John Kerry needs to pull an Al Gore and learn how to play Calvinball

It's 2004 all over again, 'yall! Political manwhore and principal funder of the infamous "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" is at it again. GOPers are the party of crazy-makers and T. Boone Pickens is the guy who paid for the 2004 crazy-making anti-John Kerry smear campaign that claims to have given Bush the 2004 elections.

Unhappy with not being in the news during this election cycle, the oilman seems to have been drunk at a dinner sponsored by the American Spectator magazine. In a room full of Washington movers and shakers he claimed to be willing to pay 1 Million Dollars to anybody who could prove his "Swifties" lied about John Kerry's record.

Kerry issued a statement accepting the challenge and vowing to give the money to Paralyzed Veterans of America. So what does the GOP douchebag say to that? In what a colleague described as "a game of GOP Calvinball", the guy completely changes the rules of the wager by demanding that Kerry "provide his Vietnam journal, his military records, and copies of movies and tapes made during his service".

First off, I was upset that my colleague used the Calvinball reference to describe anything to do with the crazy-making slimeballs working for the Republican party. Bill Waterson is one of my heroes and Calvin and Hobbes is a masterpiece for how he captured the anarchic innocence and creative exhuberance of childhood.

Yet, I immediately got how important that reference is because it aptly describes what John Kerry and his fan club are not. The Kerryites are sensible adults trying to deal with the mean playground bullies with a glandular problem embodied in the Swifties.

The Swiftboat Liars and their acolytes have already won the game and they will continue winning because it is one game with no rules that had only one goal. As long as they got Bush re-elected, it didn't matter how badly they smeared John Kerry's reputation, nor for that matter, how they did it.

Theirs is a political game about gaming, about being players and about never letting the smearing drop. Change the rules as you go, who cares. This is not about honor. This is about using media as a reputation machine in order to destroy your opponents, plain and simple.

Which takes me to Al Gore and the Bill Waterson's idea of exhuberant creativity.

I think Al Gore was luckier than John Kerry because his campaign happened outside of the parameters of the internet. That election was stolen so much more efficiently exactly because the GOPers controlled most of the unchecked media broadcasting outlets that manufactured Bush's win.

There was no blogosphere to crowdsource around any results or any evidence that would prove how they electronically stole that election. 2004? No such luck. The stakes were much, much higher. A two-pronged attack, one with the manipulation of voting technology, the other with more traditional reputation technologies was waged to cover up the manupulation.

Al Gore didn't have to contend with any of that and his "disappearance" made it all the more helpful for his reinvention. For one, you can see in the "new improved" Al Gore, he is not playing by anybody's rules but his own.

He's become "The Toxic Avenger", running around the world with his slideshow. Not a posse of experts but a frigging slideshow. He gets to rub elbows with the real Steve Jobs whilst on the board of Apple Computers --hence that 17 inch sexy Powerbook and all the random iPods on "An Inconvenient Truth". He agrees to put together with a friend a billion dollar hedge fund focused on environmentally conscious investments. He then goes on and gets filmed, gets worldwide accolades for his environmental work and wins an Oscar. Not finished he also wins a Nobel Peace Prize. All the while keeping everybody's panties wet with the thought of him running for President. Quietly though, he was sealing his VC cred by joining Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. As far as venture capital firms go, this one invested early in Google, Netscape and Amazon.com. So now Gore will add one more title to the list of accomplishments by becoming a venture capitalist partner focused on "clean tech" investments.

Yet more importantly, Al Gore has become sexy to a lot of people.

He's is sexy to Wall Street. He is sexy to Hollywood. He is sexy to Oslo. Even the netroots.

From Menlo Park to Capitol Hill, everybody wants a piece of that Al Gore a ... ction.

Why the mancrushing and panty creaming galore?

Let's answer with a question : Who's the better and bigger man now? Bush or Gore?

That's an easy answer, isn't?

Compare that to John Kerry. Many people who voted for him still remember John Kerry's silence during the swift boating along with his unwanted concession speech --not even hours after John Edwards had announced they wouldn't concede until every vote was counted.

That's why John Kerry needs to take a long vacation, play some Calvinball and come back a bigger man.

John Kerry needs to find his own game and just like Al Gore, run with it.

Only after then he'll be able to have hilariously likable moments like this one :

John Kerry, take note : That's one heck of a game Al Gore is playing and you ain't playing it with the liars of Swift Boat.

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