Who's a Threat to US National Security?

By David Bloviator
Political Editor

Which political party can you trust to protect the United States from its foes, foreign and domestic?

The answer is obvious, right?  Let's see what the polls say:

Whiskey tango foxtrot?

Before you say it's Fox “News,” we'd point out their polling unit is well respected and often accurate, which is why the rest of the Fox hatemongers have no use for it.  If they say that Republicans have an eight point edge on foreign policy, we're inclined to believe it (at least before we learned that the leader of the Republican Party stole and hid the most sensitive national security secrets we have, to the cheers of his grovelling Republican tongue-bathers.)

The party that in this century alone brought you a useless bloody war in Iraq that turned the country into a failed Iran-dominated shell of a state, to our detriment, and then followed that performance by electing a Russian asset who collaborated with Putin throughout his Presidency and stole highly classified secrets to at best use as blackmail and at worse as a cash cow?

That Republican Party?

If you take the longer view, though, there's a reason for the longstanding Republican advantage on national security despite being falsified by pretty much every fact since 1968. 

The reason is that for at least that long (actually, since 1948), Republicans have successfully smeared Democrats as weak on national security, whether the threat was the Communist menace, the terrorist menace or the menace of desperate refugees along the Rio Grande seeking to exercise their right to asylum.  The threat morphs but the story stays the same: Democrats are at best weak and at worst unpatriotic.

This is the attack line even when reality is diametrically opposed.  When  a Democratic Vietnam War hero ran against a Republican draft-dodging coke-snorting ne'er-do-well, the Republicans invented a ridiculous fiction smearing the war hero as just the opposite.  

And when the draft-dodger was elected by a 5-4 vote of the Supreme Court, he then proceeded to drop the ball when warned of the clear and present danger of al-Qaeda terror attacks in the United States.  Al-Qaeda attacked just as warned and instead of being held accountable for their fecklessness, we got this  instead:

And the little man in the flight suit, under the direction of Deadeye Dick Cheney proceeded first to turn victory into defeat in Afghanistan and then tear up Iraq on transparently false pretenses.  The resulting power vacuum, in addition to costing thousands of lives and trillions of dollars, led to the strengthening of Iran and the creation of an oil-fueled failed state in the heart of the Middle East.  That's not much of a reason to trust Republicans with U.S. national security, but the myth persists.

We think it persists because the Republicans have been so ruthlessly pounding away at Democratic “weakness” ever since Dean Acheson and College of Cowardly Communist Containment “lost” China like a vagrant sock.

And because Democrats have been so bad at fighting back.  Their first instinct was to prove they could fight Communism by waging pointless bloody wars in Asia.  That didn't work out so well, especially for the Asians.

Their second instinct has been to hand over their lunch money, thereby locking themselves permanently into the myth that Democrats can't be trusted to protect national security.

On the rare occasions they have fought back, the results were gratifying.  Remember in 2008 when John McCain tried to play the card against Barack Obama because, one, he was a Democrat, and, two, just look at him?  Here's what President Obama had to say:

Well, you know, Sen. McCain, in the last debate and today, again, suggested that I don't understand. It's true. There are some things I don't understand.

I don't understand how we ended up invading a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, while Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda are setting up base camps and safe havens to train terrorists to attack us.

That was Sen. McCain's judgment and it was the wrong judgment.

When Sen. McCain was cheerleading the president to go into Iraq, he suggested it was going to be quick and easy, we'd be greeted as liberators.

That was the wrong judgment, and it's been costly to us.

Obama went on to do what the Bush Administrations flubbed: removing Osama bin-Laden as a threat. However, Republicans, blinded by hate, played the national security card to keep the lawless detention center in Guantanamo Bay, weakening the United States by maintaining for no reason a symbol of American contempt for international law and order.

More recently, President Biden stated the uncontroversial view that the Republican insurrectionists seeking a mass mobilization to overthrow democracy and replace it with a reactionary kleptocracy were “semi-Fascist.”

Republicans used to think that being soft on Russia was bad

The response from the semi-Fascists has been the usual Republican performance of fake outrage, combined with brilliant historical rejoinders along the lines of “Are you saying that a violent movement embraced by millions of Republicans is fascist?”  Got it in one!

The blunt statement of an inconvenient truth is great for rallying the Democratic base, but for really peeling away the Republican red, white and blue veneer, you need to move the middle ground of the electorate, the same one that for half a century believes against all evidence that the party of Nixon, Agnew, Ollie North, Sarah Palin, Tomatoe Quayle and Dead-eye Dick Cheney is the Party of National Security.

The news that the Tangerine-Faced Traitor a/k/a the Leader of His Party stole reams of sensitive intelligence and secreted it in the basement of his Florida hash house between the liquor bottles and pool towels and then lied about has not landed well with anyone not a semi-Fascist.  And it's even caused many who fit that description to suddenly pipe down.  (Calling Cancun, come in Cancun, calling Sen. Cruz.)

But if Democrats really want to close the public perception gap, why not make the obvious point that no party led by a person with so little regard for the defense of the U.S. can be entrusted to protect us?

There are maybe two problems.  First, Dems don't really like wrapping themselves in the flag, which Republicans have used, and therefore the progressive wing recognizes, as a cover for white supremacy among other forms of bigotry.

Secondly, they've never done it, so they don't have the invective at hand.  We can help, by repurposing some of the most rancid Republican attacks and smears on generations of patriotic Democrats (remember the 2004 Republican Conventioneers happily mocking John Kerry's Purple Hearts for wounds suffered in military service 12,000 miles away from where George W. Bush won his dental health medal for service in the Alabama National Guard?).

Here are just three attack lines, repurposed from their bastard Republican birth:

Republicans – the party of amnesty and abortion!  That was one of 1972's greatest hits.  What kind of party promotes amnesty for a dangerous corrupt subversive who has tried to overthrow the U.S. government, helped a Russian dictator whitewash interference in U.S. political affairs, and stole highly-classified sensitive documents in violation of among other criminal statutes the Espionage Act? 

And abortion.  Abortion.  Abortion.  Abortion.  Let's see how Republicans like it when they get to defend forced birth every day, at every campaign stop, and in every interview with a member of the real news media.

Oh, by the way, abortion.

Republicans coddle Communists. This was the heart of Ronald Reagan's national security pitch in 1984, in a successful effort to distract the nation from his pointless disastrous forays in Lebanon and Nicaragua.   Anyone who opposed his love of random shoot-'em-ups was weak on Russia and Communism.  

Commie coddler? Love it!

Is there any doubt which party is squishy-soft on Russia?  Despite their votes to ship some arms to Ukraine, on the number one national security issue of our time – protecting the U.S. against Russian subversion – the Republican have sided over and over again with Putin's Russian agents, and in fact support installing a known Russian stooge and former President as the next one despite overwhelming and unrefuted public evidence of collusion.  See, e.g., Mueller Report, Vol. I.

Republicans support a candidate who openly solicited Russian hacking and election subversion, whose campaign conspired with Russian agents by sharing confidential campaign information with them and watering down a pro-Ukrainian plank in the 2016 platform.  Later that same Russian agent echoed Putin's incredible denial of that interference, tried to destroy NATO, the successful anti-Russian defensive alliance, and stole highly classified documents, which he stored in a golf club penetrated by Chinese and Russian agents.

You can't trust a party who promotes and defends an agent of Russian Communism (what would you call a regime where all economic assets are under the control, political and economic, of a tyrant like Putin?).

Republicans won't protect us against terrorists

Maybe Joe Biden could drive the point home by flying to Berlin and telling Vladimir Putin to tear down his illegal invasion of Ukraine.

Republicans won't protect us from dangerous terrorists who want to attack the homeland.  Remember the little man in the flight suit pictured above?  You may not believe it, but he beat a real war hero in 2004 not only by smearing that hero as a coward and traitor, but also by branding said hero's entire party as too weak on homeland security.  In 2004, Flight Suit Guy and his wingman Dead-eye Dick Cheney ran for re-election by claiming that a Democratic win would lead to an America overrun by terrorists.

Here's ol' Deadeye:

Cheney was criticized in September for saying about this election “if we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we’ll get hit again, that we’ll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States.” ...

“It’s very important that we choose someone who understands the nature of the enemy we face, who understands the depth of the commitment needed in order to defeat it, who understands that we’re far better off taking them on over there than we are fighting them on the streets of our own cities,” Cheney told a group of supporters last week in Michigan.

Absent an ongoing offensive against terrorists such as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Cheney said, “terrorists will grow only more determined … and the risk will increase that they’ll get their hands on deadlier weapons than anything we’ve seen yet.” And at a rally earlier this month in this Green Bay suburb, Cheney accused Kerry of “a record of weakness and a strategy of retreat” on national security.

Now the terrorists aren't scary brown people from Iraq (actually, they were from Saudi Arabia, a fact that ol' Dead-Eye invariably overlooked).  Instead, they're home grown.  And sure enough, Republicans are encouraging domestic terrorists to attack the very foundations of our country again, just as they did on January 6:

Graham says there will be riots in the streets if Trump is prosecuted pic.twitter.com/oE6MyuqjeA

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 28, 2022

 Republicans are doing nothing to protect our democracy from being overturned by violent rampaging mobs incited by the leader of their party.  They are even using threats of further mob violence to obstruct justice and threaten law enforcement, whom they used to back when they were shooting Black women in their beds.

Elect Republicans and the domestic terrorists will grow only more determined and, if the Republican-bent Supreme Court has its way, the risk will increase that they'll get their hands on weapons deadlier than anything we've seen yet in a school shooting.

That should work.

Oh, and don't forget, abortion.