QUOTE OF THE DAY – AT 8:56 A.M. ET:  Reader Bart Rogers alerts us to a superb column by Victor Davis Hanson in which Hanson examines the ease with which President Obama has used "edged rhetoric," some openly inflammatory, to advance his own causes, making his Tucson speech some like utter hypocrisy:

Edged rhetoric surely worked against Hillary Clinton when the wife of the first “black” president was reduced to a veritable racist. And it worked in 2007-8 against an incumbent Bush whose sober post-9/11 implementation of tribunals, renditions, Guantanamo, Predators, preventative detention, wiretaps, and intercepts was reduced by Obama to a near fascist takeover of the country — until they were all adapted by a President Obama himself. To this day, stung Bushites still offer up massive aid to Africa, prescription drug benefits, No Child Left Behind, and deficit spending on social programs to prove they were not the bloodthirsty Draculas who set up the gulag at Guantanamo and unleashed the children-destroying Predator drones.

We all know what is coming in 2012 — the most well-financed, Wall Street-subsidized, vitriolic camping in modern memory, in which Obama’s rivals will be metaphorically reduced to caricatures of racist, selfish, and cruel nativists.

Hanson notes that Obama gave a "let us all come together" speech at the 2004 Democratic convention, thrusting himself onto the national stage:

The 2011 Tucson speech will have about as much resonance with Obama’s impending campaign style as the 2004 oration affected his 2004-9 political behavior.

COMMENT:  Republicans must not be lulled to sleep by their political success in November.  Already the president's poll numbers are rising, as we noted here last night.  And any idea that the liberal attack machine will become more civilized should be laid to rest. "Civilized" isn't what they're about.

I've seen, in recent weeks, an attempt by liberal writers to begin to paint an Obama 2012 victory as almost inevitable.  That, combined with an uninspiring GOP presidential field, can truly create a real Obama inevitability.

As Hanson points out, Obama has lulled us to sleep before.  Attacking a sleeping enemy is an old, and successful, military technique.

January 24, 2011