Dirt-Slinging's A-Comin' (1 of 2)

I see that Josh Marshall agrees with me that rehashing the Vietnam era will help John Kerry and hurt Bush. His attitude on that is "bring it on," too:

It's true that since Kerry has made a big deal of his service that it's open for scrutiny.

But, frankly, I hope they keep going on this angle because the more they push on this front the more it will push the president's service record back to the center of attention. The contrast, on so many levels, is terrible for the president -- a running political wound which hits on all the patterns of skating through on family connections, letting others do his dirty work, and having connected friends clean up his messes.

All that is necessary is that Democrats push back hard on this stuff.

I'm down with that. Kerry's a fighter, and that's not a comparison in which  Bush is going to come off looking better. It could well be that Bush and his political team have created such a bubble around themselves, thanks to the help of the Republican echo chamber from Fox News to the pill-popping bigot Rush Limbaugh to thousand of dittohead blogs - aided and abetted by a mainstream press that has only recently begun to examine Bush's policies with any reasonable level of scrutiny - that they're becoming detached from reality in a self-destructive way.

I mean, dressing up George Bush in a flight suit doesn't make his ducking out on his National Guard service look any more noble. Running ads exploiting the deaths of the victims of 9/11 and the police and firefighters who lost their lives there doesn't just erase his stonewalling of his own commission that is investigating the intelligence failures leading up to it.

Marshall also notes that two of the seediest characters from the Republicans' endless crusade against Clinton are on the job to sling sleaze at Kerry: David Bossie and Floyd Brown. Sid Blumenthal in The Clinton Wars (2003) describes this sleazy pair. Brown at one point was the head of the rightwing group called Young Americans for Freedom, a coarser and unofficial version of Young Republicans. Brown produced the notorious Willie Horton ads for Old Man Bush's campaign in 1988.