Still, they’ll need to do something diabolical to be able to play the fear card on enough Americans to win.

It’s spelled I-R-A-N.

”Update: Via Duncan, I see that Ezra wonders why the Village isn’t writing about the fact that the GOP front runner is a barking madman. I think it’s simple. They don’t think he is. They also don’t think Ann Coulter is a shrieking lunatic or that Rush Limbaugh is a lying sack of offal or that one should find anything morally objectionable about torture or indefinite detention or invading countries on false pretenses. They believed for years that Tom Delay was a regular guy and that James Dobson is full of good ideas.

The Village, in other words, is comprised of the same people who are giving money and time and support to the lunatic Rudy Giuliani. They think being simultaneously stupid and madly aggressive is normal. After all, they pretty much gave George W. Bush a nonstop blowjob for years until he had been below 40% national popularity for so long they couldn’t ignore it”

“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’ – that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.

And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me – because obviously sitting around saying, ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger.’”
–Lee Atwater

It’s gotten a lot easier; no coding or dogwhistles required (perfect for linear-thinking Republicans). Now you just yell “illegal alien” or “islamofascist” straight out.

Still, they’ll need to do something diabolical to be able to play the fear card on enough Americans to win. Thank God, their racist, authoritarian base is far from a majority.