As the midterm elections enter their final hours, we're presenting here a montage of this campaign's most memorable visual examples of the exploitation of 9/11 by the GOP and its allies. These images constitute a kind of campaign epilogue. Because if the GOP loses its majority tomorrow, it may in part be because the party's ability to harnass 9/11 -- to exploit 9/11's emotional power to to propel the story the party's been trying to tell from President Bush's choreographed bullhorn moment atop the smoking rubble right on up through his most recent speeches -- has finally run out of steam for good.

The GOP has long done its best to use lingering trauma from 9/11 -- and whatever bond President Bush was able to create with the electorate by identifying himself with it -- to persuade Americans to give GOP leadership the benefit of the doubt despite its many and glaring failures. But Iraq, Katrina, corruption, the failure to catch Osama bin Laden, and many other failures of leadership -- not to mention the aggressive if belated efforts of Dems to strike back hard at the GOP's 9/11-related mythmaking -- may have finally broken the GOP's 9/11 spell. For the GOP, 9/11 may be a spent force.

View our exploitation-of-9/11 collection after the jump.

The following mailer with images of the towers was sent out by Arizona GOP Gubernatorial canidate Len Munsil to attack Dem governor Janet Napolitano as soft on illegal immigration. Napolitano is cruising to victory with a lead in the polls approaching 30 points.

The following ad by the third party Softer Voices is now running in Pennsylvania on behalf of GOP Senator Rick Santorum. "Our enemies crash planes into buildings. They cut off heads," it opens. "Don't we need leaders tough enough to face such a threat?" It also simulates the nuking of an American city. But such tactics have failed: Santorum is facing near certain defeat at the hands of Dem Bob Casey.

The following ad comes courtesy of Ben Smith at The Daily Politics. Produced by Dick Morris and airing on Fox, it plays a recording of Islamic terrorists discussing an attack by phone -- then interrupts the call, and says: "This terrorist wiretap has been interrupted by a Democrat controlled Congress." It then shows haunting imagery of the shell of the towers left standing after the attacks.

The following ad by the right-wing Progress for America which ran in Ohio and Missouri opened, memorably, with images of terrorists and the following line: "These people want to kill us." It continued: "Many seem to have forgotten the evil that happened only five years ago. They would cut and run in the Middle East." The ad was roundly rejected by Ohioans, however: A station that ran it was flooded with complaints from local citizens outraged that the imagery had run when their children might be watching. Meanwhile, the GOP meltdown in Ohio has been near complete.

In the following commercial, GOP Senator Mike DeWine of Ohio used images of the smoldering towers to attack Dem Sherrod Brown as weak on national security. It later emerged that the images had been faked, and Brown is now cruising to victory over DeWine.