I've been bracing myself for a vicious political season, and sure enough, it's happening. The Washington Post has a compendium of vicious political attack ads, most of them coming from the GOP. Taken together, they are a catalog of outrage. Admittedly, the story is a bit distorting; we don't usually see all the political fisticuffs that occur in obscure congressional districts in mid term elections. However, the outlandishness of the attack ads are a wonder to behold. They're like prying open the unconsciousness of right wing evangelicals and revealing the roiling fears and desires inside. Although there are exceptions, like Wisconsin, generally speaking the redder the state the more outlandish the smear tactics. Here in the Chicago area, the bluest part of blue state Illinois, we've been subjected to relatively sly attack ads accusing Tammy Duckworth, an Iraq war veteran who lost both legs in combat, of cutting and running on the war. Who knows what kind of mayhem is going on downstate.
The most dismal aspect of these smear tactics is that they are explicitly aimed at the GOP's conservative base--the so-called values voters. The GOP has nothing to offer these voters except jacking up their fears, which is starting to look like an end in itself for everyone involved. The feckless and irresponsible Republican Congress can't promise anything useful for the republic with a straight face. His feeble exercise in rearranging the deck chairs on the cruise ship Iraqi Freedom now over with, George Bush is running like a bride late for her wedding to the specter of gay marriage in New Jersey. With its grotesque imaginings, anarchic disregard for the mores of middle class life, and general semiotic emptiness, this election is starting to look less like an exercise in democratic processes than a Halloween episode of The Simpsons.
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