The electoral success of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Red-baiting treason slanders proved too alluring for other Republicans to resist.                       

Joseph McCarthy

Among those who have greatly profited from hurling similar charges are:

• President Richard Nixon
• His vice president, Spiro Agnew
• Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich
• Former Congressman Dick Armey
• President George W. Bush
• Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin
• Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann
• Rush Limbaugh
• Sean Hannity
• Bill O’Reilly.

During the 1992 Presidential campaign, Republicans tried to paint 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.

George H.W. Bush

After losing the White House to Clinton at the polls in 1992 and 1996, Republicans tried to oust him another way: By impeaching him over a tryst with a penis-loving intern named Monica Lewinsky.

The Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted to impeach, but the effort was defeated in the Democratically-controlled Senate.

The 2008 election of Barack Obama pushed the Republican “treason chorus” to new heights of infamy.

Barack Obama

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.

The following titles vividly reveal the hates, fears and ambitions of their authors—and audience:

• Conservative Victory: Defeating Obama’s Radical Agenda by Sean Hannity
• Obama Zombies: How the Liberal Machine Brainwashed My Generation by Jason Mattera
• How Barack Obama is Bankrupting the U.S. Economy by Stephen Moore
• Let Freedom Ring: Winning the War of Liberty over Liberalism by Sean Hannity
• The Manchurian President: Barack Obama’s Ties to Communists,Socialists and Other Anti-American Extremists by Aaron Klein
• The Blueprint: Obama’s Plan to Subvert the Constitution and Build an Imperial Presidency by Ken Blackwell
• Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Croniesby Michelle Malkin
• Why Obama’s Government Takeover of Health Care Will Be a Disaster by David Gratzer
• To Save America: Stopping Obama’s Secular-Socialist Machine by Newt Gingrich
• Obama’s Radical Transformation of America: Year One by Joshua Muravchik
• How the Obama Administration Threatens to Undermine Our Elections by John Fund
• Power Grab: How Obama’s Green Policicies Will Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America by Christopher C. Horner
• The Bad Science and Bad Policy of Obama’s Global Warning Agenda by Roy W. Spencer
• America’s March to Socialism: Why We’re One Step Closer to Giant Missile Parades by Glenn Beck
• Obama’s Betrayal of Israel by Michael Ledeen
• The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality by Jerome R. Corsi
• The Case Against Barack Obama: The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media’s Favorite Candidate by David Freddoso
• Censorship: The Threat to Silence Talk Radio by Brian Jennings
• The War On Success: How the Obama Agenda Is Shattering the American Dream by Tommy Newberry
• Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them by Steven Milloy
• Liberalism is a Mental Disorder: Savage Solutions by Michael Savage
• Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism by Ann Coulter
• How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must): The World According to Ann Coulter by Ann Coulter
• Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right by Ann Coulter
• If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d Be Republicans by Ann Coulter
• Guilty: Liberal “Victims” and Their Assault on America by Ann Coulter
• Catastrophe: How Obama, Congress and the Special Interests Are Transforming…a Slump into a Crash, Freedom Into Socialism and a Disaster into a Catastrophe….And How to Fight Back by Dick Morris

Consider the vocabulary Right-wingers use to describe their political adversaries:

“Liberals,” “radicals, “bankrupting,” “treason,” subversion,” “slander,” “terrorism,” “betrayal,” “catastrophe,” “shattering the American dream,” “leftists,” “Communists,” “government takeover,” “socialism,” “power grab,” “secularism,” “environmentalism.”

And while the Right lusts to constantly compare Democrats and liberals (the two aren’t always the same) to Adolf Hitler, its propaganda campaign draws heavily on the Nazi leader’s own advice.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler laid out his formula for successful propaganda: “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.”

“[The masses] more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.”

Thus, Republicans spent the eight years of Barack Obama’s Presidency repeating the lie that he was born in Kenya—not Hawaii, as the long-form version of his birth certificate attests.