<font color=brown> Like I've posted before.........Bush and Rove have gone to the well too many times with these kind of tactics. The backfire has begun......how many votes do you think Bush will lose ultimately over this fiasco?<font color=black>
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NOT SO SWIFT
George Bush and Karl Rove are catching a whole lotta blowback this week. Plausible deniability is no longer possible. Not that anyone should be surprised or even disappointed that the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth do indeed have some cozy (and possibly illegal) connections to the Bush re-election campaign. These kinds of relationships are common between “official” campaigns and their brutal surrogates, who are called on to make the kinds of ugly attacks sitting presidents like to keep at arm’s length.
The resignation this week of Bush campaign attorney Benjamin Ginsberg, after The New York Times revealed that he was an active adviser to the Swift Boat Veterans group, only emphasized those ties. An unhappy Ginsberg, who also worked on the 2000 Florida recount for Bush, called the press’ attention to his role a “stunning double standard.” That’s at least partly accurate. The activities of the vets are the kind of dirty tricks not uncommon on either side of the political spectrum. But somehow the attacks on John Kerry’s military record seemed to cross a line that even the mainstream press could no longer ignore. First, the official record contradicted the attacks. And revelations about connections between the vets and the Bush camp have been emerging almost daily. Ginsberg was just the one who got caught.
This comes after weeks of the Bush campaign insisting that the activities and expensive television advertisements of the veterans group were done without its involvement, and that the president couldn’t stop them if he tried. No one should be fooled by such talk. If the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth expressed a need to attack the war records of Bush Sr. and Bob Dole, the White House would quickly find the means to silence them. The vets performed a valuable service for Bush: They undermined a key Kerry campaign strength – his war record.
And they performed the role well, even if some of Kerry’s accusers have the look of men who have spent years in search of Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, conspiracy fiends for whom actual evidence is hardly necessary. But they have a right to despise the Democratic challenger for any reason they want, whether it’s for his harrowing testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 22, 1971, or for what they may perceive as his shortcomings as a soldier. If Bush wants to join them in these attacks, he should at least be honest.
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