Bush's Scurrilous Campaign
Lacking the "vision thing," the Bushes have always been down and dirty, nasty campaigners, because the only way to win an election without your own agenda is to thoroughly trash your opponent. Bush Senior famously did that to Michael Dukakis in 1988 by claiming Dukakis was a ridiculous, dangerous liberal who let convicted murderers and rapists out of prison so they could murder and rape again.
Those Willie Horton ads were not official Bush Sr. campaign ads, but they nonetheless were just as coordinated with the campaign as are the Swift Boat ads with the current Bush campaign. (I know the campaign finance laws, thank you. And just because we don't have official coordination – that would be illegal! – doesn't mean we don't have it with a wink and a nod.)
Dubya himself spent a lot of time in 2000 trying to tar Gore with the liberal brush and benefited from the concocted storyline that Gore was some kind of serial exaggerator, a story made from whole cloth and amplified by the conservative commentary echo chamber until it became something like convention wisdom. In the 2000 primaries, Bush attacked John McCain's war record, which is why McCain is always gritting his teeth like he's just taken a giant spoonful of castor oil whenever he says anything about Bush.
So now we have the Bush campaign – let's just call it the extended Bush campaign to acknowledge that the Swift Boat ads are not directly paid for by the official Bush campaign – trying to knock holes in Kerry's Vietnam record on the basis of ZERO EVIDENCE, but on the basis of statements made by people who have hated Kerry for years for his opposition to the war once he returned home.
Read for yourself the pieces in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Chicago Tribune. Curiously, nothing yet in the Wall Street Journal trying to get to the truth of the matter.
Here's the politics behind it all: As long as the Bush campaign doesn't explicitly renounce the attack ads, the impression is left that there is some truth to them, because the so-called liberal media, following its ideology of objectivity, generally refuses to take sides.
Case in point is today's Wall Street Journal headline, "Kerry Moves to Contain Damage From Attacks on His War Record." It doesn't say "False Attacks," just "Attacks." Today's Chicago Tribune, which in other pieces has indeed written of the falsity of the claims, nonetheless reports on the political story with this headline: "Sniping escalates on war service." All of this leaves the impression that the ads attacking Kerry's record are not false; that it's just a "he said/he said" kind of an issue and that's what we get from our "objective" so-called liberal media.
Kerry has fired back with a new ad, that you can view here.
Those Willie Horton ads were not official Bush Sr. campaign ads, but they nonetheless were just as coordinated with the campaign as are the Swift Boat ads with the current Bush campaign. (I know the campaign finance laws, thank you. And just because we don't have official coordination – that would be illegal! – doesn't mean we don't have it with a wink and a nod.)
Dubya himself spent a lot of time in 2000 trying to tar Gore with the liberal brush and benefited from the concocted storyline that Gore was some kind of serial exaggerator, a story made from whole cloth and amplified by the conservative commentary echo chamber until it became something like convention wisdom. In the 2000 primaries, Bush attacked John McCain's war record, which is why McCain is always gritting his teeth like he's just taken a giant spoonful of castor oil whenever he says anything about Bush.
So now we have the Bush campaign – let's just call it the extended Bush campaign to acknowledge that the Swift Boat ads are not directly paid for by the official Bush campaign – trying to knock holes in Kerry's Vietnam record on the basis of ZERO EVIDENCE, but on the basis of statements made by people who have hated Kerry for years for his opposition to the war once he returned home.
Read for yourself the pieces in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Chicago Tribune. Curiously, nothing yet in the Wall Street Journal trying to get to the truth of the matter.
Here's the politics behind it all: As long as the Bush campaign doesn't explicitly renounce the attack ads, the impression is left that there is some truth to them, because the so-called liberal media, following its ideology of objectivity, generally refuses to take sides.
Case in point is today's Wall Street Journal headline, "Kerry Moves to Contain Damage From Attacks on His War Record." It doesn't say "False Attacks," just "Attacks." Today's Chicago Tribune, which in other pieces has indeed written of the falsity of the claims, nonetheless reports on the political story with this headline: "Sniping escalates on war service." All of this leaves the impression that the ads attacking Kerry's record are not false; that it's just a "he said/he said" kind of an issue and that's what we get from our "objective" so-called liberal media.
Kerry has fired back with a new ad, that you can view here.
posted by JFH @ 7:42 AM
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