GOP STRATEGERY: Keeping You Stupid
14 August 2006 7:04 am by Taylor Marsh
GOP STRATEGERY: Keeping You Stupid
\”John Kerry had a point.\” – George
Will, ABC's \”This Week\”
| Kerry, circa election 2004. Like him or hate him, Kerry was right. |
No kidding, George.
The Democratic Party doesn't do what the Republicans do. We operate
on educating, planning and reality.
Bush, Cheney and Rummy want Americans uninformed,
strapped to their terror alerts and scared witless. The one thing they don't
want to do is educate us.
That's one reason Americans don't know that in the latest Washington Post poll, Americans now trust Democrats over Republicans on fighting terrorism. Democrats now lead Republicans 46% to 38% on being better able to fight terrorism. Sargent talked about it last week. Republicans don't want anyone to know how far they've slipped, so they're slinging political slurs at Ned Lamont instead. So is Joe. We've seen this before.
That's why during the 2004 election cycle, when John Kerry warned
that terrorism needs to be attacked through police work and vigilance, Bush
and his boys went on the campaign war path. See, they couldn't afford for Kerry's
plan to take root and the American people to become wise. So Bush made a preemptive
political attack, arming the voters with rhetoric only the stupid and scared
could swallow. But swallow they did.
The Republican plan of attack is important, because it's about to be geared up for election 2006.
However, a couple of years later American's are finding out something
very stark. Not only did John Kerry have a point, as George Will admitted yesterday, but he was absolutely right
on so many things. Let's start with Tora Bora as an example, which will lead us to today.
Kerry stated over and over and over again during election 2004
that Bush and Rumsfeld let Osama and around 1,000 al Qaeda escape into the badlands
bordering Pakistan. We've heard from Gary Berntsen, a Republican, who just happened
to be one of the Special Ops guys on the ground that said this is exactly what happened.
Former general Franks denies it. We recently heard from Cobra II authors, Michael
R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor, that this is indeed a fact. Bush, Rummy and
Franks didn't act fast enough, then refused Berntsen's plea to get Rangers on
the ground to block bin Laden's escape, so he vanished at Tora Bora. Franks still denies it, but his case has now collapsed.
Now we find out that the London terror plot wasn't brought down
through some \”war\” mechanism, but through highly skilled, patient
police work; the very type of tactics John Kerry campaigned on during 2004 and
said would work best against terrorism. He was right, but the Republicans attacked
with stupid talking points yet again. \”John Kerry had a
point,\” said Will. That, my Democratic friends, is a fantastic understatement.
But Bush and the Republicans don't want us to know the facts or
be armed with the truth. They operate on the wingnut radio philosophy: keep
your audience stuffed with propaganda and emotionally overwrought and their
votes will follow. Republicans don't educate they stupefy.
There's more truth about Kerry during the 2004 campaign worth
pointing out that comes from that very same interview by Matt Bai, which the
Republicans turned inside out to their advantage. It's important because the
Republicans are going to try to keep Americans stupid and scared again, right up until they vote.
… In 1988, Kerry successfully proposed an amendment that forced
the Treasury Department to negotiate so-called Kerry Agreements with foreign
countries. Under these agreements, foreign governments had to promise to keep
a close watch on their banks for potential money laundering or they risked
losing their access to U.S. markets. Other measures Kerry tried to pass throughout
the 90's, virtually all of them blocked by Republican senators on the banking
committee, would end up, in the wake of 9/11, in the USA Patriot Act; among
other things, these measures subject banks to fines or loss of license if
they don't take steps to verify the identities of their customers and to avoid
being used for money laundering.Through his immersion in the global underground, Kerry made connections among
disparate criminal and terrorist groups that few other senators interested
in foreign policy were making in the 90's. Richard A. Clarke, who coordinated
security and counterterrorism policy for George W. Bush and Bill Clinton,
credits Kerry with having seen beyond the national-security tableau on which
most of his colleagues were focused. ''He was getting it at the same time
that people like Tony Lake were getting it, in the '93 -'94 time frame,''
Clarke says, referring to Anthony Lake, Clinton's national security adviser.
''And the 'it' here was that there was a new nonstate-actor threat, and that
nonstate-actor threat was a blended threat that didn't fit neatly into the
box of organized criminal, or neatly into the box of terrorism. What you found
were groups that were all of the above.''In other words, Kerry was among the first policy makers in Washington
to begin mapping out a strategy to combat an entirely new kind of enemy.
Americans were conditioned, by two world wars and a long standoff with a rival
superpower, to see foreign policy as a mix of cooperation and tension between
civilized states. Kerry came to believe, however, that Americans were in greater
danger from the more shadowy groups he had been investigating — nonstate
actors, armed with cellphones and laptops — who might detonate suitcase bombs
or release lethal chemicals into the subway just to make a point. They lived
in remote regions and exploited weak governments. Their goal wasn't to govern
states but to destabilize them. …
As I talked about on Saturday,
we are now learning much more about the foiled London terrorist plot, including
that the Brits didn't want to
pull the trigger so quickly. There was more investigative pieces and groundwork
to put into place. But Bush wanted the news, the framing, the issue. However,
the bottom line is that Kerry's type of old-fashion police work is what got
the job done.
But that's really not the rub.
John Kerry knew what to do a long time ago, said it straight out, then was
punished for his knowledge by Republican attack points that push stupid over
educating the public.
As long as the American people are willing to be fed such unadulterated crap
from the conservatives they'll continue to get exactly what they deserve, but
it won't be a Democrat who can actually solve problems and lead us out of this
mess. It will continue to be a world at war with no way out.
George Will was right. Kerry had a point. But the bottom line goes one step
further. John Kerry was right. He's still right and other Democrats are too.
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