Outside the Beltway

Respond to Vile Republican Attacks

James Joyner · Tuesday, September 14, 2004 · 2 comments

I haven’t commented on the last few messages from the Kerry campaign but found this one particularly amusing:

From: “Mary Beth Cahill, Kerry-Edwards 2004”
Subject: Respond to vile Republican attacks

Every incumbent seeking re-election needs to defend his/her record. But George Bush can’t defend his record of exporting jobs, soaring health care costs, dangerous dependence on Middle East oil and a disastrous foreign policy. His campaign only has one strategy left: throw all their resources into a negative campaign spreading lies about John Kerry.

What we’ve seen during the past few weeks is just the beginning. The Republicans are continuing to spread their lies about John Kerry. The Democratic Party is crucial to our campaign’s strategy of responding to these slanders. The sooner you can make your donation to the Democratic Party, the better — by receiving your contribution now, the Democratic Party will be better able to budget and plan its future response to these vile assaults.

***

You know how the Bush-Cheney attack machine works: their false, malicious, and slanderous campaigning is going to continue, and the lies are going to keep coming. You’ve seen their pattern — they register an outrageous charge and poison our politics; then a few days later, they retract their statement. Dick Cheney’s recent remark about the increased likelihood of terrorist attacks if John Kerry were elected is just another example of this strategy in what has become the most negative presidential re-election campaign in modern history.

So, a letter complaining about the negativity of the Bush campaign uses the words “vile” (x2), “lies” (x3), “slanders/slanderous” (2), “assaults,” “false,” “malicious,” “outrageous,” and “poison” in the space of three short paragraphs. The only example they adduce is itself a well-documented distortion of what Cheney actually said and which in any case is certainly more defensible than the charge that Bush is somehow responsible for exporting jobs or our dependence on Middle East oil. And, indeed, their calling our foreign policy “disastrous” is precisely what Cheney opined about a Kerry foreign policy, which they cite as a “outrageous charge.”

Update (1236): And this comes on the same day that the DNC lauches a negative ad on Bush’s Guard service. It’s right on their website: DNC Video: Fortunate Son. And, yes, it’s already been discredited by major news organizations.