Addicted To TANG

You know, I really do want to keep both feet on the ground. I really do want to avoid underestimating the opposition. And, especially after beholding (and begrudging) eight years of mastery from Maestro Sick Willie himself, I keep expecting John Kerry to finally come to his senses and start helping himself and his foundering campaign instead of digging himself deeper in the hole that is swallowing it.

But he just won’t stop, because, apparently, he either doesn’t get it, or doesn’t want to get it.

It's not October, but the Kerry campaign is playing perhaps its final card for a surprise with the help of Dan Rather and 60 Minutes. On Wednesday, stories began breaking that Ben Barnes, the former speaker of the Texas House of Representatives and former lieutenant governor, was breaking his off and on silence and telling how he pulled strings to get a then-young George W. Bush into the Texas National Guard.

I keep telling myself that they can’t possibly be serious. That they have to realize that throwing one more “spitball” at a man who has already been fusilladed by them and survived it all is a hopelessly futile act not worthy of the word “strategy.” That they have to know that Bush never has, and is not, running for re-election on his National Guard tour of duty. That he has gone embarrassingly out of his way to praise John Kerry’s Vietnam service and just a few days ago declared it to be far more valorous than his own. That they’re pushing on an open door. That nobody is going to be distracted by this, and Bush won’t be diverted off-message. And that this return to the “gotcha” scrap heap will not change the subject from Vietnamgate or his vacant Senate record, and will be seen as precisely the sort of “fear and smear” tactic that he’s spent the last week or two petulantly decrying.

And yet…

’This is clearly the Kerry campaign's response to the Swift Vets controversy, and we predicted that it would happen,’ says [a] Bush associate. ‘We've known it would come back at some point.’

Don’t they know that Mr. Barnes is one of their own fundraisers? Or that he has been a notoriously unreliable source? Or that every senior Texas National Guard official has stated that no favoritism was shown for Bush, and that Bush served honorably during his time in the National Guard? Or that there is so much more scandalous revelation that will come out about Kerry?

The John Kerry camp should be careful about how much mud it flings. According to media sources in New York for the campaign, a number of national media outlets have already completed or close to completing several major investigations into possible Kerry fundraising irregularities, as well as what one media source calls ‘devastating’ stories of Kerry's time in Paris when he was meeting with Communist Vietnamese officials.

’Americans have no idea what Kerry was doing during that time in Paris,’ says a journalist. ‘It makes the Swift Boat ads look lightweight by comparison.’

Can Kerry really be this petty? This short-sighted? This tangential? This undisciplined? This stupid?

Here was his “instant response” tonight:

For the past week, they attacked my patriotism and my fitness to serve as commander in chief,’ Kerry said. ‘We'll, here's my answer. I'm not going to have my commitment to defend this country questioned by those who refused to serve when they could have and by those who have misled the nation into Iraq.’

Not one speaker this week attacked Kerry’s patriotism. Every last one of them honored his service in Vietnam. Even Zell Miller (see below), in his fire & brimstone peroration, went out of his way to stress that it was Kerry’s judgment he was questioning. And that does pertain to his fitness – which is sorely lacking.

And the proof of it is that he completely ducks the substantive dismantling of his Senate record and runs right back to “I served in Vietnam!”

Nobody cares that he served in Vietnam. Haven’t for months. Except the Swifties. And they’ve destroyed that cover.

The one thing on which he doesn’t flip-flop is completely and utterly irrelevant to the here & now. And on everything that does matter, he’s well-nigh incomprehensible.

Libs can continue stoking their caustically anti-Bush stereotypes all they want, but it’s their guy who’s hopeless.