Bob Herbert's column in today's New York Times succintly explains the Bush Administration/Republican mindset at this point. According to Herbert:
Mr. Bush wants ordinary Americans to remain in a perpetual state of fear +óGé¼GÇ¥ so terrified, in fact, that they will not object to the steady erosion of their rights and liberties, and will not notice the many ways in which their fear is being manipulated to feed an unconscionable expansion of presidential power.If voters can be kept frightened enough of terrorism, they might even overlook the monumental incompetence of one of the worst administrations the nation has ever known.
Great strategy, eh? Flush Democracy down the drain to save yourself? But when you've screwed up everything else you've touched - the budget, the war in Iraq, "dead or alive," Hurricane Katrian - and when your right-wing base is deserting you in droves, what more can you do? Essentially, the GOP is counseling the exact opposite of what Franklin Delano Roosevelt said at the depth of the Great Depression ("the only thing we have to fear is...fear itself"). Instead, the Bush/Republican motto seems to be, "the only thing that can save our asses politically is fear itself."
The problem is, a fearful public may be more willing to allow its hard-won liberties to be snatched away from them by a bunch of small-minded authoritarians. Like the current Republican Party, in other words. According to Herbert, this is extremely dangerous, especially in the post-9/11 world:
...This is a road map to totalitarianism. Hallmarks of totalitarian regimes have always included an excessive reliance on secrecy, the deliberate stoking of fear in the general population, a preference for military rather than diplomatic solutions in foreign policy, the promotion of blind patriotism, the denial of human rights, the curtailment of the rule of law, hostility to a free press and the systematic invasion of the privacy of ordinary people.There are not enough pretty words in all the world to cover up the damage that George W. Bush has done to his country. If the United States could look at itself in a mirror, it would be both alarmed and ashamed at what it saw.
Fear itself. Now THAT is scary!