Accidental Blogger

When Americans feel bad about themselves – lack of healthcare, public services, educational opportunities, fair wages etc., they tend to vote Democrat.  When they feel angry about others – foreigners (or enemies within) destroying their buildings, jobs or culture, they vote for Republicans. It is no wonder then that Republicans always like to talk the language of war, drumming up jingoistic fervor and invoking marauding hordes of unsavory, faithless "foreigners and fifth columns" at the borders, at airports and in our schools and universties planning and plotting to do us great harm.  The memory of tilting airplanes flying into buldings and the specter of Islamofascists (applicable to Osama not to Saddam) armed with WMDs, nuclear dirty bombs striking in the future have helped the Republicans win the last couple of elections. Karl Rove saw to it – by not letting the public forget for a moment that they were helpless children protected only by the unwavering machismo of George W. Bush and the stoic fortitude of Uncle Cheney. Right up to the 2004 election, the most reliable weapon In Bush – Rove- Cheney’s arsenal of fearmongering was Iraq. But that WMD has since been blunted, dismantled and declared a dud.  Absent the reliable vote getting machinery of Iraq, the Republicans have swiftly and efficiently turned their attention to new enemies – "aliens" from south of the border and homegrown ones lurking maliciously in the heart of secular America. The new battle cry is shrill, ugly and for the most part as laughably deceptive as the imminent Iraqi threat was in 2002. I hope Americans will see through the scare tactics and remember the just wars we need to wage at home and the unjust war in Iraq that we need to bring to an end.

Examples of the cynical GOP strategy: 

Republican Brian Kennedy is running for the U.S. House in an Iowa district that is thought to have an illegal immigrant population of fewer than 5,000.

So why was he recently in Laredo, 1,300 miles to the south, visiting health clinics, meeting with local law enforcement officers and U.S. customs agents, posing for pictures, holding a teleconference with reporters back home and in general underscoring his call to "lock the border"?

The answer is simple: He sees it as good politics, and national polls seem to back him up as the Senate Judiciary Committee takes up an immigration bill today.  Seventy-one percent of Americans asked say they are more likely to vote for a candidate who favors tighter controls on illegal immigration, compared with 11 percent who would be less likely, according to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal Poll conducted in mid-March. The poll also found that 59 percent oppose President Bush’s proposal to allow illegal immigrants who hold jobs to apply for legal, temporary worker status.

AND

"American society looks down on Christianity, U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay asserted Tuesday at a conference of religious conservatives, but God and Jesus Christ have chosen Christians to stand up for faith.

DeLay, who is facing tough times of his own, offered a half-hour speech that was part history lesson and part sermon to a crowd of about 300 gathered at a Washington hotel for a two-day conference titled "The War on Christians and the Values Voter in 2006."

"But in a sense, there always has been and always will be," he said. "Our faith has always been in direct conflict with the values of the world. We are, after all, a society that provides abortion on demand, has killed millions of innocent children, degrades the institution of marriage and all but treats Christianity like some second-rate superstition."