GOP’s full-blown panic: Why they’re pushing national security again

[unhappycamper]

http://www.salon.com/2014/10/09/gops_full_blown_panic_why_theyre_pushing_national_security_again/

Look closely and you'll see the old Republican strategy of attacking Dems on defense is back. Here's the reason why

GOP’s full-blown panic: Why they’re pushing national security again
Heather Digby Parton
Thursday, Oct 9, 2014 07:00 AM EST

If there is one thing liberals have envied about the conservative movement over the years, it’s the simple and clear metaphor they employ to describe their coalition: a three legged stool consisting of “family values, small government and a strong national defense.” (If you’ve ever had the experience of listening to Democratic strategists struggle with an “elevator pitch” you’d understand why.) The original brilliance of that metaphor was the idea that it requires all three legs to stand up so every faction must be equally supported by the others. (I would argue that the seat of the stool is law and order — aka race — but the poor metaphor is so tortured at this point that it’s about to collapse of its own weight, so I won’t.) In any case, over time those factions all merged into a party consensus that was simply called “conservatism” and the three legs of the stool today merely symbolize the three issue areas that animate the Party. Each set of concerns is always relevant to some extent or another but when one gets a little bit shaky they can usually trot out one of the other ones to rally their troops.

So it’s not just an ideological coalition, it’s also an electoral strategy. For instance, when the Obamacare fearmongering fails to produce the predicted chaos they could shift gears and start frothing about debt and taxes. Or when the culture warriors go too far and start babbling about “legitimate rape” and call women who use birth control a bunch of sluts they can call in the nativists to scream about an “invasion of illegals” or stoke fears that we are in imminent danger of terrorists killing us all in our beds. When events break just right, they can even combine them to create a full-blown panic.

Here’s how it’s being done for the upcoming election by Republican Senate challenger Tom Cotton from Arkansas:

“The problem is with Mark Pryor and Barack Obama refusing to enforce our immigration laws, and refusing to secure our borde. I’ll change that when I’m in the United States Senate. And I would add, it’s not just an immigration problem. We now know that it’s a security problem. Groups like the Islamic State collaborate with drug cartels in Mexico who have clearly shown they’re willing to expand outside the drug trade into human trafficking and potentially even terrorism. They could infiltrate our defenseless border and attack us right here in places like Arkansas. This is an urgent problem and it’s time we got serious about it, and I’ll be serious about it in the United States Senate.”