Today, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee sent an email from John Kerry to their email supporters, asking for support in fighting for the truth:

Hello,

We need to fight back against the lies, fight back with the truth.

The pattern is always the same. Right-wing front groups spend weeks or months peddling a distortion, putting millions of dollars behind ads, pushing out chain emails, misleading millions into believing lies. And then they push it into the center of the debate.

The health care fight has been marked by outragous distortions -- from so-called "death panels" to lies about the public option. And the battle to stop climate change and build a clean energy future is shaping up the same way. We need to fight back before the debate gets to that point; we need to spend as much time building support for the truth as they do building support for lies.

That's why I'll be launching TruthFightsBack.com to fight back against the lies from Big Oil and other forces of the status quo. And I need your help. They are already putting millions of dollars behind the distortions; we need to do all we can to give the truth a fighting chance.

Please contribute what you can to help the truth fight back.

TruthFightsBack.com will do more than give you the truth; it will give you the tools you need to push the truth, to raise the volume of the truth loud enough to drown out the shouting of the lies. And millions of activists can be our eyes and ears to make sure everyone knows the distortions that are coming.

We need to buy ads on search engines, hire researchers to fight back in real time, build the best tools to push the truth in every way we can, from letters to the editor to influencing social media like Facebook and Twitter to email networks. This is the way debates in the 21st century will be won, and we need to make sure we can win them.

So please do what you can to help. Whether it's $25, $50, $100 or more, every contribution will give the truth more of a chance to fight back.

The stakes are too high to let distortions and lies twist our debate. Our planet is endangered by ever-increasing carbon pollution. We need to fight for a clean energy future where America is in charge of our own power.

Thank you for your help.

Sincerely,

Senator John Kerry

TruthFightsBack.com, the innovative website that empowers activists to fight lies with the truth, will be relaunching soon as part of the JohnKerry.com community of websites. This time, it will focus solely on the vital issue of global climate change and the efforts to get a new, clean, American energy economy.

We'll need all the help we can get to make this site work. The forces of the status quo are putting millions of dollars behind distortions and lies, so we need to all join together to fight back with the truth.

Here's a personal look ... I was driving through Indiana way back in September, a month before the Kerry-Boxer climate bill was introduced, and months before the full Senate will consider it, and already I saw billboards saying that Democratic Senator Evan Bayh "kills jobs" because of support for climate legislation. Now, even leaving aside the fact that Evan Bayh hasn't announced any support for the legislation, the billboard is flat out wrong. Dealing with our dirty energy economy will unleash a wave of innovation and creating millions of good-paying jobs that can't be outsourced overseas. It - along with health care reform and reform of our financial industry - is a vital step to reforming our economy and making it ready for the challenges of the 21st Century.

So please do what you can to help:

TruthFightsBack.com

A number of blogs and other sites have highlighted Senator Kerry's grilling of AEI's Kenneth Green during a Finance Committee hearing. Here's Joe Romm at Climate Progress:

Steven Hayward, the F.K. Weyerhaeuser fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, recently said, “The brain waves of the American right continue to be erratic, when they are not flat-lining.”  He may have had in mind his AEI colleague Kenneth Green, whose lack of knowledge on climate was laid bare for all to see by Sen. John Kerry in today’s Finance Committee hearing [...]

Green’s lame defense of himself is no surprise since he regularly spouts stuff like, “No matter what you’ve been told, the technology to significantly reduce emissions is decades away and extremely costly” — from a 2008 speech AEI later removed from their website (excerpts here).  And last month, he weirdly compared EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson to Clint Eastwood and carbon polluters to criminals.

Kudos to Senator Kerry for exposing this American Enterprise Institute “expert.”

Joe embeds the video, so go watch ...