This Election is the Republicans' to Lose - and Sure Enough....
Mood:  incredulous
Topic: Stupid Party Tricks
Anyone who opposed John Kerry had reason to be elated as late as last week.

- CBS News, Dan Rather, and at least state-level Kerry supporters were implicated in a scheme to pass off fake memos about the President's National Guard service as a fig leaf for CBS' and Rather's partisan attacks on George W. Bush.

Can you imagine the furor and alarums which would have resulted if, say, it had been Brit Hume and Fox News trying to float faked paperwork about John Kerry's service record? (Not that anyone seems to be doing much with the wealth of genuine dirt on Kerry... )

- Kerry's campaign, even after a superficial "win" in the first debate, still seems stuck in neutral, with Kerry campaigners celebrating a whopping 47 percent approval rating for their man.

That reminds me of a Tank McNamara cartoon in which the protagonist, a retired football player, coaches a Little League team that just... can't... win. The team is re-energized with a new slogan - "Let's go out there and lose by less than the point spread!"

- It appears that Team Kerry may have broken the rules on the first debate, if only smuggling unauthorized material such as a pen and cards or papers into the podium.

Of course, this exposes the major problem with debate "rules" - exactly how does one enforce these rules, or even obtain a moderator who is so inclined?

In retrospect, getting Jim Lehrer to moderate the first debate was almost exactly like getting Fidel Castro to moderate the Khrushchev-Nixon "kitchen debates."

Lehrer's fellow PBS traveler Gwen Ifill promises to do no better in the vice-presidential debate, because she makes her political leanings pretty clear in her own work, often trying to present partisan viewpoints as "mainstream" ones - with the untrue implication that "mainstream" viewpoints are unbiased or even necessarily not evil.

Jim Crow was once a "mainstream" political philosophy in this country, and there were times when the national press either backed it or was too cowardly to oppose it.

Bob Schieffer from CBS News ought to recuse himself from moderating the next Bush-Kerry debate, if only because of his involvement with the ongoing smear campaign against Bush where he works.

Just where are the people from the Republican National Committee who are screaming for Dan Rather's blood? Where are the attack ads exposing "mainstream journalists" as political whores? Just where the hell is Brit Hume when we need a debate moderator?

Lee Atwater, where are you in our hour of need?

Instead of all the ineffectual mewling around, we need attack ads that harp day in and day out on John Kerry -

John Kerry, who as Massachusetts' Lieutenant Governor FORBADE his fellow citizens to participate in civil defense drills against enemy nuclear attack - at a time when the Soviet Union had a relative advantage over us in nuclear weapons and an ABSOLUTE advantage over us in biological weapons, also deliverable by ICBM.

John Kerry, whose intense lobbying of Congress pulled the US out of Southeast Asia and condemned Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodians to mass slaughter, starvation and slavery under Communist regimes;

John Kerry, who, if his votes in Congress would have been the deciding ones, would have denied our troops the Bradley fighting vehicle, the Abrams main battle tank, several product-improvements for fighter planes, bombers, missiles... leaving Soviet, Chinese and Warsaw Pact forces in clear dominance over global battlefields - and in fact, leaving the Soviet Union still a going concern instead of a bankrupt negative advertisement for Communism?

John Kerry... who never met a Marxist dictator he didn't lobby for in Congress - sort of a mirror-image Manchurian Candidate?

John Kerry... who has never publicly retracted his statements before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Communism and (his words) "benevolent dictatorship" are morally equivalent with democracy?

Where are all the ads showing us THIS loser?

All the legitimate, documented evidence anyone could ask for that John Forbes Kerry is NOT who we want as President is just lying around waiting to be published!

Why is the Republican National Committee sleep-walking?