DIRTY, SLIMY FEELING
I know – you feel it too, don’t you? That dirty, slimy feeling. You felt alright a couple of weeks ago, but now your stomach senses that something isn’t right. Off balance. Icky.
Welcome to Bush/Cheney 2004.
The Bushies, who have done a miserable job in messing up the country with their radical foreign and domestic agenda for the past three years, are in trouble. Without a leg to stand on in terms of accomplishments and without a clue how to solve the problems they created in Iraq, the budget deficit, 3 million lost jobs, etc., they have decided to use their massive Surrogate network to define John Kerry for the American people.
We have seen this too many times before. Al Gore was considered the Mr. Clean of the Clinton administration – in truth, a spectacularly clean administration to begin with, especially compared to the Bushies – before the compliant Surrogates on wingnut radio and cable squawker shows started after him for trivial things like wearing earth-tones and making claims he didn’t make about creating the internet. By the time Gore was letting out audible (and well deserved) sighs in the first debate with the overwhelmed and underwhelming Junior Bush, he was already a national laughing stock. With the great help of late night comedians and network anchors, the corporate media bought the Surrogate story lines whole, belittling Gore for every unscripted wrinkle. Meanwhile, the new amiable dunce, GW, was held to low or no standards and was rewarded simply for not breaking down in tears and crying for his mommy. The way he was batted around daily like a ping-pong ball by the Surrogates and the mainstream media, the only thing more amazing than Gore winning the election was the fact that he was prevented by the Supreme Court from taking office.
Earlier this year, the Bushies were distracted by the "inevitability" of Howard Dean’s nomination and were publicly rubbing their hands in glee at the prospect of hammering so easy a target. They were caught off guard by not only the Kerry surge out of Iowa, but by Kerry’s new fire, a healthy by-product of the Dean insurgency. Since late last year, the Bush Surrogates had been putting out several mild servings of juvenile political poison – Surrogate-in-Chief Rush Limbaugh calling Kerry "French-looking" at every mention, calling him "Lurch", etc. Thus did the Surrogates keep their options open, just in case one of the other Democrats overcame Dean and might be taken seriously by the electorate. After it became clear that Kerry was not only the Democratic nominee, but that he also was beating Bush in head-to-head polling, the Rove message-of-the-day machinery got rolling and the Surrogates went to work.
The first shot of the real campaign was taken by Bush Surrogate Matt Drudge, the pretend-journalist who willingly floated a completely unsupported claim of a Kerry affair with an intern. This was the beginning of the Clintonization of Kerry, whereby the Bushies will try to throw mud at him – mostly lies, at best half-truths – and then call him dirty. This was followed by an ad by an "independent group", attacking Kerry for having a yacht and several houses.
The "official" campaign, meanwhile, accused Kerry of hypocrisy for alleged "flip-flops" on various issues. Their willing Surrogates repeated it (and still do) on wingnut radio and cable. The corporate media then picked up the "story", created out of thin air, evaluating Kerry for nuance and shifting, and finding nothing. But, like the slime it intends to be, it sticks.
This past week, the mainstream press followed the wingnuts around as they made hay out of various off-the-cuff statements made by Kerry, such as the legitimate comment that the Bushies were "crooks and liars". Well, is the truth a defense? I might have offered a different, um, nuance...Liars, certainly, but "crooks"? Seems to me you need a few convictions for that one and you’ll have none of that out of the Ashcroft Justice Department. I’d focus more on the radical nature of the Bush regime. We don’t need a change. We need relief from radical change.
But the wingnuts and the mainstreamer Surrogates have begun putting Kerry in a box where everything he says off-script is subject to self-righteous ridicule, whether it deserves it or not. Today, Limbaugh started riffing on Kerry swearing a Secret Service agents after he fell on the ski slopes. This type of nonsense exposes two main elements of mainstream press bias against the Dems: 1) If Bush ever went skiing, there wouldn’t be a reporter allowed within 2 miles, except for the 15 minutes it took him to kiss a baby and his screened-for-support parents. The Bushies and their ilk live and play behind steel doors and barbed wire, and the unscripted is unseen. Democrats are just too darn open with their personal lives. 2) Dems are always held to higher standards. If Bush were out and jammed his pinky on his chainsaw trigger, his screeching, whining and swearing would be held up as the admirable, natural reaction of a real macho rancher-guy.
The Kerry forces have been doing a good job of instantly responding to every Bush lie with honest facts. But it’s played in the media as action-reaction, without any exposure of the quality of the information (i.e.: Bush lies, Kerry doesn’t). It will be tough for Kerry to fight through the Slime of the Surrogates, and he won’t get any help from people in the corporate media who know better. The whole purpose of the Slime is to make Kerry supporters feel uneasy about their choice; for those who know that it is time for regime change to question whether Kerry is the guy.
There has to be a strategy to make the Bush tactics themselves the issue. Will they stop at nothing and leave no lie untold to maintain their illegitimate grip on Power?
8:17:07 PM 
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