On fearmongering.....

One of the constant criticisms of the Bush administration is that they have relied on FEARMONGERING to maintain support for their War on Terror.  The questions I would like to pose are, "What is fearmongering?", "Is Bush guilty as charged?" and "Don't the Democrats do that too?"

Believe it or not, "fear-monger", "fearmonger" and "fear-mongering" do not seem to be actual words in the English language according to most of the online dictionaries I checked (if anyone finds a source, please let me know).  The closest thing I can find is "scare-monger" which is defined as "one inclined to raise or excite alarms especially needlessly".  I would venture to say they're synonyms.

As I'm writing this, I came across an article by Charles Krauthammer which pretty much sums up everything I was going to try to write, although i think he wouldn't define fearmongering in this case as raising alarms needlessly - to him the threat of an attack worse than 9/11 is real.  His basic premise is, Democrats who are honest fearmonger too and there's nothing wrong with it.

The primordial fear that haunted us through the first days and weeks after 9/11 has dissipated. Not because the threat has disappeared but for the simple reason that in our ordinary lives we simply cannot sustain that level of anxiety. The threat is as real as it was on Sept. 12. It only feels distant because it is psychologically impossible to constantly face the truth and yet carry on day to day.

But as it is the first duty of government to provide for the common defense, it is the first duty of any post-9/11 government to face that truth every day — and to raise it to national consciousness at least once every four years, when the nation chooses its leaders.

Fearmongering? Yes. And very salutary. When you live in an age of terrorism with increasingly available weapons of mass destruction, it is the absence of fear that is utterly irrational.

The '90s are over. It's not the economy, stupid. It's Hiroshima — on American soil. If that doesn't scare you, it should. We could use more fear in this election, not less. Cheney should be commended for his candor. (Ted) Kennedy too.

In my opinion, the threat of a terror attack using WMD must be real because Democrats use it so often to bash Bush's policies.  Do the Democrats recommend searching every container that comes into US ports because they think someone might be importing RPGs?  Not according to future House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer.

“I simply do not understand why House Republicans refuse to join Democrats in demanding that 100 percent of the shipping containers destined for the United States be scanned for radiological, biological and chemical agents before being loaded onto ships bound for our ports.....

“Does anyone really believe that if the unthinkable occurred in an American port today that the American people would not immediately demand that every container coming into our ports be screened?  We must not wait until the unthinkable occurs before we do what is necessary to shore up this national security vulnerability.

Did anyone reading that miss the point that Republican failure to see a threat will cause a terrific catastrophe?  This despite that fact that containers have never been used, by terrorists to transport WMDs and no one has decided to exploit this highly publicized "weakness" in security in the five years since 9/11 (or before that for that matter).

Needless to say, every important Democrat has said that we're "not safer" because of Bush's misguided policies.  To me this means that we are at greater risk today of 9/11 happening than we were on 9/10/01.  Yet, there's no explanation for over five years of success in preventing attacks.  if we're not safer, there should be more, or worse attacks.  They can't claim there are no threats because they themselves don't believe that, otherwise they wouldn't feel so strongly that we need to be safer.
Part of the claim of Republican fearmongering is the President's attacking of Democrats for not supporting his aggressive (read: unconstitutional) measures for rooting out terror suspects here at home.  How dare he accuse Democrats of being unpatriotic (read: wrong)!  If you look at the Democrat plan for security - they are all defensive in nature.  Protecting ports, protecting nuclear and chemical plants, protecting our troops with better armor and providing more funds for first responders.  There is nothing in their plan that even hints at actively seeking out terror suspects, only "combating the economic, social, and political conditions that allow extremism to thrive", whatever that means.  Invading Iraq may have been wrong, Guantanamo may be wrong, wiretapping of calls without Justice Dept approval may be wrong, but I haven't heard any alternative suggestions that indicate that the Democrats are willing to actively seek out those that want to do us harm.  The only thing close would be calls to refocus on destroying the Taliban in Afghanistan, but do they really think that all terror would have ceased even had we done that four years ago and not invaded Iraq?  Would the world's extremist Muslims suddenly love and respect us or would they be showing up in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Sudan, Lebanon or who knows where else?

Here's a wake up call to everyone on all sides of the political aisle.  Our situation now is not the same as Vietnam and it's not the same as WWII or the Cold War.  We face a real and much different threat which everyone believes could lead to an attack with WMDs against the US homeland. Let's try to channel our fears into creative, yet rational decision making. 

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Just because...I stumbled across this item from factcheck.org that they put together during the 2004 presidential campaign...

Funding for Veterans up 27%, But Democrats Call It A Cut

Money for Veterans goes up faster under Bush than under Clinton, yet Kerry accuses Bush of an unpatriotic breach of faith.

So would this have been fearmongering, or not?  At least with the War on Terror, republicans are accused of inflating a real threat.  Here, the Democrats create a threat (funding cuts) that never existed in the first place! This quote from US News also sums up my thoughts on this issue as part of our national security agenda.

Their (Democrats) idea for increasing our national security, as the liberal writer Michael Kinsley points out, is to increase veterans' benefits (which the Bush administration has been doing)–although it's not clear that this would diminish the desire of Islamofascists to destroy our society or reduce our freedoms.