In 1988, the Bush campaign planted a lie in the media that
Michael Dukakis had suffered from depression after losing an
election for governor. According to Susan Estrich, his campaign
manager, it cost Dukakis six points in the polls. A Bush family
friend planted another lie that Dukakis' wife, Kitty, had once
burned a flag at a demonstration - and Dukakis took another hit in
the polls.
The Bush family is at it again, with the now-well-documented
lies told from the pulpit - er, podium - of the Republican
National Convention, including lies told directly to the American
people by George W. Bush himself. While many of these lies, like
Bush's assurance that he was looking out for seniors when the next
day would see the largest hike in Medicare premiums in history,
were of the Bush-praising variety, the most toxic were those that
either lied about John Kerry and his record, or implied that
Democrats (and, implicitly, Greens and progressive independents)
don't value their nation or its defense.
Which presents the Kerry campaign with the same conundrum the
Dukakis, McCain, and Gore campaigns faced when confronted by Bush
family lies - how to respond?
There's an old concept about fighting fair in relationships
that has to do with what therapists call "the belt
line." When you get to know somebody, you discover the things
you can say that will irritate, bother, or even anger them. But
you also learn the things you can say that will emotionally wound
them. When people use those emotionally wounding things in order
to win a fight, it's referred to as "hitting below the belt
line."
Good marriage counselors teach couples never to hit below the
belt line. The reason is simple: when a person has repeatedly been
hit below the belt line, the wounds don't easily heal. Over time,
if the "below the belt line" hits are repeated, the
wounds will cut so deep that trust is lost, self-confidence and
commitment disintegrates, and the relationship is doomed, and the
recipients of the hits can be devastated - wounded beyond easy
repair. The most common responses to being hit below the belt line
are to endure the wounds or leave the relationship. But some
people respond by hitting back below the other person's emotional
belt line. This, too, is the death knell of a relationship.
Today, John Kerry faces the dilemma of a person who's been
repeatedly hit below the belt line. How he responds will not only
shape the outcome of this election, but may also determine how
badly the psyche of the American people will be wounded.
Consider, for example, the new Swift Boat ads - probably the
most powerful of the untruthful Republican below-the-belt-line
efforts so far this election season.
In 1971, a young John Kerry testified before congress. "A
few months ago in Detroit," he said, "we had an
investigation in which over one hundred and fifty honorably
discharged - many, highly decorated - veterans testified to war
crimes committed in Southeast Asia. Not isolated incidents, but
crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of
officers at all levels of command.
"It's impossible," Kerry continued in his testimony,
"to describe to you exactly what happened in Detroit, the
emotions of the moment, the feelings of the men who were reliving
their experiences in Vietnam, but they did. They relived the
absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do.
They told the stories of times that they had personally raped, cut
off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to
human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up
bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in a fashion
reminiscent of Genghis Kahn, shot cattle and dogs for fun,
poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of
South Vietnam, in addition to the normal ravage of war and the
normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied
bombing power of this country."
There was a reason for this hearing, Kerry said, and it was why
he was bringing the testimony of these 150 Vietnam veterans to
Congress.
"We called this investigation the Winter Soldier
Investigation," he said. "The term 'winter soldier' is a
play on words of Thomas Paine's in 1776 when he spoke of the
'sunshine patriots and the summertime soldiers who deserted at
Valley Forge because the going was rough. And we who've come here
to Washington have come here because we feel that we have to be
Winter Soldiers now. We could come back to this country and we
could be quiet. We could hold our silence, we could not tell what
went on in Vietnam.
"But we feel, because of what threatens this country - the
fact that the crimes threaten it, not reds and not redcoats, but
the crimes that threaten it - that we have to speak out." (You
can listen to or download the MP3 audio here.)
Kerry's testimony was not a blanket condemnation of all
veterans as the Swift Boat ads suggest. Nor was it an accusation
against our soldiers as the Republicans chant like a mantra.
It was, instead, the report of an investigation that he had
helped lead into the consequences of trying to fight a guerilla
war against the citizens of a nation who viewed American soldiers
as occupiers and aggressors, rather than liberators. That view of
American soldiers by the nationalistic citizens of Vietnam fueled
the ferocity of their battle against an army they perceived as
invaders - invaders who ultimately killed between 2 and 3 million
Vietnamese - and led American forces to often ferocious and brutal
responses, often perceived by both officers and soldiers as
necessities for survival.
Just as when John Kerry, as a United States Senator,
investigated the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI)
and exposed a vast criminal syndicate with tentacles into both the
Bush family and members of his own Democratic Party, his Winter
Soldier investigation uncovered troubling truths. Like his BCCI
investigation, the Winter Soldier investigation produced both
painful consequences to malefactors of great wealth and political
power, and helped cleanse us of a cancerous and corrupt wound. And
just like with his investigation of BCCI, Kerry's Winter Soldier
investigation produced wealthy Republican enemies.
Those enemies have now chosen to fight back by striking Kerry
"below the belt," taking his words out of context and
twisting their meaning. They seek to pit veteran against veteran,
non-veterans against Vietnam era veterans, and turn the attention
away from the criminal actions of LBJ, Nixon, Kissinger, and other
perpetrators of Vietnam, and on to the man who raised the
questions and exposed the unpleasant truths.
How can he respond? This isn't a fight between two people,
where the wounded party can simply walk away - these scurrilous
charges are being made by wealthy associates of the Bush family in
the most public of venues - the nation's airwaves. To try to
suppress them by going to court and challenging their
untruthfulness will be fruitless - it won't produce results until
long after the elections are over. And if Kerry were to hit back
below the belt - for example by taking some of George W. Bush's
past statements out of context and twisting them into a new and
venomous meaning - he would become his enemy, joining the ancient
and evil tribe of what psychiatrist M. Scott Peck so accurately
and poignantly called "The People of the Lie."
Bush partisans try to deflect our attention from this
below-the-belt attack by pointing out the millions of dollars
spent on above-the-belt (e.g. accurate and undisputed) attack ads
run against Bush over the past months, citing his record on job
creation, outsourcing, the disaster of Iraq, and the like. But as
we all know - usually from painful experience - below-the-belt
attacks are fundamentally different. There is no moral
equivalence, and to claim that there is - as Karen Hughes did
recently on CNN, and both Laura Bush and George H.W. Bush did just
before the Republican National Convention - is only to compound
the evil of the lie.
The other problem this sort of attack produces is that negative
campaign advertisements do not have as their goal to produce votes
for a particular candidate - instead, their singular goal is to
suppress the vote, to produce a "they're all bums"
response among voters. Thus, American voter participation is at
shocking lows.
While America has seen many hard-hitting campaigns - dating
back to 1799 when an associate of John Adams hired a newspaperman
to print (true) stories alleging that his opponent Thomas
Jefferson had been sleeping with his widow's half-sister, his
slave Sally Hemmings - only very rarely have they been so grounded
in basic deception and, thus, truly below-the-belt hits.
Unfortunately, as the elder Bush learned with Lee Atwater's
abovementioned efforts and his Willie Horton ads against Dukakis,
they work, because they leave the victim with so few rebuttal
options.
So how to respond?
Simple: tell the truth. And do it with righteous anger, as
Joseph Welch did to Joe McCarthy on June 9, 1954, exploding
another house of cards built on lies and bully tactics. (MP3
clip here) And tell the truth not just on behalf of the
candidate, but on behalf of all of the American people and our
democratic republic.
This sort of response will work most powerfully because the
real victim is not so much Kerry as it is you and me, the American
electorate, We the People. We - Republicans, Democrats,
Progressives, Greens, Independents - are being wounded by the Bush
lies, as is the vital and precious electoral process that
generations of Americans have fought and died to defend.
We the People - through Kerry, the DNC, or third party 527s, or
simply by spreading the truth one-to-another - must right this
horrible wrong. We must expose the fundamental evil of Big Lie
techniques in politics.
We must hold up to the light of truth John Kerry's noble and
courageous 1971 attempt to stop an unjust war and heal the
veterans who had been criminally ordered to commit atrocities by
civilian powers in the White House and Department of Defense. And
we must hold up to the light of truth the people and motivations
behind these morally criminal political smears.
It could take the form of a simple ad that plays the first few
sentences of Kerry's testimony before Congress, and points out his
courage to investigate that, then BCCI, and, in April 1986, his
chairing the Senate subcommittee on the Iran-Contra hearings. It
could even bluntly point out the lies in the entire series of
Swift Boat ads and other Bush statements, and then - like Joseph
Welch - ask Americans if we will continue to tolerate lies in what
should be honest, democratic debate.
"Whenever the people are well-informed," Thomas
Jefferson noted in a letter to Dr. Price in 1789, "they can
be trusted with their own government. Whenever things get so far
wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set
them to rights."
If the Kerry campaign and the DNC and the corporate-owned media
are all, ultimately, unwilling to discuss the truth of the Bush
family tactics, then we must do so ourselves.
The result - regardless of the outcome of this election - will
be a healing of the democratic process. It will also salve the
psyches of Americans who have been brutalized by Osama Bin Laden,
by an incompetent administration that played right into his hand
by elevating him to international prominence (and then let him
escape), and by repeated lies and smears that do as much violence
to American democracy as did 15 Saudis with box cutters that
horrible day three years ago.
We must help America become, as Jefferson said,
"well-informed," and, thus, heal our national psyche
from the wounds inflicted on it these past decades by the Bush
family. It begins with you and me: Pass it along.
Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project
Censored Award-winning best-selling author and host of a
nationally syndicated daily progressive talk show. www.thomhartmann
.com His most recent books are "The
Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal
Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human
Rights," "We
The People: A Call To Take Back America," and "What
Would Jefferson Do?: A Return To Democracy."
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