GOP playbook for 2008 is open
And it’s looking pretty damned familiar. Today’s piece by Peter Canellos [Boston Globe] via [TPM] takes a look at some putrid rhetoric being dragged out and reheated for America. One hopes fewer people will gobble it up this time and ask for more.
Former New York mayor Rudolph Guiliani asserted, in response to a question about Iraq, that “these people want to follow us here and they have followed us here. Fort Dix happened a week ago. ”
However, none of the six people arrested for allegedly plotting to attack soldiers at Fort Dix in New Jersey were from Iraq.
Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney identified numerous groups that he said have “come together” to try to bring down the United States, though specialists say few of the groups Romney cited have worked together and only some have threatened the United States. “They want to bring down the West, particularly us,” Romney declared. “And they’ve come together as Shia and Sunni and Hezbollah and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda, with that intent.”
Those who pay attention know that implicating Saddam and Iraq in the 9/11 attacks was critical to gaining the support the Bush administration has since squandered. We’ve also grown tired of the fear-mongering employed at every turn, and more people than ever are cynical about such tactics. But it would appear the GOP presidential frontrunners think the strategy still has legs, and it makes me wonder what place Karl Rove might be expecting to hold in the next administration, should it be a Republican one.
