Democrats Should Attack Republicans As Unpatriotic…Starting Now

The Republicans love American iconography – the flag and the slogans – but they hate America. Say this.

Programming note: I’m taking a short break in the UK this week so we won’t be recording the podcast on Friday. We’ll be back to our normal programming schedule next week!

- Ben

Photo/JTA-Saul Loeb-AFP via Getty Images)

by Bob Cesca

WASHINGTON, DC – You can see it coming a mile away. The Republicans are ramping up their “critical race theory” meme for this election cycle – the stage is being set for the same old trickery. And it goes like this: they make something up, cable news reinforces it, swing voters believe it, and despite myriad reasons to vote against them, Republicans get re-elected and perhaps recapture congressional majorities. 

It doesn’t require any super powers to predict that it’ll probably be this “grooming” nonsense in which Republicans say public school teachers are indoctrinating children to become trans or gay or whatever the Republicans are inventing out of thin air. Naturally, it’s meant to have the same impact as “critical race theory” did last year in Virginia’s gubernatorial race: scaring the hell out of parents over something that’s not actually happening in classrooms. In this case, they’ve traded their racist dog-whistles for homophobic and transphobic dog-whistles.

Naturally, the Democrats need to forcefully push back and debunk lies wherever necessary, but doing so isn’t a message, it’s merely a response to the Republican message. The Democrats need their own messaging strategy to make Republicans respond to them. For that, the party has to seize the initiative – turn the tennis ball machine around and aim it back at the Republicans. 

To do that, the party establishment and its activist base should immediately go on the attack and not let up until the votes are certified in November. Rather than constantly responding to Republican disinformation and propaganda, the Democrats need to take the fight to the Republicans.

Back in 2002, George W. Bush’s first midterm, the Republicans managed to expand their House majority while capturing a Senate majority – all this despite historic precedent, and after the Republican administration failed to prevent the 9/11 terrorist attacks. How did they do it? They relentlessly hammered the Dems for being unpatriotic. It didn’t matter who was the target, Democrats were attacked across the board for supporting, in particular, Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden. 

And yes, even the military veterans on the Democratic side were targets of the GOP’s patriotism-based assault. During his re-election campaign against Republican challenger Saxby Chambliss, Georgia’s Democratic senator, the late Max Cleland, was infamously coupled with Hussein and Bin Laden in a statewide ad campaign – indicting Cleland as unamerican and unpatriotic.

Max Cleland was a Vietnam War veteran who left two legs and an arm in Khe Sanh, while Sax Chambliss received a medical deferment from the military draft due to an alleged football injury. Did Republicans care about this rather important disparity? No way. So, Cleland lost and the U.S. Senate went from a 51-49 Democratic majority to a 51-49 Republican majority.

It was ugly and immoral as hell, but it worked. George W. Bush enjoyed a Republican Congress for the next four years of his two-term administration.

I strongly believe the Democrats need to borrow the unpatriotic attack and aim it squarely at every Republican, incumbent and challenger alike. Don’t flinch. Show no mercy. And unlike 2002, the unpatriotic attack has the benefit of being true.

And we have receipts.

• We can start with Republicans vocally supporting Vladimir Putin in both words and votes. 31 Republican senators voted against aid to Ukraine. There are innumerable video clips from Fox News, especially Tucker’s show.
  

• We’ve observed Donald Trump’s party invading and occupying the U.S. Capitol – the shrine to American democracy – to illegally install Trump in the White House again. If we don’t use this, we’re just asking to lose many, many seats.
  

• Trump recently told his rallygoing fanboys, “We’re such a stupid country.” This one will resonate.
  

• Republicans in two dozen states have passed laws making it harder to vote, allowing partisans to control the vote-counting, and granted state legislatures the power to overturn the will of the people. There’s nothing more anti-American than directly rolling back democracy. 

• The Republicans have repeatedly chosen party over nation, most recently illustrated by Bill Barr and Mitch McConnell separately saying that despite Trump’s criminality and incompetence, they’d vote for him again. 

• Marjorie Taylor Greene said this week that enlisting in the American military is “throwing your life away.” Trump called veterans who died for our nation “suckers and losers.”

• They’ve embraced dictators and white supremacists. They’ve undermined our allies and our NATO alliances. They’ve defended the Confederate flag – the banner that signified both slavery and a bloody rebellion against the U.S. Constitution.

The list goes on and on.

The Republicans love American iconography – the flag and the slogans – but they hate America. Say this. The ads write themselves. And, conversely, this strategy positions the Democrats as the party of American values. So, bonus.

The time is now. Before cable news and the Sunday shows christen the latest Republican disinformation as the theme of the midterms, the Democrats – not just the party, but all of us – need to fire away with this one. Obviously there are other messages to be circulated, too. (I’ve always liked “Democrats Deliver” but a positive look-at-us message only gets us so far.) We need to learn some lessons about seizing the initiative from our NeverTrump allies. You might not like their politics or their personalities, but they know where the Republican weaknesses are and we can’t leave anything to chance. The stakes are too high. So, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead, as they say. Get your war faces on and let’s defy history.

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For Banter Members: Who Shot JFK?

In this week’s special Members Only podcast, we do a deep dive on the assassination of JFK and why some of the conspiracy theories are, well, not necessarily conspiracy theories. Bob Cesca is, unbeknownst to many of readers, a bit of an expert on the subject and has spent considerable time at the National Archives in Washington, DC, examining microfilm to try to find answers. It’s a fascinating episode so make sure to tune in! You can listen by going here (we’ve also added Bob’s vital reading list on the topic for those interested in learning more) .