Hussein's buddy Donald Rumsfield’s bizarre attack on the critics of the Bush administration exemplifies exactly how desperate the crazies have gotten as they careen deep into their second term. Rumsfeld has taken to framing the administration’s debacle in Iraq as a fight of freedom versus fascism. There is only one problem with the analogy; it isn’t accurate. A generally agreed-upon definition of fascism is "a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion." Paxton, Robert O. The Anatomy of Fascism. (Knopf Publishing Group, 2005). To me this sounds far more like the shenanigans going on in and around the White House than in the theocratic totalitarian regimes of Iran and Saudi Arabia. The unwillingness of the administration to frame its enemies as religious fanatics is disturbing. Perhaps because here at home we have a government run by violent religious fanatics? One wonders.
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Rumsfeld's rant was perfectly in tune with the philosophy of Karl Rove: Attack your opponents with your own weaknesses. For example, when Bush was vulnerable on the shirking of National Guard duty issue, the administration had its friends attack the military record of the war hero John Kerry. Now, the Sec. of Def. of the New American Fascist Party (NAFP)attacks its critics as fascists. Although, I suppose in Rumsfeld's case, it could have been psychological projection.
I guess Rumsfeld is banking on the fact that many Americans don't even know how to find Washington DC on a map never mind being versed in the subtleties of parsing definitions of political ideology. You are right on the money about the Rovian attack strategy; their machine is gearing up with the elections around the corner.
The Democrats continue to allow Rove to dictate the narrative. Democrats should have been using the fascism meme against the Repuglicans for months now.
I have been really irked by the unwillingness of the party to get in the mud and fight dirty. There is too much at stake for the party to take the high road. Not sure how this has changed under Dean's leadership but Gore/Lieberman set the precedent by adopting his "for the good of the country" stance in not going to the mat over the 2000 election.
That's an interesting point, tracing the party's meekness to the Florida recount. That, perhaps, was the first sign that Democrats were excessively responsive to Rethuglican concerns. At this point, I just can't understand it.
The current climate of bitter partisanship in Washington did not come from the democratic side of the isle. When the Republicans let their party become taken over by religious ideologues, in Congress and the White House, things went south in a hurry. You cannot run a complicated government structure using the bible as a guide to good governance. Nor should you be making foreign policy decisions based on your biblical understanding of what the middle-east should look like.
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