The October Surprise - a three point attack

A standard tactic of the new Republicanism (i.e. neocons) is to promote their political agenda by means of fear and reacting to panic. Naomi Klein refers to this as "The Shock Doctrine".

A cornerstone of this is rallying political enthusiasm during election time by spreading panic and fear. In 2004, the "terror alert level" would go up whenever John Kerry went up in the polls. In 2008, however, we are seeing a new level of political manipulation with their 3-point attack. The Republicans are literally willing to create global disaster to improve their chances of retaining the White House in November.

Point 1 - Threaten economic disaster
See previous post on The Big Bailout.

Here's the big kicker, though. In trying to defend the Bush Administration's plan of hastily passing a massive bailout with no definition of what's in the bailout, assistant press secretary Tony Fratto accidentally said too much. He ADMITTED that the Bush Administration has been working on this plan for MONTHS! "Some of the policy staff have had months to think about what a program like this would be like and how it would work", he told reporters on a conference call.

That's right, they knew what was coming, certainly did not do anything to avoid it, possibly facilitated it, likely collaborated with lobbyists and insiders, and have an extremely detailed plan of how they want to spend $700B of taxpayer money. However, they're only revealing a 3-page summary, and demand that the money be handed over with no discussion, no public accountability, oversight, or any revealing of where they're going to put the money.

To top it off, in the massive document they want passed sight-unseen, there's a dirty little secret that gives insight into just how badly they could screw over the American people.

Point 2 - Global instability
See previous posts on rewarming the cold war, Georgia, any of several posts about Dubya's War, and ... well, go check out the ZadPolBlog archives.

We're antagonizing Russia, turning Pakistan from an ally to an enemy, threatening war - potentially nuclear war - against Iran, playing games with North Korea who now has the bomb, still militarily occupying Iraq, stirring up military conflict in Georgia, beefing up nuclear capacity in India and have stoked the flames of conflict in Palestine throughout Bush's terms.

Global instability leads to fear - fear that Republicans exploit as election-year scare tactics.

Point 3 - MASSIVE voter fraud is in the works
As RFK Jr., point out, votes are being stolen by hundreds of thousands.

Here in Wisconsin, we have a massive one-two punch against Democracy. Our state attorney general is also the co-chairman for the McCain campaign in Wisconsin. Not only is this an egregious conflict of interest, but his is actually suing the state to try to prevent voting by anyone who has registered to vote since 2006 - because those people have been polled to be a majority Obama voting block. On top of that, the Republican Party is sending erroneous mail-in ballot applications to Democrats and Independents in the state, so they will believe that they can vote by mail and not show up at the polls. Instead, their votes can be ignored.