"Stay on the offense" 10/16/04

When cornered, divert and attack. This is a time-honored technique of verbal abusers everywhere, artfully utilized by President Bush's campaign (Rove), most recently after being so soundly pounded in the three Presidential debates. I have to think that Kerry was set up. Dick Cheney first publicly mentioned his daughter, Mary's, homosexuality in a "town hall" type appearance on August 24th. The door was opened. Since then, the matter has been covered by (and this is a partial list): The San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Post, Fox News, New York Daily News, Los Angeles Times, Associated Press, The Tennesseean, Philadelphia Daily News, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Baltimore Sun, Chicago Sun-Times, Newsday, Washington Times, CNN, Financial Times, CNBC, USA Today, and Orlando Sentinel (list from Salon.com). Then, when John Edwards mentioned it in the vice-presidential debate, he was thanked by Dick Cheney. The open door was illuminated. When Kerry walked through it, in the third presidential debate, WHAM! It worked, and the media can talk of little else from this "uncommonly substantive" (George Will) debate than this one remark, which was, at it's core, complimentary. I would agree with those, including Elizabeth Edwards, who have noted that the Cheney's reaction is indicative of some level of "shame" about their daughter's sexual orientation, if I didn't think it more likely that this is just another Rove strategy to divert the discussion from actual issues and attack, personally, reverting to another time-honored verbal abuse tactic, name-calling ("bad, bad man"), and that the Cheneys (all of them) have been willing participants in the ploy. To the Dems: Shut up already. You don't need to defend this. Kerry did nothing wrong, beyond not seeing the trap that was being laid. It is the Republicans who continue to pour fuel on this story, because they are afraid of talking about anything else. While the Republican candidates attack Kerry for his kind remarks, they divert our attention from more important matters like the armed detention of seventeen members of the 343rd Quartermaster Company from Rock Hill, South Carolina for refusing to carry out a mission in which they were being ordered to deliver unusable jet fuel, contaminated with diesel, which had already been refused once, to a base two hundred miles away, a trip they were being asked to make in slow, broken-down vehicles through heavily-defended areas, without armed defense on the ground or from the air. As these brave soldiers, many of whom are nineteen and twenty year old kids, banded together to do what was right against orders, a few snuck in frantic phone calls to their parents or loved ones back home. A powerful heart-rending article about this, including the reports from the families of the young soldiers on the content and nature of the calls and messages, can be found as today's top story on Salon.com (full version requires premium membership, although one day pass is available for free). Divert and attack ("stay on the offense") equals conversational hijacking. The pundits and experts spend hours of television time talking about whether or not Kerry should have mentioned the Vice President's lesbian daughter, a full time employee of his campaign, whom everyone else was already discussing (read: fair game), instead of discussing the fact that Karl Rove spent two hours yesterday testifying, "before a federal grand jury trying to determine if an administration official leaked the name of an undercover CIA officer," Valerie Plame (from The Charlotte Observer: http://www.charlotte.com/mld/charlotte/9929495.htm?1c). The leaking of such information is an act that could be considered treason, should the grand jury be able to determine which administration official actually leaked. Rove, Cheney and Colin Powell have all been interviewed (either in the grand jury chambers or in their offices). "Stay on the offense." I can just hear Karl Rove pounding that into his candidate's head, trying to make him remember it, live it, but it is a weak strategy, the last resort of the saddest verbal abusers, who, unable to engage in meaningful discourse about relevant subjects, turn and attack in a pathetic effort to make it all about them, in their false righteous indignation. We are not that stupid and we don't buy it for a minute. This election is not about Mary Cheney's sexual orientation or John Kerry's mention thereof. This election is about an ill-managed and increasingly deadly fiasco in Iraq, a squandered US Treasury, a White House staff that considers themselves above the law and mandated by God, the jobless, those without access to healthcare, and an impetuous, impulsive, unstable and reckless buckaroo President who appears to us and all the world to sometimes not be in full command of his own faculties. I intend to cast my vote against the shame-based use of verbal abuse tactics in political campaigning, against "staying on the offense," and for a breath of straighforward, informed, intelligent, fresh air who is not afraid to engage in discourse without the use of silly devices, John Kerry.