The Republicans, the self-proclaimed party of family values, remain squarely behind a family and a Presidency whose most salient features are amorality, greed, demagoguery, deception, vulgarity, race-baiting, misogyny, and, potentially only time and further investigation will tell a murky relationship with a hostile foreign government.
As a Jew whose heritage comprises the bitter memory of racist demagoguery insufficiently denounced by the powerful, would I welcome a stout denunciation of Farrakhan by Obama?
Prime Minister Netanyahu, who made demagoguery a form of art and whose ideological zeal robs the Israelis and Palestinians alike of peace which they cherish and need.
The National Council of La Raza, the nation's largest Latino advocacy group, slammed SNL for showcasing "a man whose campaign has been built on bigotry and demagoguery" and for giving him a platform to "mainstream his message of hate".
Mixing sober outrage with mischievous humor and blithely trampling the boundary between documentary and demagoguery, Mr. Moore takes wholesale aim at the Bush administration, whose tenure has been distinguished, in his view, by unparalleled and unmitigated arrogance, mendacity and incompetence.
Given both men's talents for demagoguery and huge followings the only problem might be determining whose name should appear at the top of the ballot.
And these are just very, very hard debates to settle, because they depend on qualitative assessments (whose conspiracy theory is more round-the-bend and noxious? whose rhetoric tiptoes closest to demagoguery?) that are influenced, overly and covertly, by one's own ideological biases.
We cannot politicize unless it is to revel in the opportunities for demagoguery afforded us by events like those in Chattanooga, where soldiers — heroes now by default, whose killing must be avenged — were killed by the right religion, whose wages are death and whose practitioners must meet the same at anywhere at a thousand points on the globe.
(One notable exception: David Gregory of NBC News, whose sharply focused follow-ups pushed Mr. Bush off script and got him to disown some of the faith-based demagoguery of the Family Research Council).
The stability of democracies is jeopardised when scenes of chaotic population movements fuel demagoguery and populism; authoritarian regimes or their proxies exploit refugee flows as weapons of war to destabilise adversaries whose resources will be suddenly stretched, or as a technique to score points in a diplomatic negotiation.
Whose crime and whose punishment?
