GOP Insurgency Takes Playbook From…The Taliban?

Truthout.org

Ah, the good ol' GOP…you just gotta luv 'em….Here is a brief excerpt of an excellent (and long) article we found on Truthout.org. 

by Robert Parry, Consortium News

The Republicans and their right-wing media allies are doing whatever they can to strangle the Obama phenomenon in its cradle; the mainstream media pundits are stressing the negative so they don't get called “in the tank for Obama”; and the Democrats are shying away from holding the Bush-Cheney administration accountable for its crimes.

Republican congressman, Pete Sessions of Texas…compared the GOP insurrectionist tactics to those of the
Taliban, the radical Islamic group that is battling U.S. forces in
Afghanistan and has been allied with Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda
terrorist group.

“Insurgency,
we understand perhaps a little bit more because of the Taliban,”
Sessions said during a meeting with editors of the National Journal's
Hotline. “And that is that they went about systematically understanding
how to disrupt and change a person's entire processes.”



[Apparently realizing what he was saying] Sessions caught himself slightly, adding:



“I'm not
trying to say the Republican Party is the Taliban. No, that's not what
we're saying. I'm saying [that] we need to understand that insurgency
may be required when the other side, the House leadership, does not
follow the same commands, which we entered the game with.”

None of these developments is particularly surprising. Indeed, they track closely to the political-media pattern that took shape the last time a young Democrat won the White House, when Bill Clinton became President in 1993.

Then, the dispirited Republicans got a lift from the loud voice of a younger Rush Limbaugh who used his popular three-hour radio show to pillory Bill and Hillary Clinton. That, in turn, encouraged the congressional Republicans to vote as a bloc against President Clinton's budget and economic plan.

The Republican determination to destroy Clinton infected the political system with an ugly virus of hyper-partisanship; the right-wing media ramped up its hate talk; mainstream journalism lost its way, wandering into a strange landscape of garish sensationalism and shallow news reporting; and the Democrats failed to counteract the threat posed by the neoconservatives who surfaced during the national security scandals of the Reagan-Bush-41 years.

In short, the dynamic that took shape in 1993-94 carried the United States into the catastrophic presidency of George W. Bush just eight years later. [For details on how this happened, see Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege.]

(Click here to read the entire article)