One result of Bush's credibility-gap-widening performance in last Thursday's debate is that the presidential campaign is very likely to get significantly uglier. David Neiwert wrote on 09/29/04 that Nasty days are here. Among other things, he looks at a current piece of lunacy from Mad Annie Coulter. As he puts it:
Now that the dust has settled, it's more than abundantly clear that John Kerry kicked George W. Bush's squinting, smirking little kabootie in last night's debate. The polls are likely to reflect a shift in his favor. And that means it's about to get really nasty.
It's become clear (as long predicted) that the central theme of the Republicans in this year's campaign is going to be: A vote for Democrats is a vote for terrorists. (See, e.g., the ad that appeared on the RNC Website: "10 out of 10 terrorists agree: Anybody But Bush!") That was, as just noted, the context of one of Bush's more notable evasions last night.
And this is not just a matter of another few weeks:
Now, it doesn't take a majority of the country to make widespread belief in this meme a serious problem. I mean, if you believed that the very survival of the nation itself rested on defeating John Kerry, wouldn't you be willing to resort to just about anything to prevent it?
The mainstream conservatives who propagate this belief -- from Bush to Cheney on down -- are effectively radicalizing their supporters, at least those who take their pronouncements as Gospel. Anymore, that's about 30 percent of the population -- a minority, but sizeable enough to be a serious problem.
If Kerry gets elected, the attacks against him will continue, probably even more intensely than against Bill Clinton. With that in mind, I was intrigued to see a piece of advice offered to Kerry by John Dean over a month ago. Dean sugggested that Kerry file a lawsuit over the Swift Boat Liars for Bush book, Unfit for Command: The New Book Attacking Kerry's War Record: How It Defames the Candidate, and Why He Should Sue by John Dean, Findlaw.com 08/31/04
To assert that these stories are biased, one-sided, distorted, and incomplete would be overly kind. ...
How should Kerry deal with the attacks? He should take a page from the playbook of the last U.S. Senator to receive his party's presidential nomination: Barry Goldwater, in 1964. Goldwater suffered the same type of attack, and set a precedent as to how to counter it: Sue.
Never has a book been more deserving of a defamation lawsuit. And Kerry has several reasons to sue. One is to put these false claims to rest forever. The other is to deter future, similar claims.
Recall the absurd 1992 charges that Bill Clinton was running drugs and murdering people. Most people laughed, and Clinton chose to do nothing about the claims, during the election or after. But the Clintons paid a cost for not suing: Even more ridiculous charges - claiming Vince Foster's suicide was a murder, and so on - followed, and critics were emboldened to say anything they wanted about the Clintons, regardless of veracity.
Supreme Court decisions have made it extremely difficult for a public official to win libel lawsuites. Essentially the plaintiff has to establish malicious intent, which in practice is virtually impossible. If we actually had a vigorous press corps that subjected claims like those from the Swift Boat Liars to careful analysis and investigation, the malicious-intent standard might be useful as encouraging vigorous criticism of those in power.
But in today's media environment, where the New York Times shamelessly allows Judith Miller to help start a war by pimping phony WMD claims from Ahmed Chalabi, where Fox News functions as a crassly, blatantly partisan propaganda outlet, and where CBS suppresses a news story on WMD because it might affect voters' decision in a presidential election, we have a seriously dysfunctional press corps.
And, as we saw during the Clinton years, we have an increasinly authoritarian Republican party that is willing to exploit phony claims from the most dubious sources to discredit the Democrats. So Dean's idea of Kerry making a high-profile legal fight against the Swift Boat Liars strikes a chord with me.
At the very least, it could browbeat our pathetic press corps into covering what marginal characters are promoting a lot of this nonsense. With rare exceptions, they can'tbe bothered to do it on their own. But if Kerry makes a post-election legal fight over Unfit for Command, whether or not he wins the election, it would give him the opportunity to lay out in dramatic detail how phony and flaky the Swift Boat Liars' accusations are, and do so in a way that gives our lazy, trivia-and-sensation-obsessed press a "this side said/that side said" story where the competing narrative were subject to the legal process of establishing evidence.
Left to their own sad devices, the mainstream media will continue to promote "balance" by saying, "Side 1 says the earth is round, while Side 2 vigorously protests that the earth is flat." Michael Kinsley, who's not always the most assertive of liberals, did have some good observations on that in an interview with Brian Montopoli reported in the 10/01/01 CJR Campaign Desk:
BM: What's the biggest problem with campaign journalism right now -- particularly what appears on page A1?
MK: The biggest problem is -- and I don't know what the solution is, so it's not a criticism, as much as it is a puzzle -- is that the conventions of objectivity make it very difficult to say that something is a lie. And they require balance, which is often just not justified by reality. The classic thing is the Swift Boats. If you follow what all the papers say, they inch close to saying what they really think by saying, "it's controversial," or "many have challenged it," euphemisms like that. And then they always need to pair it with something else. "Candidate X murdered three people at a rally yesterday, and candidate Y sneezed without using a Kleenex. This is why many people are saying this is the roughest campaign ever." ...
I think it's absolutely true that Bush and his administration are better than anyone ever has been in sticking to the party line. I would be quicker to criticize people for not adapting if I could think of a way to adapt. They stick to the party line because they really believe it, possibly. Or even, to stretch plausibility as far as it can be stretched, because it's true. Those are two possibilities. So I think all you can do is point it out and let people draw their own conclusion.
The Daily Howler has been providing a rolling review of Unfit for Command. But Dean also gives an example showing just how frivolous their method of attack is. And he argues:
To prove he has been defamed, a public figure like Kerry must show the defamer acted with "actual malice" - defined as knowledge of falsity, or reckless disregard for truth or falsity. Actual malice is often very hard to prove. But that's not so here. ...
This is the rare case where actual malice may be easy to prove. ... A clearer case for actual malice could hardly be made.
I find Dean's "closing argument" convincing:
Whether Senator Kerry is elected or not, he should take these false charges to court in order to end this kind of campaigning. In so doing, he would protect not only himself, his campaign, and his legacy - he would also set a valuable precedent for future candidates, and do a public service by warding off future baseless attacks.
I was impressed by the results a few years ago when the Holocaust-denier David Irving made the mistake of suing in British court an author, Deborah Lipstadt, who had described him as such. The lengthy court decision against him laid out in careful, patient detail just why Irving's more controversial arguments are dishonest to the core. It's actually one of the most impressive documents I've ever seen explaining the difference between serious, responsible use of historical evidence and the construction of dishonest pseudohistory. The Nizkor site provides the text of the judge's decision.)
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