The rhetoric is remarkably similar to 1965-68; it's deja vu all over again, but today's players seem to be willfully ignorant of that fact.
Josh Marshall has a post yesterday I debated bringing here. It's about as ominous as I've seen from someone who is fairly level headed. He compares the present rhetoric of the administration and it's supporters to Germany in the 1920s. A bit much to me. But I keep getting surprised by Bush and co.
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The Dead-Ender Right and the Bridge They're Building to the 1920s.
07.31.07 -- 11:11AM
By Josh Marshall
It's important to keep up on the war-supporting rump of the Republican party. Here's a post by Dean Barnett, which explains how "the left" is deeply invested in "defeat" in Iraq and for this, among other reasons, is ignoring, denying and generally trying to cover up the good news now coming out of Iraq day by day.
As Barnett writes, critics of the war "have a lot invested in this war failing and failing miserably."
At other moments, the pro-war rump seems to oscillate between heralding the untold successes in Iraq and blaming the critics of the war, who've never had any hand in its prosecution, for what they appear to believe is the inevitable failure of their enterprise.
What I'd like to focus on though is the increasingly clear and no less disturbing trend for the president's defenders to ape the tactics, rhetoric and strategy of the post-WWI German revanchist right, which laid the groundwork for and in many respects evolved into the Nazi party.
An inflammatory comparison? Yes. But the inflammatory nature of the comparison shouldn't scare us into ignoring how strong the similarities are. You see it in the explicit 'stab in the back' rhetoric and the effort to cover up their own authorship and prosecution of the role by blaming their own failures on the critics of the war.
And then perhaps the most telling sign, from an American perspective: As the dead-ender right's plans and dreams about Iraq come under greater and greater strain from the alternative universe of reality, and as the president's popularity wanes further and further, there's a growing tendency for them to think about and write about domestic American politics in terms of violence and extra-constitutional action.
A minor example of this I noticed just yesterday on the Powerline Blog, where Sen. Schumer's (D-NY) call to remove the "presumption of confirmation" from President Bush's court appointments a "coup". "Is This a coup? If not, what is it?" ran the headline to the post.
As the war for faux-democracy looks more and more like a debacle, the lure of authoritarianism at home becomes greater and greater for the war's dead-end defenders. And as redeployment looks more and more likely, they have to keep raising the stakes on the consequences of doing so. Apparently our whole future, our honor, destiny, certainly our safety from the Iraqi insurgents who will restart the insurgency in the US -- all of this is in the balance. The stakes must keep rising because that is, paradoxically, the only way for them to avoid taking responsibility for their failures. And cowardice that militant, in a faction within the body politic, is dangerous for the rest of us.
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