Get ready for another week of the Republicans ratcheting up their demagoguery. They will be coming out of their corner swinging over dissent on Iraq while screeching like banshees, spitting out pejoratives like `unpatriotic' and `traitor' at the top of their lungs and draping their fascst asses in red, white and blue bunting. These are the marching orders from the Washington Wolfsschanze and Herr Rove,our minister of propaganda. Loyalist GOP goon Peter King, the Muslim bashing, America hating berserker from Long Island (famous for the sordid Amy Fisher-Joey Buttafuoco tabloid tale several years back) is leading the charge with his promise to write a letter to the Torquemada Gonzalez' Justice Department requesting that a probe of the hated New York Times be initiated and that everybody from the editor down to the janitors be hauled in front of an inquisition and charged with treason for the paper's part in breaking stories about more illegal spying operations by the Bush-Cheney syndicate.
King practically had an aneurysm while spewing out the toxin that "We're at war, and for the Times to release information about secret operations and methods is treasonous". I don't recall PK exhibiting similar outrage when Scooter Libby's fuck-bunny was acting as a neocon operative and writing stories based on blatantly false information to trump up charges and foment fear in the lead up to an illegal invasion of a country that posed no threat to America and in which over 2,500 military members have already been killed according to the `official' count and that doesn't take into account the many, many more who have been maimed for life. King is very selective when it comes to his bandying about of treason charges but give him credit for some degree of moderation. He is slightly less reactionary than his ideological soulmate Ann Coulter who wanted to see the Times building blown to kingdom come...he only wants to launch a Gestapo style raid to arrest everybody inside.
It's only going to get worse too as a coordinated slime attack on administration critics is in the early stages and Karl Rove's plan is to turn every contest come this November into a mini version of Stalingrad in a desperate, no-holds barred bid to allow the GOP to hold onto congress and stave off the subpoenas. It is going to be as ugly as waking up after a drinking binge and finding yourself lying next to Katherine Harris in the morning.
Rove Inc. have already had to resort to throwing down the race card with last week's media spectacle over the `Cornrow Qaeda' and look for nativist fires to be stoked with even more illegal immigrant bashing. Rove has had to resort to pulling black and brown rabbits out of his hat because most people are finally catching on to the manipulation of anti-gay sentiment for political reasons. The great `protection of marriage' sham failed in that it only drew more attention to the recent GOP bread and butter `fag bashing' extravaganzas that have so successfully mobilized the base....until now.
The most recent invocation of the `demonic homosexual agenda' pretty much failed drawing much scorn from not only the `mainstream' (CNN commentator Lou Dobbs denounced it as "utter and complete nonsense" and "an insult to the intelligence of every voter, Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative".) but even from such die hard anti-gay bigots as the Reverend Fred Phelps himself who is quoted in the most recent issue of Rolling Stone in denouncing Bush:
"He's some kind of demagogue without any core values whatsoever..he's only doing this because he's losing what core support he had and anyone with half a brain can see it"
The anti-gay strategy is in serious jeopardy when Phelps comes out against it and it may yet go down as one of Rove's biggest miscalculations. When you use this sort of hatful demagoguery towards a group in order to appeal to a despicably vile segment of the public for their political support it could potentially backfire. Once you painstakingly worked to build animosity to such a grand scale then anything short of loading the scapegoated group onto cattle cars and hauling them away to the furnaces is ultimately a failure to deliver. As conservative arch-enemy Alec Baldwin once put it "coffee is for closers only" and the failure to find an ultimate solution to the `homosexual problem' is a half-measure. Such half-measures are seen as betrayals and while Phelps may be the most outspoken and flamboyant of the party base there are millions who share his views.
And of course today we had another `terror alert', this time a suspicious banana ship in Port Hueneme, CA...all that is missing is Tom Ridge and his magical color chart that has an inversely proportional effect that correlates to news stories that cast a negative light on the administration or sagging poll ratings. We have seen this trick before and unfortunately until our chronically terrified, television addicted fellow Americans are able to break free from their spell of dread it will inevitably continue much to the delight of Rove and company, maybe throw in a tale about an illegal alien being apprehended at the border by vigilant Minutemen with a load of explosive burritos to get the Mexican haters revved up.
The beat just goes on and on for the hucksters, charlatans and fear pimps in the GOP, a party made up of cheap crooks and unsavory political whores who would sell their own grandmothers and their constituency of regressive ignoramuses, hard core bigots, tax cheats and corporate chiselers. If not for the gross ineptitude of the DLC led opposition party, the prostitutes working the other side of the corporate street this slime would be washed out of our system and back into the gutters where it belongs with the rest of the raw sewage.