In the Face of Brutal Defamation
Kerry and Truth Can Win in November

Neutralists and Democrats screamed when Dick Cheney went to the lip of telling the American public: “Vote for Kerry and you vote for Osama bin Laden.”

I don’t know why they should be screaming. The truth is that at this stage of the campaign 45 per cent of the American public is ready to believe it. And why is that?

What happened in Florida four years ago is the cue. There, when the Bush crowd was facing defeat for the presidency, it found the political moles to systematically disenfranchise thousands of black voters who would have won the election for Al Gore. What it did, both in broad daylight and behind the poll curtains, was to swindle those people out of their citizenship. It was a sanitized version of what the old Ku Klux Klan used to do behind sheets. It was also brazen theft on a cosmic scale. It puts heisting a convoy of Brinks trucks on the misdemeanor shelves with vagrancy and pinching lollypops. A few weeks later that ultimate protector of America’s sacred liberties and its defender of truth, the Supreme Court of the United States, studied what happened in Florida and said, “boys, this looks perfectly legal to us.”

What this told Bush’s political handlers is that if you want to win an election, and you want to run the country and the world the way they ought to be run — do it with muscle, smokescreens, payoffs, intimidation, fake numbers and large American flags to keep the taxpayers gullible. Rewrite the rules and bury the evidence.When necessary add defamation of your opponents and threats of incineration around the corner if the other guys win.

That is what we are seeing today. A question surfaces without prompting when you listen to Cheney’s mournful warnings about terror attacks if Kerry wins. The question is: what’s wrong with this picture? What’s wrong is that here is a man standing in for a president who was in office at the time of the most horrific terror attack in the country’s history. He is telling you that you can’t trust anybody but this same president in the White House. In fact Cheney was part of the security team that ignored the clues of a building threat while the White House concentrated on the biggest tax cuts in history to benefit its corporate donors.

There are other pictures that are askew and you wonder how they had the gall to hang them out there in public. Here is the picture of a legitimate war hero with the guts to turn his boat into hostile fire to rescue a soldier in the water, and the guts a few years later to tell the country that continuing the war was wrong—something most of the country already believed. And his reputation and his sacrifice are hanging there torn apart by willful people serving the interests of a man who ducked service in that same war, got influential people to bail him out, and years later landed triumphantly on the deck of an aircraft carrier in the borrowed garments of a hero.

There is something radically wrong with the picture; you know it viscerally and demonstrably, and yet you suspect it has worked. And why?

The use and misuse of the American flag is an enduring invitation to those who are prone to gullibility. It’s nice to be a patriot. If you are in doubt about the purposes or wisdom of the country, or the motives of its leaders, you can assuage all your doubts by being flattered as a patriot. The Bush government knows this. So, for example, do the promoters of mass spectator sport. It is cozy for them to be aligned with the fraternity of the willing, as defined by the government. It is convenient for them to be aligned with a government that controls all governing branches and therefore has the power to influence their revenue and oversee their operations. Moreover, some of the networks airing the games are fronts for the Bush government. So you will see profuse flag waving and uniformed men and women and salutes to American troops at the football games this weekend, more so now less than two months from the election.

And those who ask for a more somber recognition of events in Iraq, and its tragedies, are likely to be dismissed as anti-war fanatics. But “the war,” “the wartime president,” “the war against terror” keep the face of Bush out there as some kind of icon for the America Way in the minds of substantial numbers of voters, distracted from the very issues that marginalize them as citizens. The deterioration of America’s public schools is a disgrace that will haunt this country for decades. The relentless attack on the public schools has in itself made this country not only less than what it could be, but far less than what it was. So does the concealment of the actual costs of Iraq, of corporate subsidies, of the enrichment of millionaires with the revision of tax law, in the assaults on environmental protections that saved forestland and waterways from the future. Add to these the deceptions inflicted on seniors, dangling uncertainly in the face of future costs of their medicines.

All of this is part of the Bush resume.

There are today more than 30 million people in America living below the poverty line. There is practically no room in the election debate to ask why. One of the candidates is busy glorifying America and his leadership as a wartime president. The other is strapped for weeks defending his wartime service.

So when we look at the election in September we may want to hear about the actual condition of America’s economy, the fairness of how its wealth is distributed, and who makes the sacrifice. Where is the hope today for millions of uninsured? Why shouldn’t they be insured? Most of that is enveloped in the fog of Iraq and the public confusion over what’s truth and what’s spin. It works for Bush and is in fact engineered by his handlers. How and why? The Bush White House works in secret and dumps on the public by minimizing the Congress, which it controls. We’re not likely to see the full range of that secrecy until some future accountants get free reign to examine the books.

What is Kerry facing? The Bush crowd runs its campaigns with discipline and shrewdness. It doesn’t much trouble itself with ethics and civility. The use of Band Aids imprinted with Purples Hearts as convention props, mocking Kerry’s wounds in combat, should have sent spasms of revulsion through America from coast to coast. It didn’t. Bush’s people know something about gullibility that others don’t. They know how to use their manipulative power over most of the nation’s media, and their bimbos at Fox. They also are not going to shrink at ruthlessness in dealing with opponents and you will hear more about Kerry and that next act of terror.

They can do this, and do it well, because they have built a political monopoly in government: The White House, the Senate, the House and the Supreme Court, which usually functions as a sleepy and approving claque. With no check on its political power, the Bush White House can tighten its nexus of right wing politics, right wing religion and its fancy for pre-emptive war. There is no comparable power in American history. In dealing with the Democrats, its goals have reached beyond victory in the election. The idea is not only to defeat the Democratic Party but to destroy it as an effective force in American politics. This crowd is already part way there, having mobilized a substantial segment of the America religious community with its power to give millions to faith-based programs. It has strangled any serious bipartisan cooperation in the Congress and is now trying to insure its control in perpetuity by butchering congressional districts to guarantee Republican victories in scores of districts that were once competitive.

So does all that mean doom for Kerry?

It doesn’t. They can break out the flag at kickoff, at lunch or in the checkout line, but Bush has made a supernatural mess of Iraq and doesn’t know how to get out of it. If I were a black American I would vote not only in rage but at 7 o’clock in the morning to be damn sure they didn’t lock the door on me at night. If I were a woman I would vote the same way, for all of the simpering Bush does about the global rights of women and then tells them: adios. If I were a senior (and am) I would tell myself (and do): There isn’t a word this man can say in health care and Social Security that I would believe. If I were a young married worried about the cost of education and the quality of public school education for my children, I would not believe a word this man says.

If I were an American citizen who cares not only for American citizens but for others in the world, I would not believe that you have made Americans safer from terror by killing more than 10,000 innocent civilians in Iraq.

The question Nov. 2 is not about the sensationalism of the charges now being traded in the campaign. The question is: how many sensible people with personal and citizen values that are not mass produced as bumper stickers will vote? How many who are being slowly victimized by the money crunch, how many being left behind, how many who understand a better America. How many of these will come? There are enough votes out there to win for Kerry. If it’s important enough for them, they will come. And if so, the Zell Millers won’t matter.

Copyright (c) 2004 Jim Klobuchar