Using Terrorism as a Campaign Theme

Daniel Larison discusses the use of terrorism in politics.

So talk of Obama “palling around with terrorists” is not exactly a new attack, nor is it a function of a flailing, losing campaign.Unfortunately, this is all rather commonplace. Palin has misrepresented Obama’s views about tactics in the Afghan war in an effort to portray Obama as reflexively anti-military and, by extension, more sympathetic to the enemy than to our own soldiers. She has shown that she regards the problem of civilian casualties from allied airstrikes in Afghanistan to be unimportant, even though these airstrikes have gradually been undermining local support for the NATO mission and have prompted public apologies from no less than the Secretary of Defense. Just as they have demagogued the fear of terrorism to push for surveillance powers and invasions, many Republicans seem to treat our ongoing wars as little more than campaign props and they seem to have no qualms about demagoguing reasonable criticisms of current tactics as a way to impute disloyalty or lack of patriotism to their opponents.