After 9/11 Cheney, Rove and Bush used fear as a kind of propaganda tool during a time of national post traumatic stress disorder. They wanted to get some things done and, in part through their own incompetence (at least), history handed them a powerful political tool, fear, that they thereafter ruthlessly employed. Like they were carpet bombing Cambodia.
The tool of fear worked particularly well on the GOP's evangelical/social issue base and kept enough independents and fringe Democrats worried and confused to unify nearly unchecked Republican power for most of a decade. Fear grew to become the GOP's sonic screwdriver, its universal widget, it's all purpose tool for keeping the base in line and pushing around the rest of the country. It's become the GOP's drug. Now, like a helpless junkie, the GOP has to have it's dose of fear, in ever larger and more frequent hits.
How else to explain the cascading GOP rhetoric, ever falling to lower extremes to encapsulate GOP fear of The Other in the White House? How else to explain Rick Santorum's new stump speech, serving up Obama = Hitler for the cheering believers in the pews? Hunter's front page discussion of this is not to be missed.
The Republican base is mostly just as interested in having access to good jobs, decent schools, adequate health care, tax fairness, breathable air and drinkable water as anybody else. They believe, follow and vote for liars and charlatans like Santorum, Romney, Gingrich and Paul because authority figures who dominate their lives and thinking tell them that they imperil their lives and souls, otherwise.
I had thought that the GOP might be more complicated than this discussion suggests, but Santorum punching the Hitler Button makes me wonder. Has the GOP really reached the point where it can no longer motivate its own base without scaring the crap out of the voters?
That seems like an extra special reason to vote for Democrats. Let's not give control of the country to the people who seem to be panicking.