Glenn Greenwald
Wednesday Oct. 22, 2008
What is happening to GOP electoral tactics?
<snip>
There's clearly something interesting -- and different -- happening here. It's not that right-wing politicians are accusing liberals and Democrats of being unpatriotic, anti-American subversives. There's nothing new about that. To the contrary, that McCarthyite accusation has virtually been a central plank -- one could say the defining plank -- in the GOP platform for the last three decades, at least.
What's different -- markedly so -- is that once they do it, they feel compelled to backtrack, deny they said it or meant it, rescind it, and -- in the case of Palin -- actually "apologize" for it. In the last eight years, George Bush has apologized a grand total of twice for things he did (for Abu Grahib and when he demanded that a blind reporter remove his sunglasses -- and he only acknowledged personal responsibility in the latter case) and Dick Cheney once (when he joked about inbreeding in West Virginia). Apologies in general are viewed as marks of weakness on the Right and are extremely rare; but in particular, the idea that any of them would apologize for insulting liberals or impugning their patriotism is simply unfathomable.
Yet in a period of one week, that's what all three of these right-wing candidates have done -- quite abjectly. Clearly, the standard right-wing electoral tactics simply aren't working this year. As Markos Moulitsas wrote yesterday about the Hayes and Bachmann episodes: "Republicans are starting to learn that it's politically perilous to accuse Democrats of being un-American. It wasn't long ago that they were all spreading this bullshit. Today, when they're caught doing so they fervently deny it and hope they can get away with it."
<more>
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/10/22/anti_american/index.html
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