Run For Your Lives

by digby

Is everyone shivering with fear today waiting for airplanes to fly into their beds? Yes, it’s true. You are all as unprotected as little babes, now that the Protect America Act has expired. Run for your lives! You are no safer today than you were last August when the Protect America act was rammed through the congress on a whisper campaign that the terrorists were planning an attack on Washington DC.

Remember that?

On August 2, Roll Call issued a breaking news report, warning of a suspected terror threat against the U.S. Capitol:

Capitol Police officials have stepped up the department’s security presence on Capitol Hill in response to intelligence indicating the increased possibility of an al-Qaida terrorist attack on Congress sometime between now and Sept. 11.

Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS) ratcheted up the rhetoric, “ominously” advising that “Congress needed to pass changes to terrorist surveillance laws before leaving for the August recess and warned that otherwise ‘the disaster could be on our doorstep.’” Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), speaking at a FISA event yesterday organized by the Center for American Progress Action Fund, stated that the terror claims were “part of a well-orchestrated campaign” by the administration to politicize the FISA debate. She referred to the efforts as part of the “Rovian strategy of using terrorism as a wedge political issue.” Harman asserted that the intelligence agencies “knew” the terror claims propagated by conservative lawmakers were false:

That specific intelligence claim, it turned out, was bogus; the intelligence agencies knew that –apparently had communicated to Congress or to relevant people that it was bogus, the source was unreliable. But that communication wasn’t in any published form until the day that the Senate passed the amendments to FISA.

On August 5th, 2007 they passed that bill. The same bill they insist is absolutely necessary to keep the country from suffering another terrorist attack. The same bill which was not in place until six months ago and which Democrats were willing to extend as is except for the granting of immunity for lawbreaking corporations.

The Republicans are wise and understand that this isn’t an easy issue to explain to the American people. They know they can just say that the Democrats are refusing to give the President the tools he needs to keep terrorists from killing you in your beds. And it might work again. But the administration has been crying wolf for nearly six years, over and over again, whenever they want something, and it’s human nature to discount these threats after a while. The Republicans will run on beating back the twin boogeymen of terror and taxes, and there are a fair number of people who will throw in their lot with the fear mongers. But it seems pretty clear that most of the country is not as responsive to this stuff as they used to be.

9/11 was a terrible day and the price the world has paid for it has been huge. Iraqis and Americans and Afghans continue to pay the price every day. But this mindless fearmongering has turned 9/11 into a cheap Republican advertising campaign. I’m sure they’d love to switch gears and try another tack, but really, what do they have? They’ve got their “reformer with results” St John McCain out there snarling out the words “my friends” like a rabid pit bull with Tourette’s Syndrome and talking about staying in Iraq for a thousand years while claiming that he’s going to radically cut non-defense government spending during a recession. He’s like a Salvadore Dali version of Bush.

They are going to plop this big mess (including, by the way, our impending “victory” in Iraq which the Democrats will be accused of squandering starting January 21st 2009) in the lap of the next president to give themselves some daylight between Mr 28% and the conservative movement.

It would be very helpful if a new Democratic president and the Democratic congress would make it their business not to let this happen. Unless they want to be blamed for all the fallout, and lose big in 2010, they’ll make sure the country knows, without doubt, who is responsible for this mess. (Of course, we all hoped for that in 2006, but maybe a new president will make the difference.)

Update: Greenwald captures the Heritage Doomsday clock:

.