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Saturday, January 28, 2006

Why can't Americans Understand the Hamas Victory?

Excuse me if I can't understand what all the flap is about concerning the Hamas victory in the Palestinian elections. You'd think it was the first time in history that people voted questionable political parties into office.

It really doesn't take much to push the public into voting for you, no matter how evil or untruthful your political party might be. Play to fears concerning a continuing depression and you get a surprise Nazi party victory in 1930. People seem to forget that the Nazis were swept into office, winning 107 seats in the German Reichstag that year even though they had won only 12 seats in 1928. Remember, this was accomplished through a totally democratic election process.

What changed? That can be summed up in two words. Organized activism. The Nazis saw an opportunity and grabbed it. In his book, Hitler, Ian Kershaw writes:

The energy and drive of the National Socialist agitation were truly astonishing.
No fewer than 1,000 meetings saturated Upper and Middle Franconia during the
campaign. In Germany as a whole, as many as 34,000 meetings were planned for the
last four weeks of the campaign. No other party remotely matched the scale of
the N.S.D.A.P.'s effort.

And what was the message, the single thread that wove through every one of these public meetings? ONLY National Socialism could change the fate of the German people. Now does that sound familiar?

In 2004, right here in America, the worst president in our 200+ years of existence was reelected using the exact same strategy. Instead of economic collapse, the fear he played upon was that of terrorist attack. In largely every speech presented from the time of their convention until election day, the party in power let it be known that ONLY the Republican party could provide the strength of leadership necessary to protect America from terrorist attack. By the time they were through, it didn't matter to Americans that the only terrorist attack to hit this country came while George Bush was in office and that he might have been able to do something about it. It didn't matter that Bush lied us into a war with Iraq claiming they had weapons of mass destruction and nuclear capability and they were tied to Al Qaeda and were a supreme threat to America. It didn't matter that Bush had the worst environmental record of any American president. It didn't matter that Bush was in the process of destroying the Middle Class by allowing high paying American jobs to disappear overseas, replaced by jobs paying 21% less on average. It didn't even matter that Osama Bin Laden, mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, was still at large. None of this mattered.

Karl Rove sold the bill of goods that only the Republicans could keep America safe from terrorist attacks. Bush was elected president and the Republicans strengthened their control of the House and Senate.

Now we are headed into another election this year. Despite innumerable Republican scandals and misuses of power, Rove is laying track to accomplish the same result with the same methods that worked so well in 2004. In his latest speech Americans were told:

"We face a ruthless enemy and need a commander in chief and a Congress who
understand the nature of the threat and the gravity of the moment America finds
itself in. President Bush and the Republican Party do. Unfortunately, the same
cannot be said for many Democrats. Republicans have a post-9/11 worldview and
many Democrats have a pre-9/11 worldview. That doesn't make them unpatriotic —
not at all. But it does make them wrong — deeply and profoundly and consistently
wrong."

Will it work again, even in the face of so much Republican corruption? It can. Over 35% of Americans believe that because there was never another terrorist attack that Bush and the Republicans did their job well. In the face of unprecedented warrantless wire tapping of our citizens, a majority of Americans say it's okay as long as we are safer. If people can accept the lie that searches and wire tapping without warrants are a presidential right, they will have no problem putting his party back into power in the midterm elections IF they believe that only the Republican party will protect them from terrorism.

The funny thing is that these same Americans are amazed that people can vote terrorists like Hamas into office. Talk about not seeing past their own noses.

posted at 4:27:00 PM by Marcia Ellen

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