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by Thom Hartmann
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
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