"the truth can kick a lie's ass any day"....

[chiburb]

From today's DU Front Page, Plaid Adder:

Snip:

The Kerry campaign is getting plenty of advice these days, and they clearly don't need mine. But looking back on it, it strikes me that Clinton's success in 1992 depended in large part on his ability to project an alternative version of masculinity that was as powerful and as attractive as the Republican version that had been used to beat Dukakis into the ground four years earlier. Part of Clinton's magic was that he convinced American men that you could feel everyone's pain and still kick ass.

Kerry's personality appears to be pretty different from Clinton's, and the same approach won't necessarily work for him. But since we are apparently stuck, at least for this election cycle, with the politics of whup-ass, what we need to do is redefine what it means to kick ass and take names, so that Kerry's not stuck making a choice between either adopting the Republican agenda wholesale or becoming a girlie man.

I'm convinced, and of course I'm a lunatic so we must bear this in mind, that the key to it all is honesty. Bush has managed to conceal enormous personal defects and compensate for gigantic political blunders by pretending that they all spring from his simple, homespun, plain-spoken, straight-shootin', regular-guy authentic self. Bush's "authentic" guyness is, however, as constructed and cartoonish as Arnold Schwarzenegger's physique; it's a pure illusion spun from media fabrications, and is already beginning to unravel.

If Kerry can project his real self, he will also be projecting his own version of what it means to be a man; and one can only expect that it will be a lot healthier and more convincing than the crap the Republicans have been selling. Because the beating that Bush's policies have taken - and that America has taken along with them - over the past few years proves one thing beyond a doubt, and it is that the truth can kick a lie's ass any day.

Read the whole piece here:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/plaidder/04/29.html

[rogerashton]

1. It takes guts to tell the truth because

it takes guts to face the truth. Guts W* hasn't got.

Not sure that will sell, though. Most guys can be courageous as all get-out, as long as it is somebody else in the line of fire.

[chiburb]

2. A kick for Plaid Adder...n/t