[quote]But they do have the obnoxious tendency to be believed (Al Gore, Pol Pot, Hitler, Reagan and Clinton are wildly differing cases in point), which is problematic because public memory is notoriously short, and it does no one's blood pressure good to be constantly told that they are on the verge of a new and terrifying crisis on a weekly basis.

It also robs true crises of any meaning - take the whole terrorist thing for example. How many people still think it's a real threat after seven years of being told that to little effect? On an intellectual level it barely even registers, to the point where people are now starting to rank personal freedom over public security.[/fquote]

Says something about your thinking when you throw those 4 particular names into the same pot.  Also disturbing that the absence of another terrorist attack in the past 7 years means (to you) that we don't take that threat seriously.  Not sure how you've ascertained what we're registering 'on an intellectual level.'

Put in another context, your disgust for the 'hysteria machine' is well-grounded - the machine I'm referring to is the media, who can't seem to get any sort of grip on reality, who must manufacture anxiety and fear in order to sell their product.  Something of a sad comment on the consumers of that product, I'll admit, but if the market mechanism truly drives these things, we're apparently getting what we want.  The never-ending melodramatic BS gets boring as hell to me, which makes me feel better I suppose.  As I type, the Gustavathon is in full swing, with non-stop raindrop-by-raindrop reporting.  The tail does really wag the dog anymore, the tail being the frenzied media.

Dang - no edit button again.

Clinton I would not put in the bunch.  He lied for the sake of lying.  But I dont recall him exagerating.

mcCain?  I guess he is caught up in his own self importance - a common enough trait among all leaders of the US (want more proof?  Listen to Obama).  The reason that few democrats would make your list (and to be honest, getting rid of the evil tyrants, it is pretty much republicans) has less to do with the character of any of them, democrat or republican, and more to do with playing to their base.  Democxrats want to tell us that we have the worst economy since the great depression (or to listen to Obama, worse than), while republicans say that "Enemy X" is the worst since <insert name nere>.

None of it plays out in their governing.  INdeed, if you look at where each party falls the shortest, you will find democrats and foreign, republicans and domestic.  Not that they are bad, but that their attention is elsewhere, so they miss the critical milestones.

IN the last 50 years, the worst presidents on foreign were undoubtably democrats (Johnson and Vietnam, Carter and Iran, Clinton and Osama), while yes the republicans ignored the domestic scene and paid for it (or triffled with it with disasterous reulst - Nixon and Wage/Price controls).

ONe can always run scared and hide under your bed.  But Life is too short to worry about how political rhetoric is going to guide policy.  All presidents are tempered by their advisors, and reality to some degree.  So even the worst of them do not push us to armegeddon.

So you really think that the first-world public is as hysterically terrified of another terrorist attack as they were just after 9/11? I'm not seeing it - anti-terror moral leaders are being deposed from government worldwide, security laws are being scaled back or dropped entirely and Big Brother-style anti-terror campaigns seem to be very much on the wane. The academic, political and social perspectives on terrorism seem to have generalised back to a pre-9/11 meh. That's what I mean by 'on an intellectual level', which I suppose was quite unclear.

The fervour created by nightmarish crises just doesn't last, and I'd hate to think something important is missed because leaders like McCain exaggerate everything so much that we can't discern the important from merely the politically expedient and media-friendly. I mean, how do you? When the elder statesmen of the world can't pick a crisis from a molehill what hope the rest of us?

As for the four names, I actually was just going to go with Hitler and Pol Pot, but I figured that would inevitably bring questions of comparison, so I dragged out some less exaggerated (somewhat) contemporaries. Clearly I can't win with any names I choose. Comparison is a dying rhetorical form I guess.

But our political masters don't have to feed it. McCain doesn't have to treat every world event as ranking slightly below the coming of the apocalypse; he chooses to do so. Doesn't that concern you at all, regardless of the role of the media in making his hysterical views more widely known?

So to sum up, you think his words now will not reflect his views in office?

I haven't heard anything 'hysterical' from him.  He's a realist but hardly Chicken Little.  The media have been doing what I'm talking about forever, long before McCain.

What about the series of comments from the article I've linked? Where he's called nearly every event of the past 18 years or so the worst thing ever?

http://atheismnews.wordpress.com/2006/10/24/the-doomsday-code-tony-robinson/

The embedded video on that site is a BBC documentary, it's reasonably credible - Tony Robinson isn't known to doctor facts, etc.

It gives an interesting reason for old GW's 'end is nigh' terms, and bearing in mind how religious the stereotypical Republican can be, it's so insane it could be true!

For those who can't be bothered watching it, Robinson basically goes over the Israel and looks at the coach-loads of 'end-timers' who believed that Israel being granted nationhood after WWII was the first step to the end of the world. At the end, he interviews an aide of some kind (I think for the end-timers group) who says Reagan wouldn't answer the phone to them, Bush senior would occasionally listen to them, and George W regularly contacts them to get their views on issues. End-timers, while reasonably small, are a Republican supporting group and seem to be taken relatively seriously.

I've noticed different world-leaders can take the scare-factor seriously, especially Britain. I think it's something which has sprouted from 9/11, it was very easy to put any anti-terrorist stance together in the immediate aftermath. The more people cool down, the less the governments can get away with.

For better - or for worse - that is my experience with ALL presidents in my life time.  Some try to keep to their promises, some dont even try.  But all break many of them not long after elected.

From a boogey man perspective, none can compare with the hyperbole associated with Reagan (not always his words, but the words of those who love to create mountains out of molehills).  One has to just look at his presidency to see that the hyperbole never lived up to the reality.

To paraphrase Inigo Montoya, I don't think that means what you meant that to mean.

Ok, yea that stunk.  I meant that the hyperbole was not reflected in the reality of the situation.

(Of course it did not live up to it - didn't we nuke Russia 11 times over instead of 10?)