Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Story Lines

Amy Sullivan on Political Animal writes:

An article that appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer just two weeks ago included this bit about Ginsberg: “Ben Ginsberg, a legal adviser to the Bush campaign, specifically condemned the dual roles played by Democrats Harold Ickes and Bill Richardson, who had official roles at the convention and also within prominent friendly 527s. ‘They’re over the coordination line,’ Ginsberg said of Ickes and Richardson. ‘The whole notion of cutting off links between public officeholders and soft-money groups just got exploded.'”

Ginsberg is a made man and Ginsberg has now resigned from the Bush campaign. The fact that he resigned makes me think that the Bushies are getting a little bit spooked at the furious revelations coming out day by day on the Not-So-Swift lies and their campaign ties.

The convention is getting very close. I’m not sure they anticipated that the Liars were lying quite so baldy and that the press would make anything of the web of connections. (Ginsberg on the record just two weeks ago leads me to believe they thought their flank was covered on this.) The positive message they need to convey at the convention could be stepped on badly if the mediawhores decide to flog this angle while they are sitting there in madison Square Garden with every prominent Republican in the country.

I don’t think Bush wants to leave his convention over the labor day week-end still talking about 527’s.

Which leads me to Rick Perlstein’s latest article in the Village Voice in which he says:

History never truly repeats itself. Prognostication is inherently unreliable. But what history can provide is a set of guidelines to wisdom—guidelines many protesters refuse even to consider. Not all protesters. But enough protesters. All it takes is a few people to begin a chain reaction that could lead to disaster.

Like many, Lew Koch suspects the spark might come from someone working for the Republicans.

The Republicans have already shown that they are willing to engage in unprecedented smears and dirty tricks in this cycle. I think it is highly likely that they have some french looking infiltrators — provocateurs — ready to help Bush get out his story line about being “mainstream” while Kerry and the Democrats are all a bunch of smelly hippie radicals who want to tear down the state. This is the ’68 Retro Tour election, after all.

It would be really nice if people on our side could think strategically about this instead of looking at politics as some sort of emotional outlet, but I’m not holding my breath. As Perlstein notes:

Rae Valentine is even right, in a cosmic sense, when she says that “people understand that the so-called chaos of streets being shut down by protesters or even a window being broken is nothing compared to the day-to-day chaos and destruction of people being able to afford housing, or health care. That’s where the real violence—in the system—lies.”

But she is not right in the sense that matters: the political sense. “I think people understand,” she says. Linger on that formulation. It is only inane arrogance that gives someone the confidence to pronounce that, magically, “people will understand.” They might not understand at all. Instead, what they might understand is: “Bush is better than anarchy in the streets.” It ain’t fair. But if it all goes down as unplanned, there’ll be a whole lot more unfairness coming down the pike in the next four years.

One of the unfortunate things about some of the most passionate and idealistic people on the left is that they aren’t really interested in politics — they are on a sort of spiritual mission that actually conflicts with politics. I admire their committment, but if it is irrational, it helps the worst elements of the political system thrive.

I’m all for protesting as a tactic if it’s organized to make a political point. As emotional catharsis or an exercise of tribal identity it only hurts the ball club. I’m hoping that the NYC protest story is one entertaining and pointed “Billionaires For Bush” style political theatre, not anarchy in the streets.

If the worst happens, it should be noted, however, that one of the reasons that the 1968 convention anarchy was helpful to Nixon was that there had been a succession of real riots in various cities. There had been huge protests in the streets and on campus. There was tangible social upheaval in the country that made the confrontation with police at a political convention all the more dramatic. Nothing like that kind of civil unrest exists today (yet) so the backdrop that made the convention protests such a powerful image for Nixon to exploit as the “law and order” candidate isn’t there.

The best Bush can hope for is to make it a matter of “values.” I don’t know how much punch that really has, but it is true that the media loves to go all Claude Rains on us whenever there’s the tiniest hint of resistance to the bourgeois values that everybody pretends to hold (while they watch porn and pop prescription drugs.) If violence breaks out or someone does something too edgy you can bet that we’ll be treated to another huge dose of phony sanctimony from the millionaire celebrity press corpse.

They Just Lie.

Message to the media. Read this from Seeing The Forest. “They just lie” is the assumption from which you must begin when one of these “stories” starts to percolate. And you will find that by making that correct assumption you can have a good story, too. Lying on tape is a good story. If you think really hard you may remember that a few years back that you got quite a bit of mileage out of several along that line.

John O’Neil’s dirty trick against John Kerry has been exposed by one of the White House tapes featuring him talking to Richard Nixon. These are the same tapes that brought down Richard Nixon for dirty tricks thirty years ago.

Press Corpse — this is delicious, in case you haven’t noticed. It is beautiful symbolism. It is perfect symmetry. It is to make you believe in God.

If you can’t run with this, you have no business being scandal mongers. Remember, it’s all about you, It’s all about your ratings, your Q, your salary. Run little mediawhores, run. This one is just sitting there like a big juicy fig waiting for you to bite into it.

Group puts final blame on top Defense officials, but its chairman says ‘America’s enemies’ would benefit if Rumsfeld resigned.

The panel said the failures generally were caused by officers’ deciding to adopt interrogation practices used at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and taking them much further than they should have, especially at overcrowded Abu Ghraib, where the Army was never fully in control.

“There was chaos at Abu Ghraib,” Schlesinger said at a news conference at the Pentagon that was called to release the report, one of several investigations launched after photographs of prisoner abuse surfaced last spring, stunning the world.

Though Schlesinger said the interrogators and prison guards were “directly responsible” for the abuse, the report, for the first time, directly blames senior Defense Department management for problems at Abu Ghraib.

The panel faulted top generals, including Sanchez, for misinterpreting higher orders and issuing a series of contradictory and confusing interrogation policies. And it criticized Rumsfeld for failing to adequately assemble legal and military experts to set interrogation parameters early in the Iraq occupation.

It also traced confusion over interrogation policies to a 2002 memo issued by President Bush that said Geneva Convention protections did not apply to Taliban and Al Qaeda suspects in custody. The panel said the memo led Sanchez to believe that “additional, tougher measures were warranted” in Iraq.

In addition, the investigators criticized senior military leaders for failing to anticipate the insurgency in Iraq after Saddam Hussein was toppled. When the resistance accelerated in the summer of 2003 and the prison population soared, commanders did little to adequately train or beef up security and intelligence operations at Abu Ghraib.

Rather, Schlesinger said, senior civilian and military leaders based their planning on what happened after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, when Kuwait was liberated from Iraq and no prolonged resistance followed.

“They did look at history books,” Schlesinger said. “Unfortunately, it was the wrong history.”

The abuse scandal, Schlesinger noted, has had a “chilling effect on interrogation operations.” U.S. agencies are getting far less intelligence because interrogators are fearful about the consequences of pushing detainees to talk, he said.

But he stopped well short of calling for Rumsfeld’s removal, saying it “would be a boon to all of America’s enemies, and consequently I think it would be a misfortune if it were to take place.” Schlesinger said that although commanders were not “focused” on detention operations, “we do not think it was a sufficient error to call for senior resignations.”

That’s an interesting interpretation of the old “we don’t give in to terrorists” trope. In this case we can’t fire an obviously incompetent official because our enemies would supposedly be pleased.

Meanwhile all this blather is seen by a billion Muslims as total crap:

Bush said the United States will move forward as other democracies have when mistakes are made. “Those mistakes will be investigated, and people will be brought to justice,” he said. “We’re an open society. We’re a society that is willing to investigate, fully investigate, in this case, what took place in that prison.”

The president said that the United States will punish those found guilty of abuse. “That stands in stark contrast to life under Saddam Hussein,” he said. “His trained torturers were never brought to justice under his regime. There were no investigations about mistreatment of people. There will be investigations. People will be brought to justice.”

All crap.

Jacuzzi Cases

Man, Junior must be fuming that yet another one of those hated 527’s is coming online with $10 million for more of those ads he’d really like to see stopped:

Group plans anti-Edwards ads

WASHINGTON (CBS.MW) — A business-backed group plans to join the campaign fray in coming weeks by running ads in key swing states that are expected to attack Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards for his pre-Senate career as a trial lawyer.

The new group, called “The November Fund,” is co-chaired by Craig Fuller, who served as chief of staff to the president’s father, George H.W. Bush, when he was vice president, and Bill Brock, a former Republican senator.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is a key sponsor of The November Fund, which is organized as a so-called 527 group. Such groups are prohibited by law from coordinating activities with presidential campaign staffs or political parties.

The New York Times reported the Chamber and other groups plan to spend $10 million on ads attacking trial lawyers, including Edwards.

John Kerry’s selection of Edwards as his running mate on the Democratic ticket enraged some business leaders who have identified abusive lawsuits as a top priority for legislative reform.

“The impact of the trial bar’s influence on the legal, legislative, regulatory and economic decisions of an administration is impossible to calculate,” said Chamber President Tom Donohue, in a written statement announcing the formation of The November Fund.

Edwards has never disavowed the battles with businesses that were hallmarks of career as a trial lawyer in North Carolina. The candidate, who proudly describes himself as the “son of a mill worker,” says he became a lawyer in order to stand up for ordinary people against powerful interests — a theme that has echoed through his campaigns for public office.

Yes, the Chamber is non-partisan in the same the way the swift boat liars are independent. I’m sure Bush will be right out there condemning all vague “shadowy groups” again while Karl pulls all ten million dollars worth of strings from behind the curtain.

Maybe the trial lawyers need to get a little 527 of their own up and run a few ads featuring some of Edwards’ clients — the ones in the wheelchairs or missing body parts due to corporate cravenness.

Tricky Timing

I urge everyone to read this Liberal Oasis piece on smears. Smears are the most difficult tactic to combat in any campaign and it has been made even harder by the scandal junkies of cable TV and talk radio. There is no formula.

Fighting Smears

Maureen Dowd, like many backseat campaign managers, has never had to defend against a smear campaign.

Addressing a smear is one of the hardest, trickiest, most delicate things in politics.

Condemn it too early, you raise its profile and spread it places where it hadn’t been heard yet, and may never had been heard.

Wait too long, and it becomes perceived truth.

And there’s no textbook timeframe how long to wait, because every smear’s trajectory and potency is different.

Managing the timing is art, not science.

Those like Maureen Dowd — who said on Sunday that Kerry seemed to be “caught off guard” by the Swift Boat Liar attack, because he waited to respond — don’t know what they’re talking about.

Kerry surely knew this was coming.

Similar attacks began in February of this year. And he has successfully fought off such attacks in past campaigns, with the help of fellow vets.

Kerry was on guard. He simply was patient, trying to sense if the smear was gaining traction.

And he wanted to stick to his post-convention plan, touring battleground states, driving his messages from his acceptance speech, completing his introduction to the public.

Read the rest, it’s great.

I would just add that I think the “Kerry waitied too long” CW that’s forming is a media driven excuse that lets them off the hook. They know that they are responsible for allowing these assholes to be taken seriously at all and instead of taking responsibility for failing at their job they are blaming the victim. It’s an old story with these guys. “Oh he should have fought back a week earlier.” Well, if the press were in the business of journalism instead of bloodsport entertainment, they would have investigated these guys before they gave them hours and hours of airtime to spread their filthy little psychodrama all of over airwaves. The people who waited too long were the journalists.

Don’t fall for the hype. I heard all these talking heads today going on and on about how this has hurt Kerry and yet they have no evidence to back that up, other than their own guilt.

It reminds me of an earlier time when every single pundit idiot in washington predicted for month after month after month that Clinton was going down. They were just positive of it. “Any day now,” they said, “the American people are going to reject this deplorable behavior.” The screeched at the highest decibels on every cable show 24/7. Each new revelation was the smoking gun that was going to end his presidency. The 1998 election was supposed to be a deathblow.

And month after month after month more than 60% of the American people continued to support Clinton and the ’98 election was a blow out for the Democrats.

Don’t believe anything these people say about what “the American people” think. They are celebrities who have as much contact and understanding of everyday Americans as Madonna does. Wait for real data. We’ll know soon enough.

Profiles In Courage

If anyone is wondering why Tweety has turned back into Bush’s bitch, here’s why:

You might notice something missing from Hardball With Chris Matthews soon: Republicans. ” Hardball may seem more like badminton during the Republican National Convention,” threatens a GOP insider. What’s up? The GOP thinks Matthews has gone over to Sen. John Kerry ‘s side and is too critical of the Bush campaign’s editing of a Hardball interview with Kerry posted on the party’s negative site, www.kerryoniraq.com. As payback, they’ve stopped urging Republicans to appear on the show. Hardball executive producer Tammy Haddad dismisses charges Matthews is biased: “We beat everybody up.” So far, nobody from the White House has told her of the show’s being blackballed.

Yeah. Uh huh. That must be why he’s claiming now that Kerry said “all Americans are Lt. Calley’s” in his Senate testimony in ’72 and it would explain why tonight he suddenly feels that Kerry should follow the president’s lead and condemn all the 527 ads. He got manly for a minute or two and challenged little LuLu but then he got a spanking and turned into a good boy again.

Everybody Look What’s Goin’ Down

The clash between Vietnam veterans over Sen. John Kerry and critics of his war record heated up several degrees Monday as a group of vets called on a Clackamas County deputy prosecutor to resign.

“He’s hurt a lot, a lot of people,” Don Stewart, one of the organizers of a rally on the Main Street steps of the county courthouse, said of Alfred French. “It opens up a lot of wounds. . . . This is personal.”

Stewart of Oregon City and Don Kirsch of Canby drew about 45 people to a rally to criticize French, a senior deputy district attorney who said in an affidavit that Kerry lied about his service record. French later admitted his sworn statements were based on the accounts of others.

French’s comments have been used in anti-Kerry ads by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a group of Vietnam veterans who have said the Democratic presidential candidate lied about or exaggerated his actions during Swift boat river duty in 1969.

[…]

During the rally, Stewart read a letter he and Kirsch wrote in which they tell French he should resign because he has lost the trust of county residents.

“We question your fitness to serve as an enforcer of the law after swearing to facts in a legal affidavit that you do not know to be true,” they wrote.

[…]

Kirsch said French has a right to criticize Kerry “as a concerned veteran” but should not have signed a sworn statement based on secondhand information. “He’s told lies and hearsay evidence,” Kirsch said.

French did not return a telephone message asking for comment.

Thanks to Hesiod for keeping us informed and enlightened even from self-imposed exile.

I haven’t completely absorbed the implications of this article yet (thanks to Davis X Machina for the tip) but it is fascinating and everyone should read it. This guy has the most original view of the Republican mystique I’ve ever read and something about it tells me he is right on the money. Frank Wilhoit, if you’re out there, this one’s for you:

This is America, not Denmark. In this country, tens of millions of people choose to watch FoxNews not simply because Americans are credulous idiots or at the behest of some right-wing corporate cabal, but because average Americans respect viciousness. They are attracted to viciousness for a lot of reasons. In part, it reminds them of their bosses, whom they secretly adore. Americans hate themselves for the way they behave in public, always smiling and nodding their heads with accompanying really’s and uh-huhs to show that they’re listening to the other person, never having the guts to say what they really feel. So they vicariously scream and bully others into submission through right-wing surrogate-brutes. Spending time watching Sean Hannity is enough for your average American white male to feel less cowardly than he really is.

The left won’t accept this awful truth about the American soul, a beast that they believe they can fix “if only the people knew the Truth.”

But what if the Truth is that Americans don’t want to know the Truth? What if Americans consciously choose lies over truth when given the chance—and not even very interesting lies, but rather the blandest, dumbest and meanest lies? What if Americans are not a likeable people? The left’s wires short-circuit when confronted with this terrible possibility; the right, on the other hand, warmly embraces Middle America’s rank soul and exploits it to their full advantage. The Republicans know Americans better than the left. They know that it’s not so much Goering’s famous “bigger lie” that works here, but the dumber the lie, the more they want to hear it repeated.

And this leads to another truth that the left still has trouble understanding: Millions of Americans, particularly white males, don’t vote for what’s in their so-called best interests. Thomas Frank recently attacked this riddle in his new book What’s the Matter with Kansas? but he fails to answer his own question. He can’t, in fact, because his is a flawed premise. Frank, who is at his best when he’s just vicious, still clings to the comforting theory that Middle Americans are being duped by an evil corporate-political machine that subtly but masterfully manipulates the psychological levers of cultural backlash, implying that if average Americans were left to their own devices, they would somehow make entirely rational, enlightened choices and elect sensible New Deal Democrats every time. This puts Frank in a bind he never quite gets out of. Like all lefties, he is incapable of taking his ruthless analysis beyond a certain point.

The reason is simple. The underlying major premise of humanist-leftist ideology states that people are intrinsically sympathetic. If people are defiantly mean and craven, the humanist-left structure falters. “Why the fuck should I bother fighting for Middle Americans,” they ask, “if they’re just as loathsome, in their own petty way, as their exploiters, with whom they actively collaborate?”

Rather than grapple with that dilemma, the left pretends it doesn’t exist. This is why they will forever struggle to understand the one overriding mystery of why so many working- and middle-class white males vote against their own best interests.

I CAN TELL YOU WHY. They do so out of spite.

I urge you to read the whole thing. It is the most entertaining piece of political analysis I’ve read in quite a long time. And, really, what other explanation can there be for Rush Limbaugh?

Why It Matters

I keep hearing that John Kerry has has brought the character assassination on himself by playing up Vietnam in his campaign. The assessment seems to be that if he hadn’t made a big deal out of it the Swift boat Borgias wouldn’t have felt the need to come forward. This is, of course, nonsense. If he hadn’t brought up his service they would have said he was trying to hide it. This was always in the cards. The Swift Boat Borgias hate John Kerry because he said that Americans committed atrocities in Vietnam and they have never been able to forgive him for agitating against a war they felt proud to have fought.

This is an understandable human reaction. They have never been able to come to terms with that war and what it meant and as a result they have projected all of their emotional confusion about their own actions, their government’s perfidy and their country’s ambigious relationship to the troops into a single focus on the anti-war protestors as the symbol of all that hurt them. It’s beyond my ken to try to convince a bunch of 60ish year old men that they are wrong on this. This issue will dog my generation to our graves.

However, the media isn’t really talking about any of that when it says that John Kerry asked for it. It is saying that Vietnam is irrelevant and that by bringing it up he brought all this distraction upon himself. This could not be more wrong. Because of Bush’s Big Adventure in Iraq, all of this has become much more than a point of symbolism. It has become crucial to our understanding of what is happening right now.

Although the details differ, essentially we are once again engaged in a misbegotten war in which the goal is amorphous and for which the public feels ambigious. It is the result of a foolish grand geopolitical strategy not self defense and it has American troops embroiled in a complicated foreign battlefield in which we are viewed by all sides with suspicion if not outright hatred. People are dying everyday and nobody quite understands why. The pressure is building.

That at the hands of the Vietnam generation itself, we have found ourselves in this situation again is mind-boggling. And it is a testament to the “suspended in amber” nature of the hawkish mindset that it has happened.

The baby boom generation is incapable of governing if we don’t choose among them people who have grappled honestly with the crucible of their lives. And that crucible was Vietnam. George W. Bush and his cronies have never done this. Neither have the Swift Boaters. These people have not faced up to what our country did in that war and as a result we are looking at another war based upon similarly bad assumptions and we are in the process of repeating many of the same mistakes.

Here is a sad case in point. I think most of us have heard that Joseph Darby, the man who blew the whistle on the Abu Ghraib torture, is now in protective custody. Back in his hometown his family was shunned while they held parades for those who committed the torture. He received death threats.

But, I don’t know how many people know that this is a sad sequel to the story of Hugh C. Thompson, a helicopter pilot in 1968 who rescued a group of civilians during the My lai massacre and was fired on by his own countrymen. Then as now, right wing politicians were “outraged at the outrage.”

He was a 24-year-old pilot flying over the Vietnamese jungle on March 16, 1968. The crew’s objective: draw Viet Cong fire from My Lai, so helicopter gunships could swoop in and take out the enemy gunners.

Thompson spotted gunfire but found no enemy fighters. He saw only American troops, who were forcing Vietnamese civilians into a ditch, then opening fire.

Thompson landed his helicopter to block the Americans, then instructed his gunner to open fire on the soldiers if they tried to harm any more villagers. Thompson and two other chopper pilots airlifted villagers to safety, and he reported the slaughter to superiors.

“We saw something going wrong, so we did the right thing and we reported it right then,” Thompson said.

The Vietnamese government estimated that more than 500 were killed.

Army Lt. William Calley Jr. was convicted in a 1971 court-martial and received a life sentence for the My Lai massacre. President Nixon reduced the sentence, and Calley served three years of house arrest.

Thompson received the prestigious Soldier’s Medal — 30 years after the fact.

His acts are now considered heroic. But for years Thompson suffered snubs and worse from those in and out of the military who considered his actions unpatriotic.

Fellow servicemen refused to speak with him. He received death threats, and walked out his door to find animal carcasses on his porch. He recalled a congressman angrily saying that Thompson himself was the only serviceman who should be punished because of My Lai.

Today, West Point considers Thompson and his story essential to educating its cadets.

“Hugh Thompson is a great example of individual responsibility,” said Col. Tom Kolditz, head of the Army academy’s behavioral sciences and leadership department. “He took initiative, he took action, to establish institutional values in a situation where they were not operating.”

36 years later we have what is being called another “breakdown in discipline” at Abu Ghraib. As with My Lai, the upper chain of command will not be held liable. Once again there is documentary evidence of war crimes. And, here in the USA, once again, you have the hawks defending the war criminals against those who stand up to it.

This is unfolding before our very eyes in Iraq. It isn’t some abstract argument about war stories and faux heroism and who admitted to war crimes a generation ago. This is now.

If there was ever a time that a decorated Vietnam veteran who came home with the knowlege that the war was wrong and fought to end it, was called for to lead this country, it is now. This is not a distraction and it is not beside the point. It is the very essence of the debate in this election.

John Kerry may be the single most qualified man in the entire nation to be president at this moment in history.

These Charges Are False

Compare the following to the bucket of warm spit that chickenshit Fred Hiatt published today in which he remains “troubled” (thanks Karen Hughes, that’s just the word I was looking for!) by the fact that Kerry has been imprecise about the exact longitude and latitude of his trek across the Cambodian border on the Mekong River around Christmas 1968. (Psssst. I hear Vince Foster was there too.)

Here you have what is fast becoming the best editorial page in the country, run by Michael Kinsley. This is what editorials are for:

These Charges Are False …

It’s one thing for the presidential campaign to get nasty but quite another for it to engage in fabrication.

August 24, 2004

The technique President Bush is using against John F. Kerry was perfected by his father against Michael Dukakis in 1988, though its roots go back at least to Sen. Joseph McCarthy. It is: Bring a charge, however bogus. Make the charge simple: Dukakis “vetoed the Pledge of Allegiance”; Bill Clinton “raised taxes 128 times”; “there are [pick a number] Communists in the State Department.” But make sure the supporting details are complicated and blurry enough to prevent easy refutation.

Then sit back and let the media do your work for you. Journalists have to report the charges, usually feel obliged to report the rebuttal, and often even attempt an analysis or assessment. But the canons of the profession prevent most journalists from saying outright: These charges are false. As a result, the voters are left with a general sense that there is some controversy over Dukakis’ patriotism or Kerry’s service in Vietnam. And they have been distracted from thinking about real issues (like the war going on now) by these laboratory concoctions.

It must be infuriating to the victims of this process to be given conflicting advice about how to deal with it from the same campaign press corps that keeps it going. The press has been telling Kerry: (a) Don’t let charges sit around unanswered; and (b) stick to your issues: Don’t let the other guy choose the turf.

At the moment, Kerry is being punished by the media for taking advice (b) and failing to take advice (a). There was plenty of talk on TV about what Kerry’s failure to strike back said about whether he had the backbone for the job of president — and even when he did strike back, he was accused of not doing it soon enough. But what does Bush’s acquiescence in the use of this issue say about whether he has the simple decency for the job of president?

Whether the Bush campaign is tied to the Swift boat campaign in the technical, legal sense that triggers the wrath of the campaign-spending reform law is not a very interesting question. The ridiculously named Swift Boat Veterans for Truth is being funded by conservative groups that interlock with Bush’s world in various ways, just as MoveOn.org, which is running nasty ads about Bush’s avoidance of service in Vietnam, is part of Kerry’s general milieu.

More important, either man could shut down the groups working on his behalf if he wanted to. Kerry has denounced the MoveOn ads, with what degree of sincerity we can’t know. Bush on Monday — finally — called for all ads by independent groups on both sides to be halted. He also said Kerry had “served admirably” in Vietnam. But he declined an invitation to condemn the Swift boat effort.

In both cases, the candidates are the reason the groups are in business. There is an important difference, though, between the side campaign being run for Kerry and the one for Bush. The pro-Kerry campaign is nasty and personal. The pro-Bush campaign is nasty, personal and false.

No informed person can seriously believe that Kerry fabricated evidence to win his military medals in Vietnam. His main accuser has been exposed as having said the opposite at the time, 35 years ago. Kerry is backed by almost all those who witnessed the events in question, as well as by documentation. His accusers have no evidence except their own dubious word.

Not limited by the conventions of our colleagues in the newsroom, we can say it outright: These charges against John Kerry are false. Or at least, there is no good evidence that they are true. George Bush, if he were a man of principle, would say the same thing.

Yep. There’s negative campaigning and then there is character assassination, smears and dirty tricks. That the press is having such a difficult time sorting out the difference is one of the central problems with our country today. Indeed, it’s killing us.