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Politics : Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Kerry -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: CalculatedRisk who wrote (45008)	8/25/2004 6:17:28 AM
From: redfish	Respond to of 81568

Swift Boats and the Texas Nexus Published: August 25, 2004 President Bush should stop evading responsibility and unequivocally condemn the attacks on Senator John Kerry's Vietnam War service that are being orchestrated by negative-campaign specialists deep in the heart of the Texas Republican machine. Mr. Bush says that Mr. Kerry's record is admirable and something to be proud of. Yet he allows these politically useful ads to continue spreading unfounded charges that Mr. Kerry fabricated his medal-winning experience as a Swift boat commander. The attempt to contradict the federal government's own records about Mr. Kerry's record is the work of a transparently partisan group led by a longtime Kerry antagonist, John O'Neill, a Swift boat veteran recruited by the Nixon White House to counter Mr. Kerry's denunciations of the war when he returned from Vietnam. The operation's start-up money came from big-money Texas donors long supportive of Bush political causes; some principals have ties to the "independent" attack ads that blindsided another Vietnam veteran, Senator John McCain, in his 2000 primary contest with Mr. Bush. Rather than single out the Swift boat group, Mr. Bush condemned all such stealth-party activities, Democratic and Republican, which have sprung up to evade legal restrictions on the flood of "soft money'' into political races. Mr. Bush called on Mr. Kerry to join in renouncing these specialists in low-blow politicking - an idea we applaud. This page has long criticized the Democrats' pioneering soft-money evasions, and the Federal Election Commission's refusal to control these rogue operations. But the president had hardly finished speaking when the White House began sidestepping, insisting that Mr. Bush had not intended to single out the anti-Kerry ads as something that should be stopped. This is unfortunate. Senator McCain has called on the administration to "specifically condemn" the ads. Senator Kerry invited debate on his war service by making it a keystone of his campaign. But that means fair debate. Some of the veterans in the ads criticizing Mr. Kerry have praised his courage in the past. No one has offered evidence to contradict the record. By failing to condemn the ads, Mr. Bush leaves the impression that he condones this effort to turn the historical record into a partisan blur. nytimes.com