The 2006 Republican campaign: terror, terror, terror

Doyle McManus and Peter Wallsten report GOP Aims to Use a War to Win an Election Battle: Republicans are once again making the fight against terrorism a campaign cornerstone. So far, Democrats have not been as engaging Los Angeles Times 07/02/06

The headline writer could also have written "Mainstream media lets Republicans claim just about anything without seriously challenging them".  But, then, that wouldn't really be news, would it?

They report:

President Bush says Democrats want to "wave the white flag of surrender" in Iraq. Vice President Dick Cheney accuses the opposition party's leaders of "defeatism" in the global war on terrorism. And House Republican leader John A. Boehner of Ohio charges Democrats who applauded last week's Supreme Court ruling on detainees with advocating "special privileges for terrorists."

And, in the standard conduct for the Establishment press, they go along with the imaginative Republican spin on even Bush's defeat before the Supreme Court last week on military tribunals:

"The Supreme Court ruling on Guantanamo was a real blessing in disguise," said Whit Ayres, another GOP pollster. It "allows us to have a debate on whether terrorists should receive the same legal protections as American military personnel…. It's hard to see Republicans losing when that's the debate."

Democratic leaders say, at least in public, that they are confident they can win that debate.

But the Democrats' response so far has been less unified, less pointed and less memorable than the Republicans' attacks.

As in Churchill's famous saying, if it's a blessing for the Reps, it must be well-disguised.  But that doesn't stop our "press corps" from typing up the Republican talking points.

But as the Republican rhetoric gets nastier, the press faithfully reports the this-side-says/the-other-side-says story.  So sleaze like this becomes part of "mainstream" political conversation - at least for the "press corps", for whom whatever the Republican Party says becomes "mainstream":

At a fundraising event last week for Sen. Jim Talent (R-Mo.), Bush said: "There's a group in the opposition party who are willing to retreat before the mission is done. They're willing to wave the white flag of surrender. And if they succeed, the United States will be worse off, and the world will be worse off."

And after Thursday's Supreme Court decision on Guantanamo, House Majority Leader Boehner went a step further, accusing his Democratic counterparts of giving Al Qaeda "a show of support" by praising the court ruling.

A statement released by Boehner's office was headlined, "Capitol Hill Democrats Advocate Special Privileges for Terrorists." It noted that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) had applauded the court's ruling that alleged terrorists were entitled to "the basic guarantees of our justice system." The statement also said that Al Qaeda was "surely pleased at the show of support from Capitol Hill Democrats."

I wonder if the Establishment press will both to report things like this:  The Terrorism Index by Foreign Policy magazine & The Center For American Progress, Foreign Policy July/Aug 2006.  The report says:

Despite today’s highly politicized national security environment, the index results show striking consensus across political party lines. A bipartisan majority (84 percent) of the index’s experts say the United States is not winning the war on terror. Eighty-six percent of the index’s experts see a world today that is growing more dangerous for Americans. Overall, they agree that the U.S. government is falling short in its homeland security efforts. More than 8 in 10 expect an attack on the scale of 9/11 within a decade. These dark conclusions appear to stem from the experts’ belief that the U.S. national security apparatus is in serious disrepair. “Foreign-policy experts have never been in so much agreement about an administration’s performance abroad,” says Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and an index participant. “The reason is that it’s clear to nearly all that Bush and his team have had a totally unrealistic view of what they can accomplish with military force and threats of force.”