Fearmongering to win

Charley Reese has another fine commentary:

The Republican National Committee has shown what President George W. Bush's re-election campaign will be about: fearmongering....

The essence of the RNC's first commercial was that if you don't re-elect Bush, the big, bad boogeyman will get you. You should remember that it was on Mr. Bush's watch that the big, bad boogeyman got us on Sept. 11, 2001. So far as we know, Mr. Bush didn't have a clue.

Read the rest here if you like. Or... this much:

[It is] necessary to always have an enemy at the gate if you want to maintain a powerful central government and equally powerful military-industrial complex. That's a trick as old as the Roman Empire.

First it was fascism, then communism and now Islam. In the meantime, our own country grows less and less free and more and more in debt...

You as a citizen ought not to fall for this fearmongering. All we have to do is cut the apron strings from Israel and pull our troops out of the Middle East, where they have no business being anyway, and Middle East terrorism directed toward us would evaporate overnight. We have no natural conflict with the Arab world or it with us, and most assuredly Islam is not our enemy.

People seem to forget that Islam has been around since the 8th century A.D. The original Arab empire filled the vacuum caused by the fall of Rome. The Ottoman Empire had nothing to do with spreading Islam per se. Islam opposes coerced conversions, despite what some American ignoramuses might have told you.

And unlike Christianity, I might add.

The truth is, the only enemies we have are those our own government is manufacturing to justify a powerful central government that is sucking the wealth and liberty out of this country like some monstrous leech.

(And I might remind you that Charley Reese is no left-wing pansy. For instance: "I fear that public education, caught up in the fad of diversity, is not properly teaching new generations to respect and revere our own heritage of liberty.")