Destroy Them, Please
If they can get the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” affair into a matter of “he said / he said” muddled waters, they win.
Never mind it’s more a matter of “He said / forget what he said, ’cause the he who said that said this back then, and the records said” matter.
I had thought that the matter would end up not penetrating beyond the conciousness of the true-believer, the Newsmax reader. See: in their worldview “Kerry opened this up by having his tour in Vietnam such a central part of his campaing.” I fail to understand. Kerry opened himself up to a pile of sick lies and innuendo because he’s using Vietnam as part of his campaign? If they can say that Kerry threw a grenade at himself to earn a medal, can I say that during Bush’s absense from the Texas National Guard that he had a gay lover in Alabama?
Nonetheless, it’s had an effect in the polls. The only way Bush is going to win…
How do these things work? How do you respond to these items without dignifying them?
McCain was torpedoed in South Carolina, as Bush operatives suggested that McCain’s time as a POW turned him into a loose-cannon. John Micah Marshal is correct: Kerry’s second ad response, with the footage of McCain addressing Bush on his sleazy campaign tactics, is better than the first one. But, it’s a week late. Kerry needed to pick up on McCain’s statement “This is the same thing they did to me”, and run with it as the essential truth of the smear.
(The unfortunate by-product there being that it props up McCain for a likely 2008 race… he being in a perfect position to pick up the pieces of the Republican Party when Bush implodes whether in 2004 or 2006… I think I prefer Chuck Hagel, who’s already expressed his intention on running, for the Republican nomination, and to help fumigate the worst parts of the Republican Party out. McCain is overrated. As for doing away with the worst parts of the Democratic Party… ie: John Kerry’s foreign policy is going to hemmed in from Joseph Lieberman and his co-leadership in ‘Committee on Present Danger’ III — who knows what that would take?)
Part of the effect seems to come from the “Alan Colmes Rule”. I heard him on the radio the other day, condemning the Moveon.org response to the “Swift Boat Vets”… as if the two were the same thing. He’s playing with the White House talking points, and accepting them in an effort for supposed balanced. Needless to say, his counterpoint partner, Sean Hannity does not feel the need to go along with this. The center of gravity and understanding shifts awkwardly.
Go back to the rise of Joseph McCarthy. I need to look it up to see who, precisely, but either Bobby Kennedy or Hubert Humphrey were instrumental in aiding McCarthy’s rise to prominence. This makes a good deal of sense: Cold War Liberalism and the Bi-Partisan concensus. Harry Truman red-baited the Henry Wallace crowd during his 1948 run, or rather his surrogates did.
Flash forward to Watergate. Here, I’m reading from an old Walter Karp essay, where he looks back at the reporting of Watergate and finds it all disappointing: the problem being that the Media was pretty much dragged into covering it all, and did a great deal of equivocating reportage… and tended to settle on the storyline of “Donkeys versus Elephants”. (As a cynical aside: it can be pointed out, Watergate was / is par for the course to the powers that be.)
The question is: how do you throw the final death-knell on this annoyance, with the same burst and explosion that was seen when McCarthy was eventually destroyed? As Nixon’s crimes were eventually exposed? (I don’t know who defends Nixon these days — McCarthy gets his fair share of accolades from Ann Coulter, Mike Savage, and the John Birch Society.)