You're being a little too coy here --

the trick is getting our right-wing corporate media to report the truth.

The recent responses by leading Republicans show their relentless pursuit of death-lust imagery: Fearmongers trying to gain electoral success through Boogey Man narratives. They have stopped making sense, and are appealing to the emotional belief steeped in existing prejudices.

Your use, Mr. Benen, of the term craven regarding Pete Hoekstra's fundraising is where the political dialog should be, but alas, why should we expect anything worthy by a MSM that puts Newt Gringrich on MTP the most times over the past year?

When the media stop giving their airtime and column space to crazy talk we will begin to truly make a better nation for ourselves! -Kevo

The trick is getting Americans to notice.

Yeah, good luck with that. If there ever was a population easily gamed and decivied, that would be us.

I use my brother as an outlier. All he wants for Christmas is for every one else to be as apathetic and uninformed as he is. If I happen to mention how the Republicans are batshit crazy then his eyes start rolling and the distaste for my passion show itself on his face.

My Republican in-laws start talking about how liberals hate America and want to go communist, he always seems interested in that.

I can't tell you why this is, because on policy he is way closer to me than them. He hated they way hounded Clinton. And yet he still listens to their bullshit and still treats me like I'm the fringe one.

I think its the Stockholm Syndrom on a mass scale.

My conclusion? We are fucked and headed down the third world shithole road at full speed.

Strangly enough Knustler seems to agree.

It's hard to avoid descending into name-calling, but-- the basic fascist tactic is to take advantage of a crisis, so that otherwise reasonable people will think “Well, we know they’re thugs and liars, but nice guys in a dangerous neighborhood finish last and dead.”

I think that harping on this point is the key to discrediting them. What wingers want, what interests them is power, period. That's the whole story: alpha, omega, and everything in-between. It’s the explanation for every little thing they do. It’s an obvious point, and it’s tiring to keep pointing out this one thing over and over—but it’s what you’ve got to do.

The trick is getting the Americans to notice?

HA! Where are the god-danged Democrats? Why aren't they hogging the limelight defending their President?

I don't think it is a question of which party is better at making us safe it's a question of why isn't anyone from either party doing anything.
Political correctness in an effort to get votes is the only thing that matters to them. The American citizens should not have to go through all these security checks,they are not the problem. Our leaders are afraid to come out and say that Muslims are the problem because they don't want to lose any votes.

Muslims like Timothy McVeigh? Muslims like the good white terrorists who shoot up abortion clinics, Washington museums and churches? Muslims like the anthrax mailer?

I could go on, but your idiot racism and pants-pissing cowardice speaks for itself.

"...The Washington Post reported, "The health-care debate demonstrated how successful Republicans and their allies can be in selling a message to the American people, even when some of their facts are in doubt."..."

Good grief--this is something grassroots Democrats have known for a long time! The real trick is getting Washington Democrats to wake up and beat them to the punch every single time. Why haven't they been anticipating this tired tactic and getting out ahead of it? On health care and every other issue?!

This controversy needs to be turned around and Republicans asked directly: how serious can you really be about fighting terrorism if your first thought is to exploit this politically.

More than 20 years in government has convinced me that when people exploit a life and death issue like foreign policy for political gain they do not really take it seriously, and may actually undermine their ability to deal with a problem as a result of their effort to extract maximum political gain from the issue.

The most egregious example was Iraq and the extent to which Karl Rove exploited the runnup to the invasion to get Republicans elected in 2002. Karl Rove and George Bush did what no administration in American history had ever done before: they deliberately divided the nation on the eve of sending American boys and girls into harms way, and thus weakened the nation at a time when the country needed unity most.

Here was a case in which the politicalization of the war issue actually undermined Bush's ability to wage that war effectively. And so in a very real sense it cost American lives. By creating an embittered Democratic opposition over the war issue, Bush and Rove compromised their ability to adjust to changing conditions on the ground for fear that their political opponents would accuse them of failures and mistakes. Thus, when the Iraqi insurgency sprung up and things began to deterioriate, Bush was forced to "stay the course" in a losing strategy long after common sense told us that a new war plan was needed. How many needless deaths among our brave troops their selfish politicalization of the war caused is impossible to calculate.

Likewise today, this fetish that Republicans like Cheney seem to have with berating Obama for failing to call our conflict with Islamic extremism a "war on terror" seems to indictate that Republicans have their mind on some other agenda if they are so concerned with semantics and labels. Could it be, as Zbigniew Brezezinski wrote in the Washington Post in 2007, that Republicans are more concerned with keeping alive "a culture of fear in America" because a frightened public and the war context serves right wing goals of concentrated and extra-constitutional executive authority, unlimited ability to attack other countries, and because it serves the stereotyped and cliche attack on Democrats that they are "soft" on terror because they are less willing than conservatives seem to be about trashing 230 years of American democratic values in order to become just like the totalitarians we are fighting.

Ask yourselves if Republicans seem really interested in fighting terrorism or if they are more interested in exploiting the terrorist issue for their own selfish gain -- and what that says both about their commitment and their ability to deal effectively with terrorism itself.

Patrick, with such a myopic belief, you're the problem - you just can't see it! -Kevo

Ted Frier --

Bravo! Excellent post. I'd like to see it copied all over Leftblogistan.

Your problem is: you have no serious opposition party. Thus, for the sake of not having to notice, the media plays as IF there's a serious opposition party.

This of course gives the fringe a MSM voice.

"some of their facts are in doubt" is the equivalent to "Goebbels sometimes overstretched the truth about jews for political gains".

If the systemic irresponsibility in your MSM isn't fixed soon your country is doomed.

"Was 9/11 "a black eye" for Bush/Cheney? How about the anthrax attacks? Or Richard Reid? Or the attacks against U.S. allies around the world? And the terrorist attacks against U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan?"

Steve, you need to include the DC snipers in your list.

"Shoe is on the other foot, and republicans are now playing by the same playbook. How dare they attack the President. For shame."

Small difference: democrats told the truth, Republicans are liars.

But as I said: for the likes of you that's just a very small difference.

I don't watch television anymore. I live in the NY metro area, and stopped watching about 3 weeks after the WTC towers collapsed (along with the antenna for broadcast television). I don't miss it.

I went to visit my mom and sister in the Philly area over the weekend, to help my sister with some projects around the house. My mom, who has to use oxygen for COPD, watches television incessantly. Because I don't see television very often, I was really struck by how MSM covered this. Over the holidays there usually isn't much news, so local and national news covers people traveling for the holiday. Thanks to this latest incompetent terrorist, the insipid reporters had different questions to ask: instead of "how are you coping with the long lines to get on your flight home from visiting relatives?" it was "how worried are you about traveling?" It gave the reporters something "urgent" to report. It was truly pathetic, but it was in every broadcast I heard (news at noon, news at 6, news at 7, news at 10). By repeating it over and over and over, MSM beats the drums for fear, all to get more eyes glued to their station, their network, to sell more products for their advertisers. None of this analyzed the situation. None of this was informative. It was all an appeal to emotions, especially fear.

The original post and most of these comments totally miss the forest for the trees.

Yes, Republicans are trying to capitalize politically, and are saying some stupid things.

But people are legitimately afraid of people blowing up their flights (surprise). They wonder why this terrorist was let on a flight at all, much less with bomb-making material. They see TSA officials confiscate nail files from middle-aged women and dictate stupid rules about holding things in your lap.

No one here is dealing with the serious, substantive issue of security. These politicized reactions are just as bad as the Republican's reactions. If you want to neuter the Republican's attack, then talk about people's frustration about security and do something about it!

Today it was reported that the US gave over $70 million in military aid to Yemen in 2009. In 2008, they gave $0. And this is after the attacks on a US Embassy tied to Yemen in 2008.

In the last month there have been weekly high profile attacks on Al Qaeda in Yemen. And the Christmas Day bomber was sent in response to these attacks.

""The health-care debate demonstrated how successful Republicans and their allies can be in selling a message to the American people, even when some of their facts are in doubt."..."

Well, there's a tell for you. Exactly who's job is it supposed to be to inform the public and make sure they know which claims are factual and which are lies? The media you say? Hogwash. Their job apparently is to tell the public how effective Republican lies are without bothering to point them out as lies at the time they are uttered. Not only are the folks at WaPo useless as reporters, they can't even understand their own central role in fostering the gross ignorance of the American public about such matters.

It applies here also, since its more of the same, the Republicans use of "The Big Lie."

From a WWII OSS profile of Hitler, courtesy of Wikipedia on "The Big Lie."

"His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it."

It's no different with Republicans, all of them.

How long before someone in "the responsible press" calls them on it?

Just kidding.

"No one here is dealing with the serious, substantive issue of security. These politicized reactions are just as bad as the Republican's reactions. If you want to neuter the Republican's attack, then talk about people's frustration about security and do something about it!"

Um, the guy boarded the plane overseas, so neither TSA nor any other US security agency had any chance to prevent this act. How difficult is it for people to understand that, and how stupid must you be to question why TSA didn't do anything about it? Until TSA has the authority and personnel to check every flight entering the US at every airport in the world, you're just going to have to accept the fact that there are some attacks the US can't prevent. Of course, the fact that the previous administration undermined our relations with virtually all of our allies made closer cooperation on these kinds of issues - especially ones involving questions of sovereignty and the freedom of action of foreign officials on one's soil - just that much more difficult.

"even when some of their facts are in doubt"

FWIW, facts are never in doubt, by definition.

What can be in doubt is whether an assertion is factual.

The distinction isn't just pedantic. Using the term fact to refer to a dubious assertion privileges the validity of the assertion in readers'/listeners' minds on a subliminal level, even when its dubiousness is explicitly stated.

It's times like these that the president really benefits from the firm relationship he's fostered with the base.

Aw, crap...

You can cry racist all you want but this article would never be necessary if we didn't have Muslims in the U.S.
Yes we have lots of nut cases like McVeigh but 99% of all terror attacks in the world are the result of Muslims and not a single one has yet to do anything to stop the attacks.
When a group of Muslims gets up and starts to fight the "religion of peace" I will change my opion of these people.

"Was 9/11 'a black eye' for Bush/Cheney?"

No, of course not.

That was all Clinton's fault, right?

Dear Patrick - How exactly will this "group of Muslims" fight their religion of peace to your complete and utter satisfaction? And how will that make us safer from nut cases of all stripes?

Maybe you should lay off the "opion" for awhile.

"You can cry racist all you want but this article would never be necessary if we didn't have Muslims in the U.S.

Islam isn't a "race," genius. For you, I won't "cry racist,"..I'll cry "anti-Muslim bigot."

Uh, and brilliant logic, by the way. I guess you want to ban automobiles from America, too; after all, there wouldn't be any car accidents in this country "if we didn't have automobiles in the U.S."