"HOW REPUBLICANS DEFINE SECURITY"

Harold Meyerson has a great op-ed piece in today's Washington Post:

This time around, Democrats don't even have to vote against the measure for Republicans to make hay with it. If House Republicans can muster the votes to send the Hastert bill to conference (and they surely can), and then the Senate refuses to incorporate their lax and demagogic provisions, Republicans can still blame Senate Democrats -- most particularly, Democratic leader Tom Daschle, who is caught up in a tight election battle, for weakening security.

The definition of security, I suppose, can depend on who you think poses the greatest threat to the nation. In the age of Bush, Republicans (with a few notable exceptions) surely don't believe it's al Qaeda, from which they diverted our forces to fight in Iraq. Nor do they believe it's now our enemies in Iraq, against whom they did not prepare so much as a battle plan. Only if you believe the greatest threat to Republicans -- excuse me, to America -- is the Democrats, that it's worth blowing off the danger from Osama bin Laden to eliminate the peril posed by Daschle, does the Republicans' security policy make any sense at all.

This is not a new tactic for the Repugs. Looking at recent conservative book titles, it's clear that the wackos consider Democrats (or liberals) to be as dangerous to the nation and the world as terrorists: Treason, Deliver Us From Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism and Liberalism, Let Freedom Ring: Winning the War of Liberty Over Liberalism.

You know, I don't know any Democrats who think their fellow Americans are evil or traitorous just because they're Bush supporters (we just don't get it); this new McCarthyism is strictly a Repug device. Party of division, proponents of corporate cronyism and concentration of wealth in a few, well-connected hands, suspicious of science, and believers in "the end justifies the means," war-solves-everything/might-makes-right -- that's our opposition.