Will Voters Overlook Shutdown, Sequester, Impeachment and Economic Chaos over ISIS & Ebola fears?
October 27, 2014

 
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In mid-2004, the BBC ran a three-part miniseries entitled “The Power of Nightmares”. The subject of the documentary was the idea that where we once elected people with the brightest vision of our future (the “sunny optimist”), today we elect the people with the biggest fears, ridiculing their critics as “naive” and “inadequately concerned” of whatever mortal threat they can dream up, promising to keep us safe from those incredibly remote (if not entirely baseless) threats to life & limb. It doesn’t matter if their McCarthy-ite paranoid delusions are in fact just irrational fear-mongering, the hope is that easily cowed, chronically ill-informed voters (made worse by defunding education) will pull that lever for the guy that sees the dangers on the horizon that others miss, and then promises to protect you from it. In 2002, that danger was Saddam and his WMD’s. This year, it’s “Ebola” and “ISIS”. The big question then is: “Will voters, once angry over GOP game-playing that led to one Shutdown of the Federal government (with more to come?), The “Sequester” (a link I highly recommend clicking), endless mind-bogglingly stupid investigations (“Benghazi!”, “Fast & Furious” and “IRS-gate” to name a few… and that was WITHOUT control of the Senate), threats of “impeachment” over President Obama using his Executive powers to get things done when GOP obstructionists block everything in site (and how quickly we forget the economic basket case they turned the country into the last time they were in charge), hoping we’ll forget all that and put them back in charge over unwarranted fear over President Obama’s handling of “ISIS” and “Ebola”? Seriously? You could fit all the domestic deaths from Ebola and ISIS combined in a single pair of Levi’s jeans. And what’s more frightening is that it appears to be working.

In 2002, just weeks after 9/11, the Bush Administration was already hyping fears of “Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction” to ensure “strong on Defense” Republicans didn’t lose the first mid-terms of the Bush presidency. And despite their catastrophic failure to “keep us safe” on 9/11, followed by the discovery that Iraq did NOT in fact have a WMD program, resulting in a pointless and costly war, the GOP was still able to successfully play The Fear Card to win the 2004 election. 12 years later, at least two current GOP candidates for Congress, Jodi Ernst and Steve Russell apparently never got the memo.

Remember “Death Panels” and how “gays in the military” would destroy “unit cohesion”? The Power of Nightmares, 2012 Edition.

About a week ago, someone tweeted the following incredible factoid:

You have a 400% better chance of marrying a Kardashian than you do of dying from Ebola in the U.S. (one death vs four Kardashian sisters).

Fox “news”… ground zero for “All fear, all the time”… has made encouraging Ebola panic part of their daily routine, seeking to terrify the slow-witted into voting against their own best interests because they want the person stoking their fears to protect them from a virtually nonexistent threat.

Just as “The Power of Nightmares” stated, there is always someone more paranoid with a wilder imagination that can concoct a bigger fear. Republicans LOVE to combine irrational fears into one giant “Super-scare” to convince you that the most paranoid among them is the most sane. “Ebola” plus “illegal immigrants” equals “Illegals crossing the border may be carrying Ebola”. (Yes, because desperately-poor immigrants just adore visiting Western Africa, traveling 8-hours back to America, then going on a 50 mile hike towards the Texas-Plains/Arizona-desert while bleeding from the eyes with a 103′ degree fever.

Problem is, no one can live in blinding fear of Ebola forever… especially when there just aren’t any more Americans dying from it since “Patient Zero” in Dallas last month. Remember ISIS? Weren’t they coming to “kill us all” three weeks ago? Poor guys can’t even grab a headline in your local Pennysaver today. Unfortunately for the GOP, “ISIS crossing the border” fearmongering was only working in border states. But that didn’t stop Arkansas GOP Senate candidate Tom Cotton from claiming ISIS may try to cross Mexican border to attack Arkansas. Right now, Cotton is leading in the polls.

Sorry guys. “ISIS” is yesterday’s news. Not terrifying enough.

So let’s add Ebola to the mix: Perhaps ISIS terrorists infected with Ebola are pouring across the Mexican border to infect Americans? You think I’m kidding? (WARNING: I cannot be held responsible for the stupidity you inflict upon yourself by clicking this RW nutjob link saying the same but worse. Needless to say, photos of “Ted Cruz” and “Sarah Palin” rest atop the header. Consider yourself warned.)

So the question remains: Are you going to forget about Shutdowns, Sequesters and pointless investigations, risking two years of eye-rolling impeachment hearings, all to put Republicans back in charge over fears of a disease you’re not going to catch (that by all accounts is being handled incredibly well) and/or a belief that terrorists fighting in Syria/Iraq are sneaking across the Mexican border carrying Ebola-infected piss in a Dixie-Cup?

Don’t think for a moment that Republicans won’t declare a capture of the Senate as some sort of “mandate” that Americans have “rejected Obama’s policies”… which includes more pointless investigations and attempts to repeal ObamaCare. And Lord help us all if another vacancy opens up on the Supreme Court.

The people are “frustrated” that their lives don’t seem to be improving “fast enough” (despite the fact most agree their lives ARE indeed improving vs where they were six years ago.) And that’s because of GOP obstruction, shutdowns and a seven month Sequester (that was agreed to only because the consequences of triggering it were so horrific, no one believed the GOP would actually let their budget-cutting insanity go that far.)

I’ve yet to figure out frustrated voters voting for the source of their frustration.

You know what’s next don’t you? Those cars with the defective airbags that resulted in four deaths from flying shrapnel? Perhaps as many as 30% of them were purchased during “Cash for Clunkers”. (Yes, I totally made that up, but doesn’t it sound like something they’d say?)

Be Afraid! Be very afraid… oh, and vote Republican!

The Friday “Rachel Maddow Show” opened with a look at dangerously misinformed House Republicans chairing a hearing on the spread of “e*Boli” from “Guyana”.

Expect more of this if they win the majority in the Senate.

 

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October 27, 2014 · Admin Mugsy · No Comments - Add
Posted in: Election, Partisanship, Politics, Rants, Right-Wing Insanity, Seems Obvious to Me, Terrorism, voting

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