'DON'T MESS With Texas" is officially the nation's favorite slogan. In September, it won the third annual Advertising Week Walk of Fame contest, defeating popular corporate maxims like "Got Milk?" and "Just Do It." There's no evidence the Bush administration tampered with the voting, although in a climate of catchphrase-as-truth, it seems appropriate there are contests for such things and, moreover, that the president's home state is the reigning champion.

Maines was tarred as a traitor. Spurred by the right-wing blog Free-Republic.com — which posted every news story remotely pertaining to the controversy and invited no end of public bashing of the Chicks — there was soon a nationwide radio boycott, a rash of CD burnings and at least one death threat to Maines. When Maines tried to explain she did support the troops and did consider herself patriotic, she was drowned out by the much simpler — and conveniently hard to counter — idea that the Chicks "didn't support the troops."

This is old news, but a documentary about the Dixie Chicks incident, "Shut Up and Sing," opens nationally next week, and in light of the screamfest over remarks made Monday by John Kerry, the timing is uncanny. Although Maines and Kerry occupy very different cultural platforms, they both show how much trouble you can get into when you try to talk in public and say something more nuanced than "I support the troops." For instance: "I support the troops, but I don't support the war."

As we all know by now, Kerry said: "You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq." As we also know by now, this was apparently a botched joke, and it pretty quickly became clear that he didn't mean to attack the troops' intelligence, only their commander in chief's.

No matter how clear such realities are, the political buzz machine is all too happy to obfuscate things, mincing words into ad copy to suit various agendas.

Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey explained the process during the Kerry flap even as he conceded that what Kerry said was just a slip-up. "It's pretty standard-fare political discourse," he told MSNBC's Chris Matthews on Tuesday. "You misconstrue what somebody said. You isolate a statement, you lend your interpretation to it, and then you feign moral outrage."