Fear Strikes Out

Rudy Giuliani cranks up the rickety old Republican fear machine:

Rudy Giuliani said if a Democrat is elected president in 2008, America will be at risk for another terrorist attack on the scale of Sept. 11, 2001. But if a Republican is elected, he said, especially if it is him, terrorist attacks can be anticipated and stopped.

“If any Republican is elected president — and I think obviously I would be the best at this — we will remain on offense and will anticipate what [the terrorists] will do and try to stop them before they do it,” Giuliani said. […]

“I listen a little to the Democrats and if one of them gets elected, we are going on defense,” Giuliani continued. “We will wave the white flag on Iraq. We will cut back on the Patriot Act, electronic surveillance, interrogation and we will be back to our pre-Sept. 11 attitude of defense.”

This is pretty much the exact same quote Dick Cheney made in 2004 about John Kerry.

By the way, who was in the White House when "we were attacked" on 9-11? And who was the mayor of New York City?

Fear's really the only thing that the Republicans have right now. They can't run on a record. They can't run on any vision for America. They can't run on anything but "booga-booga." And I for one am not afraid of any of these attacks anymore. I refuse to be scared and cowered, and I think the American people feel the same way.

I'm now hoping that McCain, Giuliani and Romney get cybernetically combined into one big uber-candidate, because it would be so rich to defeat any one of them, and it'd be so fun watching them blow up a Presidential campaign. It's telling how sad the state of the Republican Party is that their most fearsome potential candidate is currently starring on Law and Order.

UPDATE: Great response by John Edwards:

"Rudy Giuliani's suggestion that there is some superior 'Republican' way to fight terrorism is both divisive and plain wrong. He knows better. That's not the kind of leadership he offered in the days immediately after 9/11, and it's not the kind of leadership any American should be offering now.

"As far as the facts are concerned, the current Republican administration led us into a war in Iraq that has made us less safe and undermined the fight against al Qaeda. If that's the 'Republican' way to fight terror, Giuliani should know that the American people are looking for a better plan. That's just one more reason why this election is so important; we need to elect a Democratic president who will end the disastrous diversion of the war in Iraq."