Democrats: from inspiring hope to fear mongering

Jonah Goldberg, "The politics of fear," (NRO, February 27, 2009):

This week, former Vice President Al Gore was forced to withdraw a slide from his PowerPoint presentation....

The slide in question was part of Gore’s peripatetic minstrel show of environmental doom, made famous in his Oscar-winning horror-documentary An Inconvenient Truth....

The problem: ... Caught fudging the facts, again, the former vice president had no choice but to drop the graph. It’s a small thing, in and of itself, but it illustrates something much bigger.

Democrats take understandable pride in FDR’s famous declaration, made during the Great Depression, that “all we have to fear is fear itself.” More recently Democrats, led by none other than Al Gore, have been fixated on the evils of the “politics of fear” — politics, allegedly, only Republicans are guilty of practicing.

Ever since the Iraq War turned decidedly unpopular, Gore has been demonizing George W. Bush and the GOP as fearmongers. “He betrayed this country!”

What’s hilarious about this is that Gore is, without question, the most successful fearmonger in America, if not the whole world. He is constantly spinning climate change in the most horrifying terms possible....

Gore also seems to have taught Barack Obama a thing or two. President Obama, whose whole campaign was about hope over fear, has been scaring the dickens out of people lately. He has certainly terrified the stock market. He’s warned of “catastrophe” and economic “disaster” from which we may never recover.

What’s particularly odious about Obama’s scare tactics is that he’s using them for the mother of all bait-and-switches.... It’s like convincing someone he’s got cancer and then telling him that’s why he needs to buy a new car....

[Hat tip to S.K.]