The Light At The End Of The Tunnel

All week, I had been thinking about how to put forth my observation of the complete political turn around that has occurred in the last month. Then I read this post from Glenn Greenwald, who naturally, as always, says what I am thinking, but more dramatic and concise. An excerpt:

By why are those tactics suddenly not working? If anything, one could have expected that equating Democrats with anti-American, vaguely foreign, radical subversion would have been more potent this year than any other -- given that the Democratic presidential nominee is a previously unknown, black politician from Chicago with a mixed African and Arab name, a portion of his childhood in Indonesia, and substantial parts of even his immediate family still in Kenya to this day. But that line of attack has gotten Republicans nowhere -- other than sinking further into the mud of defeat.

There are numerous reasons one could cite, none entirely satisfying on their own: High levels of economic insecurity -- and an intense belief that the country is fundamentally off course -- have made voters immune to ancillary character attacks. The GOP has been ceaselessly deploying these character-smearing techniques for decades, rendering them stale, overused and drenched with the stench of past-era obsolescence. The country has so turned against George Bush and his party that nothing they say can resonate. Voter demographics are changing, with voters becoming younger and more diverse and less vested in GOP patriotism iconography. The Obama campaign has been far more adept at aggressively engaging these attacks, rather than merely defensively denying them as past campaigns have done. The combination of an angry McCain and an unapologetically extremist Palin makes those attacks more difficult to soften.

Perhaps most significantly of all, the views typically attributed to Democrats and liberals to justify the "unpatriotic" and "radical" labels -- particularly those in national security -- are now views shared by the majority of Americans. I thought one of the most illustrative moments of the campaign was when Sarah Palin, in her debate with Joe Biden, snidely accused Obama of wanting to wave the "white flag of surrender in Iraq." That taunt -- an old, reliable favorite GOP trope -- fell flat on its face. How do you convince Americans that Democrats are weak, America-hating radicals by virtue of views which a majority of Americans themselves embrace?

We're gradually seeing not only the demise of the right-wing faction that has dominated the Republican Party for decades, but also the death of their ugliest and most toxic tactics. When numerous right-wing figures crawl across one's television set desperately denying and abjectly apologizing for attacks on the patriotism of Democrats and liberals, that is potent evidence that, at least as a matter of political rhetoric, a genuine sea-change is taking place.

I started this blog because of my disgust over the way the Republican voice was coming across -- with lies, anger, hatred and vengeance against anyone not white, male, heterosexual, American and Christian. Period. Any deviation from that labeled you many things, none of which bore any resemblance to reality, nor were they founded upon truthful tenets. The first four years of the Bush administration was tempered in some fashion for about a year right after 9/11. But, then, it went downhill with a force of passion that was lapped up by a majority of Americans that to this day, I am still dumbfounded with the astonishing number of people (apparently around 23%) in America that still believe Saddam Hussein and Iraq had anything to do with the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon!

Sadly, there are still those people (somehow still stuck at the 23% range) that believe in Bush, believe in the policies of hate and war, and who continue to tell themselves that they represent the majority view of the American public.

They do not. Thankfully, this election will shock them into the caged animals that they have always been. Not human beings imbued and transformed by the spirit of godliness and humanity, but whimpering, cowardly old hyenas living with their own dung.