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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.
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