Speaking about hostility and flaming, this is from today's Washington Post:
Sen. John McCain and his Republican allies are readying a newly aggressive assault on Sen. Barack Obama's character, believing that to win in November they must shift the conversation back to questions about the Democrat's judgment, honesty and personal associations, several top Republicans said.
This sounds really bad to me, and it smacks of the Swift Boat campaign that helped George W. Bush defeat John Kerry. I'm still appalled at how the GOP smear campaign managed to make a decorated Vietnam war hero look cowardly compared with a man who never served his country in Vietnam at all, perhaps thanks to his infuential father. Well, I think I understand why the Swift Boat campaign worked, and it was not because Americans were almost criminally gullible and willing to listen to anything the GOP said. No, it was because most Americans wanted to give Bush more time to win the war on terror that he himself had started. Most Americans probably felt, and probably rightly so, that John Kerry wouldn't be as committed to winning the Iraq war as George Bush would be. To put it simply, the question of who had been a war hero in the past paled beside the question of who would be a war hero in the present.
Well, the American people shouldn't feel obliged to give McCain more time to steer America down a path along which America has already been shooed for almost eight years now. I fervently hope that a GOP smear campaign won't work this time.
Ann
