I love Jonathan Alter......and he wrote what I've been feeling ever since the repugs pulled out their dirty bag of tricks during the 1st Clinton campaign. It's time for us to start hitting back hard. It's time for the Kerry campaign to stop being girly men and women.:grr:
Shortly before the 1992 election, a World War II veteran approached NEWSWEEK and other major media outlets with an unsubstantiated story about how he said he saw President George H.W. Bush strafing unarmed Japanese fishermen in the Pacific when both men were young Navy fliers. None of us published or broadcast the explosive allegations until after the election, and if we had, Bill Clinton's campaign indicated it would have denounced them. The same thing happened in 2000, when a book called "Fortunate Son" alleged youthful illegal activities by George W. Bush. No one from Al Gore's campaign would touch the story until later, and the book was withdrawn by the publisher.
Contrast those with the case of the Swift Boat veterans, whose thoroughly discredited accounts of John Kerry's Vietnam service have been treated with respect and whose book is now a best seller. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5853704/site/newsweek /