Damned If You Do...

Damned If You Do... - Last week, the President finally started hitting back.

So I suppose this was inevitable This piece, from AFP, is headlined "Kerry and Bush urged to tone down election attacks frenzy".

Try this exercise at home: find where John Kerry is told directly to do anything:

With a new poll showing Bush and Kerry neck-and-neck in the race, senior members of the Republican and Democratic parties appealed to the rivals to change tactics.

"Let's keep it civil so we don't get so nasty that we discourage people from coming out and voting in a very important election," said Senator Joseph Lieberman, who was a contender against Kerry for the Democratic nomination.

This is, of course, garbage - people love negative campaigning, and it only scares off people who take politics waaay too seriously. But I digress.

Senator John McCain, who challenged Bush for the Republican nomination in 2000, said opinion poll verdicts on the campaign of attack adverts and political mudslinging would force them to change tactics.

"If they start getting polling numbers like I think they will of people who will say: 'A pox on both your houses,' then I think it will change. And I hope that it does," he told Fox.

I'm sure you do, Senator McCain. Because this election is, among other things, the first acid test for your idiotic speech rationing law. And so far, it looks exactly like the joke we Republicans told you it would be.

And what's with invoking John McCain every time the media wants a "Republican Dissatisfied with Bush" for one of these stories? The guy's openly pondering running with Kerry! Citing him as a Republican on the national level is the same as Nick Coleman waving Arne Carlson and Elmer Anderson in front of his readers to try to shame Tim Pawlenty - they were old-school, pre-Reagan, Rockefeller Republicans. McCain is a Republican in the same way that Jesse Ventura was a conservative.

McCain said he was hearing from people in his home state of Arizona who are saying: "Look, I'm not even going to vote if this is the way the campaign's going to be conducted."

Tell them to get in touch with John Kerry's foreign leaders.

Posted by Mitch at March 22, 2004 07:39 AM