Games with terrorists

If you thought it was bad when Bush and company would raise the terror alert level during the 2004 presidential election campaign whenever they felt their campaign needed a boost, get ready for the big leagues of manipulating terrorism in the hopes of getting Americans to vote Republican. In second half of June, we’ve seen the fist two salvos from the McCain camp.

It was bad enough when one of McCain’s own top advisor, Charlie Black, stated that a terrorist attack against the US would be good for McCain’s campaign. McCain officially spoke out against that comment, but now one of his biggest Senate supporters, former Democrat Joe Lieberman is now saying that the US is likely to be attacked in 2009. With this pattern of “terrorists will kill you if you don’t keep the Bush agenda rolling” coming from the McCain campaign, it’s getting more and more of a stretch for John to seriously claim that this deplorable tactic is not a central theme of his campaign.

While it’s safe to assume that Lieberman and McCain indeed know more than most folk about the Bush Administration’s agenda on whether or not to preemptively start another war, that does not make it right to maintain the new and unethical GOP tactic of “vote for us or die at the hands of terrorists” approach. Fighting terrorism should be done because it’s the right thing to do. It should not be something that is manipulated – and at times intentionally made much, much worse – just to promote the Republican political agenda. Any politician should put the best interests of America ahead of partisan politics, especially when national security is in the balance.

America has real enemies. Those enemies do not play games, they play for keeps. We should not be playing games with them.