The thing that just strains my cranial blood vessels more than anything else these days is the way the Bush camp feels free to lie and mislead — about weapons of mass destruction, about reasons to send young men to their deaths, and mostly about anyone who opposes them. They know how to lie in such a way that people think it’s true — repetition. Say anything enough times and people believe it. They’ll also take what someone else said, leave out a few words or rearrange them, and boom — they’ve created a lie.
There is one good thing about President Bush’s new advertisement showing John Kerry windsurfing: Kerry does enjoy windsurfing.
That alone puts the ad on a higher plane of truthfulness than many of the statements the president regularly makes on the campaign trail. A press corps that relentlessly nitpicked Al Gore in 2000 in search of “little lies” and exaggerations has given Bush wide latitude to make things up. I guess the incumbent benefits from the soft bigotry of low expectations.
At the top of my personal hit parade of Bush Distortions is a statement the president has made over and over, notably during his speech at the Republican National Convention. “If you say the heart and soul of America is found in Hollywood,” Bush said to loud cheers, “I’m afraid you are not the candidate of conservative values.”
Bush has repeated variations of that sentiment so often that I bet you didn’t know that Kerry never said that the heart and soul of America is found in Hollywood.
What Kerry actually said, after a fundraiser in which a group of stars performed on his behalf (and, yes, during which some of them said distasteful things about Bush), was this: “Every performer tonight, in their own way, either verbally or through their music, through their lyrics, have conveyed to you the heart and soul of our country.”
And by the way, Kerry didn’t even make those comments in Hollywood. The fundraiser was held in New York.
… Bush deserves a curtain call and perhaps an award from Hollywood for how he manages to translate Kerry’s promise that he would increase taxes only on Americans who earn more than $200,000 a year into a tax increase on everybody. “He says he’s going to tax the rich,” Bush said on Wednesday in King of Prussia, Pa. “Rich hire lawyers and accountants for a reason — to stick you with the bill. We’re not going to let him tax you, because we’re going to win in November.”
So a president who signed all kinds of provisions to help wealthy taxpayers turns around, blames the lawyers and — presto! — Kerry, by implication and association, becomes a friend of the wealthy who want to raise your taxes. Clever? Manipulative? You decide.
I could go on. For example, Bush describes Kerry’s health insurance plan, which even critics say is designed to strengthen the existing employer-based system, as an effort to put “Washington bureaucrats in control.” But you get the drift.
A very intelligent political reporter I know said the other night that Republicans simply run better campaigns than Democrats. If I were given a free pass to stretch the truth to the breaking point, I could run a pretty good campaign, too.
