Never Again
This campaign season’s Karl Rove Special is getting really ugly really fast. Read Digby:
…Why would Karl Rove get all squishy about the mexican invaders? Because he can count. Immigration may get his base out in the fall, and the issue may make this a closer election than we’d like. But history shows these immigration fevers come and go. Losing any hope of the hispanic vote with a bunch of Nazi talk about “ridding the country of its problems” is the end of the whole enchilada. The Republicans cannot be a majority is they lose the hispanics. Rove knows this better than anyone — and it’s got him dancing on the head of a pin unable to please anyone. …
If you have the stomach for it, click on the link above and see what Digby’s referring to. This is real horrorshow hatethink for the darkest hearts of the conservative movement (note to fair-minded conservatives: these guys are not helping you). I wish the counterframe had already been set up so that whenever these guys pull the kind of insane crap that Digby cites, it would blow up right in their faces. That hasn’t exactly happened, but this campaign wedge may be shaping up to be so nasty that it carves off another two or three percent off the base. It’s abominable and it should hang around the neck of every Republican who thinks they can score points off fascist fantasies. This isn’t about the issue; this is about fear and hatred. I hope the public really has figured out Rove’s vile game at last.
UPDATE: Billmon, as usual, is indispensable on the topic:
…They’re waxing hysterical about the immigrant “threat” for the same reason they’ve been waxing hysterical about the “Islamofascists” for the past five years: because it legitimizes their paranoid, authoritarian world view — which in turn justifies the kind of paranoid, authoritarian state they want to see established in this country.
It’s almost as if they need to sell totalitarianism to themselves — to make it OK to ditch the libertarian legacy of old-fashioned small-government conservatism. But that takes perpetual crisis. The war on Al Qaeda wasn’t sweeping enough, so it had to become the clash of civilizations between the West and Islam. Iraq was a great emotional ride while it lasted (i.e. back in the days of mission accomplished) but now that it’s degenerated into the dry heat version of Vietnam, it’s no help at all — not just because America is losing, not just because the war is unpopular, but because it’s no longer dramatic enough to justify the kind of emotional mobilization that feeds the totalitarian impulse.
So the brown invaders crossing “our” border and daring to demonstrate in “our” streets have become the new Islamofascists — the necessary enemy of the moment. …
More on this in future posts, but suffice it to say that it’s this good guy/bad guy narrative that’s wired so deeply in our minds that allows the most craven manipulators to play on our irrational fears. Such tactics may not be technically “unAmerican” at the moment (however much we might like to think so), but they are certainly not democratic. That means they can be argued against. And that’s cause for cautious optimism.
