Political memory

[ProSense]

The MSM is a political tool, but people are far too gullible.

snip...

There is irony here, if you have a political memory. It wasn't too many years ago that Republicans had a sideline in suggesting that Democrats were dangerous warmongers, because the two world wars, the Cold War and the Korean and Vietnam wars had started on their watch. (At the same time, the GOP was also charging that Democrats were "soft on communism," but cognitive dissonance has always found a warm hearth in politics.) Bush won re-election as the warrior-president who landed on a carrier, in full Ace regalia, and proclaimed "Mission Accomplished." To slip around the awkward fact that Bush had dodged Vietnam in a privileged Air National Guard berth while his opponent, John Kerry, had been piling up medals in Vietnam combat, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were gimmicked up to slander Kerry's volunteer service as phony baloney.

This year, the plan is to leverage illegal and unconstitutional domestic spying as an election winner. Democrats who object to any part of the National Security Agency sweeps or to any section of the Patriot Act are cast as sissies doing the terrorists a favor, perhaps not intentionally.

That approach skips over the fact that a growing if still small number of Republican legislators are uneasy with the programs' dubious features, and it ignores the reality that there is a large, ready bipartisan majority in Congress for the core mission of both programs if the president would only drop the unproductive excesses that violate traditional American values.

Here, again, Bush chooses to pass up a chance to be the uniter he said he would be and instead, for partisan advantage, plays the divider he said he wouldn't be. If in the process our long-standing civil liberties needlessly get kicked over, hey, who ever heard of a war without collateral damage?

http://www.sacbee.com/content/opinion/story/14184488p-15011565c.html