Not that the left is immune from doing this, but it’s just that the right seems to have become unusually good at it. Or more accurately, the religious far right who have taken over the Republican party. The ones who proclaim loudly that they believe in that guy who said things like love your neighbor as you would yourself.

Whenever America faces her toughest challenges, you can always count on the right to be there. Sowing hate, stoking fear. So it’s no surprise that in the midst of a great economic catastrophe, the right would search for scapegoats instead of answers. And so we have the fabricated crisis of the “Mosque at Ground Zero.”

Leave aside the fact that it’s not a mosque and it’s not at Ground Zero. This is really about hate and fear, the right’s old friends.

For the last 45 years, at least, no matter who the Republican candidate has been, hate and fear were really at the top of the ticket.

Recall that in 1968, Richard Nixon won the presidency by stoking fear of Negroes and hippies. The vaunted Southern Strategy of the Republican Party was at its core a campaign of fear. What a ride it’s had.

It’s no longer fashionable to be officially afraid of blacks, but there is no shortage of substitutes. Who is the right afraid of now?

Read the post to find out the new boogiemen are in their list of things to distract us. Like Muslims in a building a few blocks from Ground Zero. Like there aren’t any anywhere else around there now.




  1. Alf says:

    Politics is like we/they religion. If you are not a member of our party/church you are excluded. We fall prey to our worse nature so we can be handled by the interests who understand group manipulation.

  2. philgar says:

    I think President Obama spoke out about the mosque to stoke the fires at Fox News. It’s not really good publicity for him. However, every minute they talking about this mosque they’re not talking about 10% unemployment.

  3. Dallas says:

    True dat.

    The core of Republican campaigns is to focus on the the “safety” part of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Sheeple Needs.

    The Liberal strategy addresses higher order issues like achievement, acceptance of facts and respect for one another.

    You have to give the Nazi GOP party credit for sticking to a formula that works well with the American Sheeple.

  4. Smith says:

    Dallas: “The Liberal strategy addresses higher order issues like achievement, acceptance of facts and respect for one another.

    You have to give the Nazi GOP party credit for sticking to a formula that works well with the American Sheeple.”

    Being a far-left liberal, I’m sure you are totally unaware of your own hypocrisy.

  5. bobbo, asking a real question says:

    The discourse will usually be a contest of impressions/bias/equivalency by ignorance. What “objective” measure of this bias is readily available once we agree on what “appealing to fear” means as opposed to “pointing out a legitimate danger/concern?”

    Maybe this notion is a total distraction as well?

    Why not take this “objective” and relevant measurement: the party platforms????? Are you for providing a social safety net and paying for it as we go, or are you for continued tax cuts for the SUPER rich and a widening gulf between the SUPER rich and the rest of us the consequences of which are partially hidden by increasing the deficit?

    Only the top 3% of americans, or those fantastically thinking they will get there, should have any interest AT ALL in voting Repuglican. If you are in the bottom 97% of wealth holders in the USA, and you vote Republican, the odds are 99% you have been swayed by some distraction.

    Silly Hoomans.

  6. brm says:

    The left generates hysteria about Christians.

    what’s the diff.

  7. bobbo, asking a real question says:

    brm==name as many instances as you care to?

  8. Still Right says:

    #2:
    “However, every minute they talking about this mosque they’re not talking about 10% unemployment.”

    Either way, no matter what my personal opinion of the Democrats is, they are in trouble now and in November, and in 2012. Obama simply is not Presidential, and the people are seeing him for what he is.
    Some of you may like to idolize him, and that’s fine. But he is failing as a President, and that is showing in his approval numbers.
    And, incidentally, I am a conservative, and a Darwinist. And I certainly do not agree that the religious right has “taken over” the party.
    Conservatism is a philosophy of economics, belief in the Constitution as written and amended, personal freedom, and personal choice.
    Abortion is OK if you don’t mind killing your own unborn child in your belly, and I don’t give a rat’s ass if two guys and a goat want to marry each other.
    I don’t want endless taxes, endless tolerance, and endless bullshit. That’s all the Democrats promise.
    Don’t paint us all with your talking point brush.

  9. Father says:

    Ronnie Reagan had us hate and fear the USSR, that old McCarthy bugaboo.

  10. Buzz says:

    Add “punishment”. The right are advocates for greater punishment as with being arrested with a bag of pot.

    See the story of the Florida girl killed while forced to work “with” the cops or go to the slammer forever because she had an ounce of pot. That threat was planted into Florida law by Republican means.

  11. Larry Budd says:

    Yes sir Alfred, Coolidges policy’s gave us the roaring 20’s, but helped greatly to push us into the Great Depression. Reagan fueled the 80’s, but gave us the early 90’s recession, and ultimately is philosophical son George W’s policy’s gave us the Great Recession.

    All your hero’s do is overheat the economy, and ultimately ruin it.

  12. bobbo, asking a real question says:

    #9–Right==What is “an endless tax?”

  13. Cursor_ says:

    This is not just a republican thing. This is a political thing as old as politics.

    To pull attention away from your own governments’ doings, make someone or something an enemy to fear and hate and you have distracted the people.

    The US is just another country that has had that used against them by those in power.

    The current hate and fear of Arabs is due to the fact that IF we stopped hating and fearing them and looked at what the US has done to them since FDR, you would all realise that WE started the whole problem. And the chickens have come to roost.

    But we did it to the USSR, Korea, Vietnam much of Central and South America, Japan, Germany, etc.

    If you mess with people they will mess with you back.

    Cursor_

  14. bobbo, asking a real question says:

    Cursor==how did “we” start the whole problem with the Middle East? Western business did go there to explore/develop/buy oil and the League of Nations/UN did plop Israel in the middle of mostly empty land quite rightly done as payback for the Ottomans and Arabs fighting for Germany.

    Just interested in what you think of as “causation.”

  15. Mr. Ed says:

    Dave, They HATE it when you’re right.
    They FEAR that you’re on to them.

    Unfortunately the brain dead neocons read your list and say “Yup!”

  16. McCullough says:

    Right wing nutballs = Left wing nutballs.

    Idiots all. I am so fucking tired of this finger pointing. It’s sickening and destroying this country. The world is NOT black and white.

    Grow the fuck up.

  17. Maricopa says:

    What McCullough said.

  18. Still Right says:

    #5
    I don’t know what the fuck you are talking about!
    What the hell kind of drugs are you on???

  19. Still Right says:

    #11 Yea, right! Um, except what WAS going on with nice little USSR and ALL THOSE FUCKING MULTI-TIPPED NUCLEAR MISSLES AIMED AT EVERY GOD DAMN MAJOR CITY AND MILITARY INSTALLATION IN THE UNITED STATES????
    You stupid typical revisionist moron!

  20. bobbo, to the left of Obama says:

    “You Know”—its just because the issues of the day are not black and white that one can ask if the Right = Hate as set forth by Unc Dave. The fact that both Left and Right are destroying our country doesn’t mean they are exactly the same.

    And if they aren’t the same, then its fair to ask/highlight how they are different.

    Unless you want to turn your brain off by: choosing one side or the other, OR===BY EQUATING THE TWO.

    Silly Hoomans.

  21. bobbo, to the left of Obama says:

    #24–Stillborn==what I posted at #5 is plain enough==what, no cartoons? Read it again or a few times and see if you can almost guess what it is about==or muster the patience to even ask a question?

    Or stay stillborn in your crib.

    Stoopid Human.

  22. Counterweight says:

    The left waves the boogieman of impending ecological disastre;
    Worldwide doom because we drive cars and eat meat;
    And the beat goes on.
    The biggest difference between the scare tactics of the right and those of the left seems to be that the right are true believers while the left seems to find a way to profit from the problems they promote.

  23. Olo Baggins of Bywater says:

    This right/left discussion didn’t exist until the GOP claimed morals and religion as a platform and effectively exploited wedge issues. The election of a black man as president made many of them insane.

  24. bobbo, to the left of Obama says:

    Counterweight==you make a slight error in your argument as you flip between the “leadership” of the left and right versus those led by such leadership. This leads to a direct error in that the leaders of the right are not “true believers” but are also taking advantage of their own true believers for their own political/personal motives.

    Keep you parallel contruction going as you mosey thru a dialectic.

    So, if I state that if the atmosphere gains another x% of carbon in the next 100 years that it is most likely that the sea level will rise by 50 meters in the next 3-400 years, have I made a boogieman attack based on fear???

    We can at least argue about it and what to do about it. There is no sanity at all in whipping up racist attitudes that Obama was born in Somalia and is a secret Muslim. So yes, both sides “take positions” but the RIGHT = FEAR all so much more often than the Dems.

    Silly to disagree with the obvious. There are many issues to fault the Dems on. Fear is one, Fear MONGERING on a Republican Scale is not.

  25. MikeN says:

    Isn’t this mosque being built on a building damaged on 9/11?

  26. MikeN says:

    It was Rahm Emanuel who said never let a crisis go to waste.

  27. Derek says:

    What is the greatest lie ever created? What is the most vicious obscenity ever perpetrated on mankind? Slavery? The Holocaust? Dictatorship? No. It’s the tool with which all that wickedness is built: altruism. Whenever anyone wants others to do their work, they call upon their altruism. Never mind your own needs, they say, think of the needs of… of whoever. The state. The poor. Of the army, of the king, of God! The list goes on and on. How many catastrophes were launched with the words “think of yourself”? It’s the “king and country” crowd who light the torch of destruction. It is this great inversion, this ancient lie, which has chained humanity to an endless cycle of guilt and failure.

  28. deowll says:

    I see that the progressive/liberal side of the Democrat Party are taking another page from the play book of Joseph Goebbels.

    If the truth won’t suit your needs lie.

    Of course telling lies is becoming the one thing that actually seems to define these people.

    I used to think they had some admirable characteristics but the more I know about them the less I find to respect. Maybe an earlier generation was morally superior but not this generation.

  29. bobbo, to the left of Obama says:

    Derek==wrong thread. This is about RIGHT = HATE. The magazine subscription sales pitch for The Realist is elsewhere.

    LIEberTARDS===like flies.

  30. bobbo, to the left of Obama says:

    And up steps do-ill to provide the shit by way of another irrelevant post.

    Well done RIGHT. If you can’t scare them with FEAR, then change the subject.

    Stoopid Humans. ((Dishonest too!))


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