{"id":8247,"date":"2006-08-19T11:02:10","date_gmt":"2006-08-19T15:02:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/8247.html"},"modified":"2006-08-19T11:02:10","modified_gmt":"2006-08-19T15:02:10","slug":"fight-fear-mongering-with-fear-mongering","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/fight-fear-mongering-with-fear-mongering\/","title":{"rendered":"Fight fear-mongering with fear-mongering?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Slate’s John Dickerson offers Dems<\/a> some advice in responding to Republicans’ election-year fear-mongering: fight fire with fire. With the GOP telling voters, “Vote for Democrats and more Americans will die,” it’s the only reasonable approach.<\/p>\n

Here’s my advice: The Democrats should embrace fear-mongering more passionately…. The question the Democrats should be asking is whether Bush’s policies are inspiring the people who want to kill us.<\/p>\n

This question derives from a central one that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld asked in his famous October 2003 memo: “Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?” In the short term, the answer seems to be no.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The argument in a nutshell is that Republican policies, particularly in Iraq, make the nation less safe. My only question is, why would pointing this out be “fear-mongering”?
\n
\nMaybe this is a semantics point, but “fear-mongering” suggests baselessly putting fear into people for political gain, even when the facts don’t warrant it. But in this case, Dems need to simply make a reasonable argument based objective fact.<\/p>\n

The threat of terrorism has<\/i> increased. The number of terrorist attacks around the world has gone up<\/i> every year Bush has been in the White House. The war in Iraq has created a new training ground and recruiting tool for terrorists in the region. I’m not exactly a neutral observer here, but at what point does “fear-mongering” enter the picture?<\/p>\n

The point that I think goes unmentioned too often is that the president’s (and the Republican Congress’) record on national security issues is really bad<\/i>. I know, it’s a well-kept secret, but it’s true.<\/p>\n

We’re talking about an administration that largely ignored Clinton’s advice about dealing al Qaeda; didn’t take the “bin Laden determined to strike inside U.S.” memo seriously; invaded Afghanistan but failed to follow through on our commitments; can’t catch bin Laden; launched a devastating war in Iraq that has increased the terrorist threat; watched the nuclear threat posed by North Korea and Iran get considerably worse; leaked classified information for partisan gain; and launched an illegal surveillance program that produced a flood of useless tips. Closer to home, they’ve rejected<\/a> Democratic efforts to boost homeland security.<\/p>\n

Why not make this the signature campaign issue for 2006?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Slate’s John Dickerson offers Dems some advice in responding to Republicans’ election-year fear-mongering: fight fire with fire. With the GOP telling voters, “Vote for Democrats and more Americans will die,” it’s the only reasonable approach. Here’s my advice: The Democrats should embrace fear-mongering more passionately…. The question the Democrats should be asking is whether Bush’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8247","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8247"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8247\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}