Not This Time

It's started again. The campaign by the radical, extreme right Republicans and our numerous enemies in the mainstream media to portray the Democrats as "weak on national security" or "unwilling to fight the war on terror" or even "unpatriotic" is in full swing. Limbaugh, aka as "The Fat Assed Drug Addict" (Paul Hackett) is in full cry, rallying his army of knuckle-dragging dittoheads with the accusation that Democrats are disloyal to America. (Funny how Limbaugh is willing to make that accusation, inasmuch as he was a gutless draft dodger when it came to Vietnam.) Coulter is openly calling us traitors. Cheney is warning that a vote for the Democrats in November will weaken America. Orrin Hatch, who is as vile and phony of a Senator as I have ever heard of, is warning that if the Democrats win, the terrorists will surely strike. Bush is again playing with the terror alerts, and evidence is coming out that Bush's people tried to pressure the British into prematurely revealing the London airplane bombing plot. Karl Rove has made it clear that the Republicans plan to run a campaign of naked fear against the Democrats, and it is already in progress. Will it work again, as it did in 2002 and 2004?

Not this time. That is, not if we hit the right wing bastards in the face as hard as we can. The Democrats must NOT simply let the radical right paint them with the phony charge of being "weak" on security. We must pound the Republicans, again and again and again, with the following points:

--9/11 happened on Bush's watch. It was Bush who dropped the ball. He ignored numerous warnings and left this country wide open to attack. It was Bush's fault we were not ready.

--Cheney deliberately manipulated intelligence data to drag us into a war in Iraq that has done nothing but harm our ability to fight the war on terrorism. It was Cheney's lies and Cheney's incompetence that convinced the weak, foolish little man in the White House to agree to war. It was Rumsfeld who failed to plan for the occupation of Iraq. The mess in Iraq is 100% the fault of the Republicans.

--Osama bin Laden is STILL not in custody. The perpetrator of the 9/11 atrocity is still running free. Bush has utterly failed to bring the criminal bin Laden to justice.

--Because Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld have refused to negotiate directly with potential enemies, North Korea and Iran have moved forward with their nuclear programs. Republican incompetence has made us more vulnerable to nuclear attack.

--Bush helped push Israel into its unwise decision to pursue a wider war against Hezbollah. Bush has worsened every aspect of the MidEast situation and made our country less secure.

--The Republicans have STILL not implemented a program to inspect all cargoes coming into the United States.

--The Republicans deliberately politicized 9/11 and have spent five years campaigning on the corpses of those who were killed, shamelessly exploiting their deaths for Republican political advantage.

The Republican attack on the Democratic Party is a lie. In fact, it is the exact inverse of the truth, 180 degrees from the facts. It is the Republicans that have put our country in mortal peril, and it is the Republicans who are weak--disastrously, sickeningly, dangerously weak--on true national security. We can't--and we won't--let them get away with it again.

Not this time. By God, not this time.