Your pain is their gain

It's as common a right-wing tactic as is racism, passing the buck and screwing the poor: Accusing your opponents of what actually represents your greatest weakness. So, given Thursday's news, was it any surprise that the party on whose watch September 11 occurred and under whose leadership the world has become a far more dangerous place again put politics over national security, accusing Democrats of being soft on terror, doing so knowing that arrests were imminent? Not only that, but that White House officials seemed downright giddy over the potential loss of thousands of lives?

Speaking before the arrests about Joe Lieberman's loss in Tuesday's Connecticut Democratic primary, Vice President Cheney said, "The al-Qaida types, they clearly are betting on the proposition that ultimately they can break the will of the American people in terms of our ability to stay in the fight and complete the task." Also speaking before the arrests was RNC chair Ken Mehlman, who said about the Lieberman loss, "It reflects an unfortunate embrace of isolationism, defeatism, and a 'blame America first' attitude by national Democratic leaders at a time when retreating from the world is particularly dangerous." He later added, "Maybe it would be easier not to take the war to the terrorists. Maybe it would be easier to leave Iraq. Maybe it would be easier to stay at home and hope it never happens to us again. But it would be wrong." Reacting to Thursday's news, President Bush offered yet another in a long line of straw-man arguments, saying, "It is a mistake to believe there is no threat to the United States of America."

In the words of self-styled terrorism expert Bill "Saddam" O'Reilly, "Iran's betting we Americans have no will to restrain their jihad, and judging from the Connecticut vote last night, they might be right." Said the disgraced Tom DeLay, "They don't want to fight this war on terrorism. ... Their world view is, 'Can't we all get along? Surely we can talk our way out of this.' And so when we are attacked, their first reaction is to recoil, and say, 'This is really horrible. It's too harsh and you can't go after these wonderful people that just killed a bunch of Americans. You've got to just find a leader here or there, put him in jail,' instead of understanding, as the President understands, that we are at war."

It's one thing, of course, to see such comments from the usual right-wing suspects. Even local radio gasbag Mike Trivisonno - whose listeners blamed the victims during Hurricane Katrina - found the time to warn his audience that if they didn't make the right decision at the ballot box, chances our a loved one would die*. I'd expect as much from them. But the right found itself the beneficiary of its newest friend. Adopting these Republican talking points was Republican-in-waiting Lieberman, fresh off his defeat at the hands of true Democrat Ned Lamont. "If we just pick up like Ned Lamont wants us to do, get out by a date certain, it will be taken as a tremendous victory by the same people who wanted to blow up these planes in this plot hatched in England," Lieberman said. "It will strengthen them and they will strike again."

The worst quote, to me, gives Americans all the evidence we need as to how seriously this administration takes the threat of terror. Hint: Not seriously at all. Per an Agence France-Presse report, a nameless White House official said, "Weeks before September 11th, this is going to play big", later adding that certain Democratic candidates this fall won't "look as appealing" given Thursday's events. What's more, we also learned that Bush had learned about the plot last Friday and had received two "detailed briefings" on it Saturday and Sunday, even discussing it with Tony Blair. Curious, don't you think, that Cheney most likely knew about what was going to happen before he said what he said, which came before the arrests? One wonders what Mehlman knew, too, as he spoke from Cleveland. One also wonders what Tony Snow knew when he helped jump-start the coordinated Republican response to Lamont's victory by saying Wednesday, "There seems to be two approaches, and in the Connecticut race, one of the approaches is ignore the difficulties and walk away. Now, when the United States walked away, in the opinion of the Osama bin Laden in 1991, bin Laden drew from that the conclusion that Americans were weak and wouldn''t stay the course and that led to September 11th."

Not long ago, I queried several friends in the know - authors, fellow bloggers, think-tank types - about the possibility of a research project that would examine the reporting of foiled terror plots. I suspected that, if you tracked official releases of such plots, you would find more occurrences of said plots in election years than you would in non-election years. Further, that the closer you got to an election, the more plots we'd learn about. This is something Josh Micah Marshall talked about in a recent Time column. And the notion that the administration had coordinated terrorism-related events to deflect attention away from bad news was the topic of an entire episode of Keith Olbermann's "Coundtown". With Thursday's news in mind, I again find myself asking these and many more questions. I'm not interested in theorizing about whether or not these plots actually hold water. That only deflects from the matter at hand and is a task better left to someone else. No, I'm interested in the fact that this administration seems ready, willing and able to use life-and-death matters - terrorist attacks - to play political games, to keep the American electorate fearful in the hopes that it will attribute its safety to the Republican Party this fall and for years to come. (Nevermind, of course, that America has already decided that the Democrats are far more trustworthy when it comes to handling Iraq and terrorism.)

Putting politics above national security is nothing new for the Republican Party. The name Valerie Plame comes to mind. Remember what she was working on before the administration outed the CIA operative as part of a smear campaign against her husband, whose only crime was speaking truth to power? Or the fact that this administration seems willing to rid itself of Arabic-speaking linguists whose only "crime" is being gay? And now this. Thousands could have died and you see White House officials saying things like "Weeks before September 11th, this is going to play big". High-level officials knew what was going to happen, so they took to the airwaves beforehand to use Lamont's victory to slander their opponents and return to the cesspool of tried-and-true right-wing attacks. In true Rovian fashion - remember it was Karl Rove who called Lieberman after his loss - the Republicans appear to be beating a long-dead horse: Terrorism. And doing so in a shamefully opportunistic manner, no less. If we're to take terrorism and the specter of terrorist attacks seriously, wouldn't it be nice if our administration did the same thing?

* Seriously, Media Matters. Come to Ohio. Then hire me.