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This articles discusses questions of truth and representation with respect to the Presidential election campaign. It's telling that the way to the convention was paved by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a group whose mere title qualifies as a big lie, since its first ad, accusing John Kerry of lying to receive medals, itself contained brazen falsehoods, soon rebutted by all credible documentary evidence, eyewitness accounts and even some of the Swift Boaters' past testimony. But more disturbing than these falsehoods, which Bush refused to disavow, was the effect in public opinion polls, many of which put Bush in the lead for the first time in months. This big lie had knocked a candidate out of apparent front-runnership for the presidency of the United States. The public's appetite for political fiction had been powerfully demonstrated. Then came the convention. For the unfaithful, watching it produced, as the Niagara of distortion poured out of the TV, a protracted, helpless, sputtering interior monologue of "buts": "But what about..." "But last year you said..." "But that's not true..." In our world, and here at home, we will extend the frontiers of freedom," says George W. Bush. Extend freedom at home? But what about the Patriot Act, allowing searches and seizures without notice; the suspension of habeas corpus for citizens named "enemy combatants" (and the Supreme Court's rejection of this claim); the detention and arrest of people who disagree with the President yet seek to attend his rallies? Which freedom has been strengthened by this Administration? Extend freedom abroad? But what about the rebellion and intensifying repression in Iraq, the US embrace of dictators throughout Central Asia, its embrace of the authoritarian Putin regime in Russia? To exactly which countries has freedom been extended? How does the nosedive in respect for America in every region of the world fit in with a global US plan to promote freedom?
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