Scare tacticians.

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AS we all know, the GOP is the party of fear. Republicans scare Americans out of voting their hopes, their dreams, their noblest aspirations--all of the things that, we are told, the Democrats appeal to. According to a recent Newsweek cover story, which breaks new proctological ground for the depth and breadth of its butt-kissing of the Obama campaign, "the Republican Party has been successfully scaring voters since 1968, when Richard Nixon built a Silent Majority out of lower- and middle-class folks frightened or disturbed by hippies and student radicals and blacks rioting in the inner cities." Apparently Rick Perlstein's much-discussed new book, Nixonland, makes a similar argument.

Indeed, it seems few arguments are less controversial. Al Gore rails with vein-popping intensity about how George W. Bush has "played on our fears." If you Google "fear-mongering" and "Democrats," you'll get about 490,000 results, and nearly every hit for the first few pages (after which, pundits trying to confirm their theses are absolved from seeking more data) is about Republican fear-mongering.

There are at least three questions here. Are the historical claims accurate? Do Republicans continue to play on people's fears today? And, if so, what's wrong with that?

Well, history can be in the eye of the beholder. But if we're setting out to chronicle the politicization of fear in the modern era, it might strike some as odd to start with 1968 when, four years earlier, the Democratic party ran its infamous "daisy" ad suggesting that a vote for Au[H.sub.2]O might well render The Children into radioactive cinder.

As for today, sure it's true. The GOP uses fear. Chiefly, it uses fear of terrorists to focus voters on the differences between Republican and Democratic policies. Whether this is irresponsible is, again, in the eye of the beholder, but you probably think the answer hinges to a large extent on how real the terrorist threat is. More on that in a second.

But first, realize that to concede Republicans use fear is not to say they are alone in doing so. John Edwards's "two Americas" shtick conjured phantasms of corporate fat cats taking your job and your health care and then kicking down your door and eating the last of your leftover pizza. How Al Gore can emit so much C[O.sub.2] about Bush's fear-mongering without spontaneously bursting into flames of hypocrisy is beyond me, given that his whole post-vice-presidency has been dedicated to scaring the bejeebers out of the whole planet about global warming. "Hurricanes! Cyclones! Famine!" These are the wages of Gaia's wrath, saith this supposedly high-road prophet. While we're at it, let the record show that a former boss of his said all sorts of scary stuff about Saddam Hussein--particularly while that boss was being impeached.

Oh, and who was it again who ran those classic fear-mongering "3:00 A.M. in the White House" ads against Barack Obama?

Liberals, Democrats, Clintonites, and environmentalists would respond to all of these counter-examples by saying I'm missing the point. This isn't fear-mongering, they'd say; it's "raising awareness" and "highlighting the issue." Which is just another way of saying there's a double standard for Republicans. But you don't need me to tell you that. You could just read Newsweek.