Sept 11 2021
“so much of our politics has become a naked appeal to anger, fear and resentment,” George W. Bush said today, entirely oblivious to irony. It was during W’s re-election campaign that I first became aware of the political fear-mongering that has become the GOP’s campaigning staple.
He is arguably the guy who started the Republicans’ regular use of the politics of fear, by claiming that America was at war with terrorists, that nobody was safe, and that only he was strong enough to save us all.
He used that same fear-mongering rhetoric to convince congress to allow him to declare war on Iraq and Afghanistan, neither of which had anything to do with 9/11.
He used it to re-direct the FBI and NSA to spend most of their resources surveilling Americans and investigating Muslims, looking for those terrorist “sleeper cells” that he insisted were among us.
I suppose it’s good that he wants to renounce the politics of fear now, but let’s not forget that he was the one who started it.