Howard Dean makes a point that I wish I didn't buy into as completely as I do:

"'The Republicans have the best propaganda out there since Lenin, and they just make stuff up and they keep repeating it, and hope people are going to believe it,' he told The Associated Press."

They really do seem to have a frighteningly-good mechanism for creating "facts" out of whole cloth, and then pounding their detractors in a variety of derogatory ways ("liberal," "unpatriotic," etc.). It's pretty spiffy, really. I don't mean to suggest, of course, that the Democrats don't do the same thing. Just that the Republicans are a lot better at it.