Starting a year ahead in school and therefore among the youngest in my classes, I was often terrorized by bullies. I learned early that the only way to stop being a victim of their abuse was to earn their respect, and the only way to earn their respect was to stand up to them. Occasionally I was able to fake them into thinking I was a bigger threat than I was; most of the time, though, I had to fight them.

I am non-confrontational by temperament, but someone intentionally harming another person for pleasure makes me as angry as anyone. When I gained enough self-respect to think of myself as important as anyone else, those attacks on me had a similar effect and I became better at fending them off. As an adult, I came to understand that fighting for oneself is a marker for self-respect and leadership, while sidestepping confrontation tends to socially select people as followers or victims.

Until an inept and stupid-sounding bully named George Bush ran for president, I was a proud Republican. I disliked Democrats, who I saw as meek Robin Hoods who assumed no one had any sense of personal responsibility, something I had an abundance of. No bully myself, I did respect the courage to fight for what one believes in rather than too easily seeking compromise.

Bush went overboard. He never questioned whether he was right, what I later realized was a common trait of his brand of Republican. That false certainty, coupled with a bully’s love of conflict, led Bush and his like-minded minions to grab power every way they could without consideration for who they might hurt in the process.

As I became more emotionally mature and intellectually enlightened, I discovered that I shared more values with Democrats than Republicans. But the Democrats were still acting like wimps; not because they were really cowards, but because they genuinely hated hurting other people. Like me, they felt sympathetic pain if someone else was harmed, while the Republicans were all-too-easily able to separate the pain of others from their own. Bush and his buddies were able to convince enough Americans that the Democrats were weak in a time of war, and they won another term. America and the world paid the consequences of their incompetence, dishonesty, and corruption with a litany of problems on every front including the economy, national security, the environment, health, and physical infrastructure.

Here we are again, coming to the end of another election, with Bush clones and their Republican hit squads using the same strategy that kept them in power and the Democrats in check. Having effectively disabled the media and the Justice Department, they can lie, cheat, and steal with near-impunity. Some Democrats have started fighting back, but their efforts are muffled by a candidate who can’t even use the word “lie” to describe the Republicans’ most effective tactic. Barack Obama can fight when he has to, I have no question about that; but he is also a decent man who gives his fellow Americans too much credit while his rivals acknowledge and exploit their weaknesses.

To beat a bully, or a gang of bullies, you have to hit them hard and where it hurts the most. If you don’t, you will never earn their respect. This is a fact of life I learned the hard way as a kid, and which my new political allies need to learn before it’s too late for America. I’ve chosen to take a different track from the official Obama campaign, telling the truth always, but shaping it into bullets that will hopefully explode in the minds of enough people to make a difference. I will say what needs to be said in a way that will cause the most damage to the bullies, by demonstrating their greatest weaknesses to their enemies. Those weaknesses, I’ve known for years, are emotional immaturity and a simplistic view of the world that excludes much of the information they need to make decisions that are truly beneficial to themselves and others. Only when they are down, forced to see themselves as others see them, can our humane instincts kick in and give them the help they need; but not so that it is perceived as weakness, an excuse to diminish our standing as valid observers whose respect they must earn.