Flip-Flop Schlock

Why would any thinking person — who's neither a paranoid nor a cynic — support George W. Bush? The answer being parroted by many Bushites is that Kerry "flip-flops."

In that view, the Democratic candidate is incapable of making up his mind, and the prime example being offered as evidence is Vietnam. And in the cascade of mud that's defining this presidential campaign, the charge is not only sticking; it is burying the very real issues of intellectual competence and personal integrity. And for that, the Democrats have no one to blame but themselves.

They set the agenda during the Democratic National Convention in Boston and are trapped in its teeth. Now, there's little left to do but to chew off a foot — and not much time left in which to do it. By promoting their candidate as a war hero, the Democrats have helped the political debate become a quasi-referendum on Vietnam. But instead of highlighting the contrast between Kerry's heroic service and Bush's shameful antics, the former's eventual disenchantment with Vietnam has been emblazoned as an emblem of his inconstancy.

In fact, Kerry's understanding of the sham that was Vietnam is not unlike that of many of us who came to see that America's excursion into Southeast Asia was built on faulty premises and fed with lies. The distinguishing difference with Kerry, of course, was that by the time he learned about Vietnam, he was knee-deep in Mekong mud.

While many antiwar activists at the time celebrated Kerry's hard-won conversion, in the context of today's quagmire in Iraq, it is being spun as disloyalty under fire by a soldier who remains shell-shocked today, and forever waffling.

In this unspoken Republican analysis, Kerry's undiagnosed posttraumatic stress disorder disqualifies him from leadership. The irony is that Bush's very real dry-drunkenness, where flimsy ideas become sacred obsessions, is being spun to portray him as a stalwart in an unstable world.

Thinking people can read the subtext of the Republican's morality play. But since this drama is being played out on television, the true contrast between one man's courage and another's cowardice is lost in a medium where sound reason is trumped by sound bites.

Beyond that, in a post-literate America, the very act of reasoning is becoming suspect. Thinking people know that issues often have more than two sides. Sadly, in the us-versus-them, video-game world of modern American politics, the prize may well go to those with the quickest fingers, and not the nimblest minds.

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