The Republican National Committee has a VERY SCARY new ad up attempting to "nationalize" the election, which is shorthand for making you forget that the Republican candidate running in your state or district has been making an ass of themselves for somewhere between six months and sixty years, because Oh My God Look Obama Is Still President.

Or that's the intended effect, but this whole thing has a very Sideshow Bob quality to it.



ISIS gaining ground. Terrorists committing mass murder. Ebola inside the U.S. Americans alarmed about national security. What's President Obama doing? Making plans to bring terrorists from Guantanamo to our country. Ignoring the Constitution, Congress, and the American people.

November 4th, Obama's policies are on the ballot. Vote to keep terrorists off U.S. soil. Vote Republican.

You didn't see "Guantanamo" coming, did you? ISIS beheading videos have appeared in enough Republican ads for ISIS to start demanding royalties, and you can never go wrong by appealing to the conservative fear that disease-riddled foreigners will move to their neighborhood and get their foreigner diseases all over your nice green lawn, but making any small noise about closing Guantanamo—ever—seems a little bit of a letdown in the pants-wetting department. The implication that we have to hold people forever without evidence or trials because the Constitution demands it, now that's enough to make you wonder if any of these folks have actually read the thing.It's not full Daisy, but the message is there. Republicans will protect you from the terrorists, so long as we forget those rather famous times when Republicans notably did not. You'd think 9/11 would be too big a thing to shove down the collective memory hole, but 9/11 was apparently small beans compared to a man showing up in a Texas hospital with Ebola or an America without a Guantanamo Bay internment camp shining like our Gulf Coast's shabbier, razor-wired Statue of Fewer Liberties, Please.

An honest question, though: Has that "Republicans are tough on national security" ship sailed? Does the general American population still believe it? In the previous years of Republican rule we saw horrific terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, we saw a case for war be systemically debunked as hoax, we saw a Republican-led incursion into Afghanistan to hunt those terrorists sputter while a Republican-led war in Iraq siphoned the majority of resources away, we saw a Rumsfeld-Cheney "privatization" of the military that resulted in ballooning costs, electrocution-hazard showers, squads of mercenary forces systemically undermining trust faster than we could build it, a lack of essential military equipment and armor, soldiers being deployed on nonstop rotations, the National Guard turning into a full-time foreign fighting force (again, with deployments Forever), a trillion dollars-plus worth of debt and nothing to show for it except an even more unstable region filled with even more horrific violence and an even more well-funded terrorist group than the last one.

In protection of U.S. soil, in military strategies, implementation, procurement, logistics and whatever else you've got, in global force projection and its effects, in "fighting terrorism," in U.S. diplomatic power overseas and in every other thing, the Republican/conservative policy turned out to be a disaster. A disaster.

Going from that to the claim that a Republican vote will "keep terrorists off U.S. soil" seems a bit cheeky. If the Republican claim is that Obama might give you Ebola (as Fox News' Ablow opines) or isn't going to war enough in the Middle East, those are certainly well-worn conservative fearmongering strategies. The only Republican promise they're willing to stick to this time around, however, is that sure, that decade of incompetence and fiasco and death might happen again (heaven knows the same think-tank strategists and "intellectuals" are in the same chairs, since the ramifications of what they had done have not and will never impact the regard with which their future pronouncements are met) but at least we won't close Guantanamo? No, that seems weak tea indeed.

Perhaps even they realized that any more dramatic promise wouldn't fly. We have a recent measuring stick with which to compare the two parties, after all. We have a few, in fact.

