SLEAZE, CONTINUED

Partisanship seems to have hardened even further in August, it appears. I’ve now gotten many emails defending the honor of the anti-Kerry Swift Boat vets and claiming that they had nothing – nothing – to do with the Bush campaign. Please. Do I think the vets have a right to say what they believe? Of course they do, and 527s are fine with me. Free speech and all that. Am I exercising a double-standard by not worrying about the Kerry-backed 527s? Hardly. I don’t recall my being soft on MoveOn.org and all the other hysterical anti-Bush screeds; and their connections to the Kerry campaign are obvious. But there is something different between cheap, ugly shots at presidential policy and quibbling with a man’s war medals. And it is surely naive to believe that the Bush campaign was unaware of this and that their Texas cronies didn’t help finance and produce the ads. If this had never occurred on Bush’s watch before, you might dismiss it. But obviously it is an old tactic he deploys whenever he needs to. I said so in the 2000 campaign, long before I endorsed Bush. Here’s my take on his pandering to the Bob Jones crowd in South Carolina. Again, I haven’t changed my mind. I just haven’t rented it out to partisanship. I owe no apologies to people who want me to.