Aid drinkers, and a few of them are now beginning to question what's going on. They aren't quite as adamant now about defending Bushco as they were a few months back.