Intimidation–physical as well as political–has increasingly become the weapon of choice for influential Republicans in the pursuit of absolute power.

This consists of aiming violent–and violence-arousing–rhetoric at their Democratic opponents. This is not a case of careless language that is simply misinterpreted, with tragic results.

Hate-mongers like Sarah Palin and Ann Coulter fully understand the constituency they are trying to reach: Those masses of alienated, uneducated Americans who live only for their guns and hardline religious beliefs–and who can be easily manipulated by perceived threats to either.

If a “nutcase” assaults a Democratic politician and misses, then the Republican establishment claims to be shocked–shocked!–that such a thing could have happened.

And if the attempt proves successful–as in the January 8, 2011 Tucson shooting of Rep. Gabrille Giffords–then Republicans weep crocodile tears for public consumption.

The difference is that, in this case, they rejoice in knowing that Democratic ranks have been thinned and their opponents are even more on the defensive, for fear of the same happening to them.  

Consider the following:

• Rep. Randy Neugebauer (R-Texas) yelled “baby killer” at Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) on the House Floor.  
• Florida GOP Congressional candidate Allen West, referring to his Democratic opponent, Rep. Ron Klein, told Tea Party activists: “You’ve got to make the fellow scared to come out of his house. That’s the only way you’re going to win. That’s the only way you’re going to get these people’s attention.”  
• Rep. Devin Nuines (R-CA) said Tea Partiers had “every right” to use racist and homophobic slurs against Democrats, justifying it via Democrats’ “totalitarian tactics.”
• Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-Minn.) said she wanted her constituents “armed and dangerous” against the Obama administration.  
• Right-wing pundit Ann Coulter: “My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is that he did not go to the New York Times building.”  
• Senator Phil Gramm (R-Tex.): “We’re going to keep building the party until we’re hunting Democrats with dogs.”  
• Rep. Louisa M. Slauter (D-NY) received a phone message threatening sniper attacks against lawmakers and their families. 
• In 2010 former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin posted a “crosshairs map” targeting Democratic members of Congress who had voted for President Barack Obama’s healthcare bill. Sarah Palin told her supporters: “Get in their face and argue with them.  No matter how tough it gets, never retreat, instead RELOAD!”

Sarah Palin’s “Crosshairs Map”

For more than 50 years, Republicans have vilified government–except when they controlled it. They have sought to convince Americans that Democrats are at least potential traitors, if not actual ones.

Among the slanders Republicans have routinely hurled at Democrats:  

• Democrats are plotting to “take away your guns.”
• Democrats are “anti-work” and want to turn America into a welfare-dependent society.
• Democrats are “Godless” and want to force atheism on believing Christians.  
• Democrats will allow United Nations “black helicopters” to stage a military takeover of the United States.

During the 1992 Presidential campaign, Republicans slandered Bill Clinton as a brainwashed “Manchurian candidate” because he had briefly visited the Soviet Union during his college years.

After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Republicans lost their “soft on Communism” slander-line. So they tried to persuade voters that Democrats were “soft on crime.”

When riots flared in 1992 after the acquittal of LAPD officers who had savagely beaten Rodney King, President George H.W. Bush blamed the carnage on the “Great Society” programs of the 1960s.

When President Barack Obama set out to provide healthcare for all Americans–and not simply the wealthy–Republicans tried to frighten voters with lies. The most infamous of these was that healthcare reform would lead to wholesale murder by government “death panels,” as Sarah Palin put it.  

That insurance companies had functioned for decades as “death panels” in denying healthcare to patients was totally ignored.

Republicans have since encouraged right-wing groups to claim that Obama was not born in Hawaii, but in Kenya. The reason for this is to strip Obama of legitimacy as a leader.

Republicans–brandishing photos of President Obama bearing a Hitler forelock and toothbrush mustache–have claimed he intends to set up concentration camps for those who disagree with him.

Newt Gingrich, the former Republican Speaker of the House, charged that Obama was pursuing a socialist agenda to reform healthcare.

Newt Gingrich

In his book, To Save America: Stopping Obama’s Secular-Socialist Machine, Gingrich claimed that Obama’s policy agenda was as “great a threat to America as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.”

Almost immediately after Obama took office, he came under attack by an industry of right-wing book authors such as Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh.

Among the terms they have used to demonize Obama:

• radical
• Socialist
• anti-American
• extremist
• subversive
• imperial

As Adolf Hitler, the master of 20th century propaganda advised in Mein Kampf: “All effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare essentials.

“Those must be expressed as far as possible in stereotypical formulas. These slogans should be persistently repeated until the very last individual has come to grasp the idea that has been put forward.”  

Nowhere has Republican fanaticism proven greater than on the issue of abortion.