An End for the "Peddlers of Paranoia"?

"The current round of paranoid politics got started in the 1990s, with bizarre stories about drug-running, murder plots, and other pseudo-scandals committed by Bill Clinton, the president who first targeted bin Laden and narrowly missed killing him in Afghanistan in 1998. But the paranoia ramped up after September 11, as the so-called architect of permanent Republican domination, Karl Rove, then President George W. Bush’s White House aide, informed the Republican National Committee that its strategy for political power centrally involved exploiting terrorism. Only the GOP should be depicted as serious about terrorism, while the Democrats should be cast as weak and soft. In the 2002 midterm elections, Republicans campaigned with a vengeance on the stark appeal to fear—remember the attacks on Senator Max Cleland of Georgia, a triple amputee Vietnam veteran?—and they regained the Senate in 2002. Paranoia was gold."

Sean Wilentz in The New Republic wonders if Osama bin Laden's death will end "the long cycle of outrageous attacks, innuendo, and conspiracy-mongering" in American politics.

But Ed Kilgore disagrees.