Above and Beyond
Could Osama bin Laden’s demise loosen the grip paranoid politics has on America?
Sean Wilentz
TNR
May 2, 2011
What a difference a day makes. On Saturday, American politics was mired in a loopy but degrading controversy over President Obama’s birth certificate, hyped in the latest campaign of divisive paranoia by Fox News, would-be Republican presidential candidate, the real-estate mogul and professional vulgarian Donald Trump, and a host of Republican hopefuls and hucksters. But, by Sunday night, the nation was hailing President Obama, who suddenly appeared to announce Osama Bin Laden’s death at the hands of U.S. forces. In his speech, Obama spoke of national unity in the light of the justice meted out to the conspirator behind the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. For the moment, at least, the engines of paranoia have gone silent. Will the long cycle of outrageous attacks, innuendo, and conspiracy-mongering, the politicized by-product of the war on terror, at last come to an end?
The current round of paranoid politics got started in the 1990s, with bizarre stories about drug-running, murder plots, and other pseudo-scandals committed by Bill Clinton, the president who first targeted bin Laden and narrowly missed killing him in Afghanistan in 1998. But the paranoia ramped up after September 11, as the so-called architect of permanent Republican domination, Karl Rove, then President George W. Bush’s White House aide, informed the Republican National Committee that its strategy for political power centrally involved exploiting terrorism. Only the GOP should be depicted as serious about terrorism, while the Democrats should be cast as weak and soft. In the 2002 midterm elections, Republicans campaigned with a vengeance on the stark appeal to fear—remember the attacks on Senator Max Cleland of Georgia, a triple amputee Vietnam veteran?—and they regained the Senate in 2002. Paranoia was gold. The strategy was applied again in the Swift-Boating of the Democratic presidential candidate, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, in 2004, in a multi-million dollar campaign falsely assailing the decorated Vietnam War hero as a fraud, coward, and un-American elitist exotic.
(More here.)
Sean Wilentz
TNR
May 2, 2011
What a difference a day makes. On Saturday, American politics was mired in a loopy but degrading controversy over President Obama’s birth certificate, hyped in the latest campaign of divisive paranoia by Fox News, would-be Republican presidential candidate, the real-estate mogul and professional vulgarian Donald Trump, and a host of Republican hopefuls and hucksters. But, by Sunday night, the nation was hailing President Obama, who suddenly appeared to announce Osama Bin Laden’s death at the hands of U.S. forces. In his speech, Obama spoke of national unity in the light of the justice meted out to the conspirator behind the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. For the moment, at least, the engines of paranoia have gone silent. Will the long cycle of outrageous attacks, innuendo, and conspiracy-mongering, the politicized by-product of the war on terror, at last come to an end?
The current round of paranoid politics got started in the 1990s, with bizarre stories about drug-running, murder plots, and other pseudo-scandals committed by Bill Clinton, the president who first targeted bin Laden and narrowly missed killing him in Afghanistan in 1998. But the paranoia ramped up after September 11, as the so-called architect of permanent Republican domination, Karl Rove, then President George W. Bush’s White House aide, informed the Republican National Committee that its strategy for political power centrally involved exploiting terrorism. Only the GOP should be depicted as serious about terrorism, while the Democrats should be cast as weak and soft. In the 2002 midterm elections, Republicans campaigned with a vengeance on the stark appeal to fear—remember the attacks on Senator Max Cleland of Georgia, a triple amputee Vietnam veteran?—and they regained the Senate in 2002. Paranoia was gold. The strategy was applied again in the Swift-Boating of the Democratic presidential candidate, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, in 2004, in a multi-million dollar campaign falsely assailing the decorated Vietnam War hero as a fraud, coward, and un-American elitist exotic.
(More here.)
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