I've been reading about the unholy combination of McCarthyism and MacArthurism that was the toxic atmosphere during the Korean War. Douglas MacArthur's father got his chance to try being Caesar in the Philippines, waterboarding and all, before President McKinley couldn't take him anymore. Harry Truman got a chance to repeat, or rather, rhyme, history, when he had to fire the son of the earlier MacArthur. It is not Shakespearean, but more a Greek tragedy, that this nativist, racist, jingoist strain of characters won't go away. Familiar name from Doug MacArthur's Tokyo sycophants---Alexander Haig. Add Buchanan, Cheney, Rumsfeld. Garnish with the new MacArthur, McCain, who wanted to be Eisenhower. Looked like the same effective mix. (In retrospect, it is a really scary thought to consider the alternative to Eisenhower in 1952, MacArthur. We were lucky.)

The rabid right was not all that happy with Eisenhower, so Kennedy had to out-hawk the hawks, and it trapped him into adventures that we were decades recovering from. I find myself hoping Obama is Eisenhower, with Johnson's domestic emphasis.

None of the dire consequences the rabid right warned of  happened, i.e. no dominoes, no global communism, and China buys our Treasury bonds. More recently we had the exquisite embarrassment of our president promising us he would protect us from Saddam's nonexistent arsenal. At least some people notice how wrong this crowd has been, and how often.

Actually, the second part is what I don't know, and would like someone to explain. There seems to be a class of rhetorical trick that is the usual technique. Here's one example: "When guns are criminalized, only criminals will have guns." It makes an absurdity out of a sensible issue, mainly by exaggerating and then reversing a point. "So we should let France have a veto over our national security?" "Liberals want to offer psychotherapy for terrorists." "Why do you hate America?"

One of our reflex-slogan specialists here recently asked why a contributing guest had switched from using "global warming" to "climate change". The obvious intent was to make the guest look unsteady, unreliable, unserious, since he can't keep his terms straight. Unfortunately, the guest always used the latter term, as does the International Panel on Climate Change. But it reminded me of an exchange I had with a letter-writer in the Chicago Tribune, in the 90s.