Calling Mr Rains, Mr Claude Rains

Jeffrey Dubner at TAPPED takes the Kerry campaign to task for following up the DNC’s hard hitting rhetoric of yesterday on the Roger Stone rumor with what he calls a weak-kneed follow-up today:

“Mr. President, this is a shameful advertisement that shows a disturbing disregard for those fighting and sacrificing in Iraq, and you should repudiate it immediately.”

He points out that they will never get the Bush campaign to repudiate anything so they show themselves weak by failing to get results.

But, everybody knows very well that Bush is not going to repudiate it and that is exactly why they are saying it. This is the way the game is played. It’s why Ed Gillespie gets the vapors every time the Democrats say boo and calls it “political hate speech.”

It’s called phony sanctimony and it works very well, as the Republicans have shown for years. They always shed crocodile tears and call the other side’s attacks vicious and beyond the pale while they are sticking the shiv in as hard as they can. The difference is that this time we stuck the shiv in too.

I see Atrios disagrees with me. I think he should repudiate it.