“It's stupid, it's stupid, it's stupid"

I’ve ceased trying to come up with new superlatives to describe my incredulity at the depravities of the disloyal opposition and the bizarre incompetence and apparent mental irregularity of their presidential candidate. So here goes, without any inordinate rhetorical festooning.

John Kerry’s latest aimless flailing has grabbed hold of the Rathergate memos and won’t let go of them.

Yes, yes, I know, the DNC is running that two-minute mini-disinfomercial about the “Bush went AWOL” myth, but that’s, well, the DNC. Dirty tricks are supposed to be left to surrogates, proxies, and fellow-travelers. The candidate is supposed to focus on the positive, pro-active, “vision-thing.”

But John Kerry doesn’t have any of that. The closest he came was, “I’m John Kerry, and I’m reporting for duty.” That boat was shot out from under him and apparently he’s having a really, REALLY difficult time dealing with that – so much so that he’s become obsessed with getting his tit-for-tat revenge, and that means dragging the President’s National Guard service out of mothballs and flogging it anew.

But the problem with that is that the latter is ancient history. It’s been trundled out by the Dems in every one of Bush’s campaigns. And even if it was a revelation, it would still be irrelevant because Bush has a three-and-a-half year record as commander-in-chief – on which he most certainly IS running, thank you very much. Meanwhile, Kerry is the comparatively unknown quantity, and the more that he goes back to thirty-plus years ago to go after the incumbent, the more attention he draws to his own Swiftboat Vet problems, which haven’t gone away.

Dem strategists outside the Kerry camp tell the New York Post’s Debra Orin that it makes “zero sense,” and “shows lack of discipline, lack of strategy, lack of message and freelancing — just what a slipping campaign can't afford.”

“It's stupid, it's stupid, it's stupid. Get off the National Guard and all that bull. Every day we talk about the National Guard and Vietnam is another day that George Bush wins. No one cares about thirty years ago," one of them said. Another confirmed the boomerang hazard of this gambit by citing focus-grouping of swing voters this week “where no one even mentioned Rather's Guard flap but an unnerving number ‘parroted back’ attacks on Kerry as a flip-flopper who lied about his Vietnam service.”

"The Kerry people think they didn't attack Bush hard enough. They're dead wrong. More attacks on Bush aren't a reason to vote for Kerry," this strategist says.

That last sentence sums up this entire campaign, and why John Kerry is destined to lose on November 2nd.