From my old blogging buddy, Mark. He's as dead on as ever on fighting the lying scum that we face in the White House.

As there are a lot of regulars on the blog tonight, I wanted to make a couple of points about messaging, and about the lies coming out of the Bush camp.

1) Don't let someone goad you into an argument with a faulty premise. Next time you read something savaging Kerry, take a moment to think how the enemy is trying to jerk your chain or frame arguments in ways that are favorable to them.

Case in point: the idea that Kerry's purple hearts were given for 'scratches'. Somehow this gutless line of bull sounds reasonable, but take a minute to consider the context. The very people who are putting out these lies all opted to avoid going anywhere near live fire during Vietnam. Whether Kerry was severely injured or not is immaterail given that the people who injured him WERE TRYING TO KILL HIM.

Also, while these right-wing cowards are trying to imply that Kerry didn't deserve his medals, look what these same political terrorists did to Max Cleland, who had two legs and an arm blown off. They not only compared him to Saddam Hussein in order to drive him out of the senate, but they recently had political war criminal Ann Coulter attempting yet again to diminish his loss in the most despicable way.

Remember: these are not people who are trying to make a valid point. These are the lowest of the yellow, belly-crawling liars in our political system, and they will do or say anything to defeat democracy. They know their candidate is an abject failure, they know he can't run on his record, and they know he started a war we didn't need to fight.

2) Kerry campaigned his way for the past month or so, despite a lot of handwringing that he wasn't fighting back hard enough, and it turns out he was right in what he was doing. Bush hosed 40 million into the toilet and got almost nothing for it, except a hasitly arranged press conference intruding on yet another bass-fishing, brush-clearing, Crawford vacation.

What many of you have learned in the past thirty days is what some of us learned in the last thirty weeks: John Kerry and his closest advisers know how to run a campaign. It may not be incendiary or smashmouth, but they know what they're doing.

The problem now is that the pundits, who always want to be the first to pronounce a winner and a loser, are starting to talk about Kerry winning big. That means people are starting to raise the bar of expectations on Kerry, but only to put it out of reach yet again so they can trash him for not measuring up to their expectations.

Don't let the pundits or Bush's lapdogs in the press fool you. This is going to be a close race, and Bush still holds almost all the cards. He has the bully pulpit, which means he can change the conversation any day of the week. He has more money - still - but more importantly he has major media outlets shilling for him 24/7 for FREE. Bush is also now clearly desperate enough, as witnessed by his mind-blowing flip-flop on American policy toward the Middle-east peace process, to do just about anything to get re-elected. I'm not a conspiracy fan, but you don't need Diebold horror stories to see the possibilites. Loose cannon Dick Cheney and the mercenaries in the VP's office could trigger an incidence in September with Iran or North Korea just to save their own necks, let alone George's.*

You're all very sharp and strong advocates for Kerry. I'm asking you know to become razor sharp. I'm asking you to decide, no matter what, that you're not going to blink in the face of the onslaught of lies and hate that will come spewing from the RNC and Karl Rove's sociopathic mouth. And all the more so should Bush actually be down in the polls going into October.

Don't flinch. Don't give them an inch.

* You think that sounds crazy? I do too. Then again, this White House lied America into a full-blown war and an occupation of a foreign country without so much as planning for the peace. If they'll do that, they'll do anything. Because they already have.

Posted on the official Kerry Blog by Mark from Iowa at April 17, 2004 02:27 AM



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