Conor Friedersdorf notes the unseemly exploitation of terrorism for political purposes:

But the McCain campaign has exploited the fact that Bill Ayers was a terrorist to imply that their opponent is sympathetic to our enemies in the War on Terror, a campaign tactic so irresponsible that even GOP partisans should forcefully denounce it, and for a reason that hasn’t anything to do with fairness.
 

This is hardly the first time that we have seen critics of the “war on terror” and other government policies tarred as little more than traitors and enemies.  In his despicable article denouncing several paleoconservatives and other antiwar figures, Frum memorably said:

Since 9/11, by contrast, the paleoconservatives have collapsed into a mood of despairing surrender unparalleled since the Vichy republic went out of business.

This surrender-to-the-enemy meme has been entirely false, which doesn’t stop these people from repeating it time after time.  The people who make these charges seem to believe them, however, and they justify themselves by defining whatever policies they don’t support as appeasement or the equivalent of surrender.  By definition, disagreeing with them becomes proof of wanting to surrender, no matter how irresponsible and genuinely damaging to the national interest the policies they advocate may be.  Having framed their opponents as no better than abettors of the enemy, they are then bewildered when someone says that they have questioned anyone’s patriotism. 

When Romney suspended his campaign in February, he said that he was doing it to avoid facilitating surrender to terrorism, which, it almost went without saying, he believed would be the result of a Democratic victory.  This has been a consistent theme of pro-war arguments for the last two years once large numbers of people began seriously considering withdrawal from Iraq as a viable alternative.  During this long campaign, Obama’s critics have repeatedly pushed the idea that he is somehow sympathetic to anti-Israel terrorists, and some on the right have dwelled on the so-called Hamas “endorsement” as if it meant something.  In the earlier version of the association game, Obama’s critics obsessed about peripheral advisors’ views on Israel.  Before we heard about Obama as the “pal of terrorists,” we were lectured frequently about how significant and terrible it was that Robert Malley had a small, informal role in the campaign, which simply had to mean that Obama favored talking to Hamas despite his stated opposition to this very thing.      

So talk of Obama “palling around with terrorists” is not exactly a new attack, nor is it a function of a flailing, losing campaign.Unfortunately, this is all rather commonplace.  Palin has misrepresented Obama’s views about tactics in the Afghan war in an effort to portray Obama as reflexively anti-military and, by extension, more sympathetic to the enemy than to our own soldiers.  She has shown that she regards the problem of civilian casualties from allied airstrikes in Afghanistan to be unimportant, even though these airstrikes have gradually been undermining local support for the NATO mission and have prompted public apologies from no less than the Secretary of Defense.  Just as they have demagogued the fear of terrorism to push for surveillance powers and invasions, many Republicans seem to treat our ongoing wars as little more than campaign props and they seem to have no qualms about demagoguing reasonable criticisms of current tactics as a way to impute disloyalty or lack of patriotism to their opponents.  

Conor is right that these attacks breed cynicism and make the public less likely to heed warnings about genuine threats, but he might also stress that this sheer lack of seriousness from those who, like McCain, talk about the “transcendent challenge” of Islamic extremism tells us something about how much they have exaggerated the nature of the threat as part of exploiting fear of it to acquire power.  It is a measure of how little the alarmists believe their own dire claims about the scope of the threat from jihadism that they are so willing to play political games with invocations of terrorism.  If Conor is expecting Republican partisans to denounce such tactics, which seem to be SOP for so many, he may be waiting for quite a while.