Swift Boating Part II - The Local View

Swift Boating - embellishing a sliver of truth with innuendo, exaggerations, falsehood, and intimidation; often used in political campaigns as a tool to gain control of the election process; generally recognized as a pejorative description of a political attack or smear.

From Glenn Greenwald of Salon Magazine, constitutional lawyer and blogger:

"By far, the most significant pattern in how our political discourse is shaped is that the right-wing noise machine generates scurrilous, petty, personality-based innuendo about Democratic candidates, and the establishment press then mindlessly repeats it and mainstreams it."

The Right Wing Noise Machine knows that an aggressive attack can cover all sorts of sins. Divert attention, obfuscate, blow smoke, obscure, and distort the debate. Use innuendo, embellish the facts, change or ignore the context. In their "normal" discourse with EACH OTHER and in the media, they regularly engage in what the military refers to as "demonizing the enemy." In the military this helps soldiers get ready to kill.

In politics demonizing your political opponent serves the purpose of minimizing or diverting the debate through intimidation and threats. The less talk of the issues and the less we focus on the ideology of the radical conservatives the more likely they win. What is it that they don't want to talk about? Why are they so fearful of open debate and why do they insist on using such aggressive attacks in all political settings? We should be wary of anyone who uses intimidation and threats to gain political advantage.

The good news is that all of these playground style attacks and attempts to intimidate can be simply swatted away as insignificant and ultimately futile tactics. Simple re-focus of the debate and respectful consideration of the issues involved does the trick every time. Unfortunately, as we have seen repeatedly over the past decade or so, when these attacks DO gain traction the ENTIRE debate is hijacked and the ATTACK becomes the news instead of whatever issues of politics and governance are involved.

The prime example recently is Barack Obama's response to the Fox broadside trying to play the race card against him. Obama's speech was exactly the correct response. He respected the issue, considered the issue in a historical and political perspective and spoke to us as a mature, strong leader. As a result the attack has melted away. Remnants linger in the press and in the blogosphere precisely because of the effectiveness of Fox's media assult. THAT'S WHY THEY KEEP DOING IT.

Locally, conservative bloggers have been largely frustrated in their attempts to hijack the debate, though not for lack of trying. None of their rumor-mongering, innuendo, or back channel mud-slinging has made it out of the blogosphere. The District 6 Democratic Congressional campaign has been a pretty clean affair. I've seen a few attempts to throw the mud behind the scenes with little or no effect, but much to their credit, both candidates have run unrelentingly positive campaigns. Open debates and honest respectful discussions of the issues will ultimately give us the best candidate in our district to go against the Republican candidate in the Fall.