From my point of view there have been very few to no attacks on any of the candidates that don't have some sort of backing from other sources, though of course everyone is entitled to ignore or disagree with the sources presented. None of the criticisms have come out of left field. Of course, liberals have a much easier time when virtually the entire media is on their side. When conservatives are left with basically the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal (the main paper is very liberal, and oddly liberal Al Hunt is the editor of the editorial section), Fox News, the Boston Herald, the New York Post, and the Washington Times, we have to rely on liberals to criticize their own when coming up with evidence against them, seeing as the use of any of the sources above or the blogosphere are immediately discounted by leftists. Fortunately, that's not too hard to do since there's so much to criticize about them that they eventually leak into the leftist press. <beg>
I will have to say that the blogosphere, though rarely used as a source here, has its own uses especially when the MSM ignores certain issues, and they do so often. Without the blogosphere, Dan Rather's fraud against President Bush with those forged documents would never have come to light.
I'm still wondering why people are criticizing the Swift Boat Veterans so much as a tool of the right, especially since they weren't. Agree with them or not, they independently formed out of people who had served with John Kerry, not all of them being right wing Republicans. Many of the members were liberals who supported other Democratic candidates. Their chief spokesman was an Edwards supporter. When all but four of the people who served with him joined the group (who were still alive), and only one of those four came out to support Kerry, that tells me there's something to them. It seems to me, though, that the left wanted to delegitimize them somehow as a defense of Kerry by casting them all as the far right wing. Perhaps the men were angry that Kerry had turned into a big anti-war activist who accused his fellow soldiers of killing civilians deliberately, and were making everything up. We'll never know since we weren't with those men. But to dismiss them out of hand as a tool of the right wing shows a disregard of the mounds of eye witness testimony they produced.
You can even say that the left invented things about Bush when it came to his Air National Guard service to unjustly smear him. It was a myth that his dad got him in when the man in charge of recruiting said that there was no waiting list for officers, only for enlisted men. It was a myth that he had tried to avoid combat when he volunteered three times for Palace Alert, a program that would have sent him immediately to Vietnam. He was turned down by his superiors each time because he lacked sufficient hours in his jet. It was also little known that his unit was actually in Vietnam at the time he joined, but had returned by the time he completing basic training. To me, that doesn't sound like a coward who was trying to avoid combat at all costs.
Originally posted by ccmalo:
btw, what to make of Biden's reference to Franklin Roosevelt being President in 1929 and his television chats? Did he mean that as a joke?
It's quite well known that Joe Biden makes A LOT of gaffes when he isn't reading prepared material. I think he just didn't think through his answer very well and said something that gave his opponents a lot to laugh about. I'm sure if he sat down and thought about it, he would have remembered that Hoover was president and that TV's didn't reach the American public until the early 1950's. Most will just laugh and say, "Oh, that's just Joe."
Another recent Joe gaffe was when he insisted he would never support clean coal ("Not here in America!"), only to be reminded that his boss supported clean coal. He then had to backtrack and claim he'd always supported it and was merely misquoted, despite his voting record that was solidly against clean coal. That was one of his whoppers in the debate. I'm not sure why he had to do that since no two people agree on everything. Just as an example, it's well known Palin and McCain disagree on drilling in ANWR.
