Angry Woman Continues Long Rant

That understanding is now gone. During the War on Terror and the invasion of Iraq, neocons routinely accused war opponents and skeptics of their “anti-terrorism” civil liberties assaults of being traitors. David Frum's stint as Bush White House speechwriter enshrined this "patriotism” attack as his and their speciality. Bush and Cheney's speeches, especially leading up to the invasion of Iraq, the 2002 midterms, and then the 2004 re-election campaign, inevitably featured innuendo if not explicit claims that Americans opposed to their war policies were against America and on the side of the terrorists: i.e., traitors. The Lincoln Project's Rick Wilson produced a campaign ad for the 2002 Georgia Senate race morphing the face of the Democratic incumbent Max Cleland, who lost three limbs in Vietnam, into Osama bin Laden's. Upon leaving the White House, Frum continued to build his career on impugning the patriotism and loyalty of anyone — right, left, or in between — who opposed all the various wars he wanted to send other people's children to go fight and die in.

But it was the Trump era that transformed treason accusations from a periodic transgression into the standard, reflexive way of criticizing Trump and his movement. Indeed, Frum now performs the same service as he did during the early Bush years at The Atlantic, CNN and MSNBC, where he is most beloved by Democrats for casting this same aspersion against any opponents of Democratic Party politicians. From the middle of the 2016 campaign to this very day, accusing one's political adversaries of being traitors to the U.S. — in the form of Russian agents — have become so common that Democrats now barely know any other insult to express. An entire generation has been trained to believe that “treason” is the crime of expressing views that undermine Democratic Party leaders, diverge from the U.S. security state, and/or dispute the consensus of the U.S. corporate press.