Feet of clay, they all have feet of clay.

[Jackpine Radical]

Hillary is an opportunistic, triangulating DLC bitch.

Obama is superficial and thinks that Dorothy and Toto were killed with 10,000 others in a Kansas tornado.

Edwards voted for IWR when he should have known better. He also paid too much for his house and his haircut.
Kucinich looks like a Czechoslovakian elf.

Biden got caught plagiarizing.

Pick a candidate. Even a non-candidate. They all got negatives.

Earth-tone Al says he invented the internet & he's kind of a wet blanket at beer parties.

Wes Clark almost started WWIII by playing Chicken with the Russians in Kosovo.

And so on.

My point is that there is no such thing as an unsullied, unsmeared Dem candidate--and if you find one, she won't stay that way for long. So I guess we had better start learning how to discriminate real stuff from trumped-up mud, woodshed our people about the serious matters, and start defending them from the trivial bullshit.

An example: Edwards is a hypocrite because he bought a lavish mansion while proclaiming his dedication to helping the poor?

OK-So what? He has done a lot for small people fighting big insurance companies and he sees the issues clearly. Now, if you want to talk about hypocrisy, what about Newt Gingrich screwing an aide in the parking lot and divorcing his third wife on her deathbed while persecuting Bill Clinton? What about...{insert latest Republican moralist caught in sex scandal here}

Biden caught plagiarizing? Is that comparable to telling the lies that brought us into an unnecessary and immoral war?

Etc.

When there's a REAL issue, let's deal with it. When the Puggies loft horseshit, let's defend our candidates and turn the attack back with the nastier examples from their side. Every time they try to smear one of ours, we need to drown one of theirs in the septic tank. Fortunately, them being them, it's not very hard to do this--they have given us so much material.

[LaurenG]

1. I just had to kick and recommend this.

:hi:

[Jackpine Radical]

2. Thank you.

[SheilaT]

3. I've been saying something like that since 2004.

Every possible nominee has his or her flaws. Every one of them. It's just that each one's flaws are unique to him or her. If Hillary is the nominee, she'll be trashed in a way quite different from Edwards, if he's the nominee. And so on.

I also believe it's a dangerous fallacy to think that someone who's run before (Gore and Kerry) is immune because they've already had the worst thrown at them. Not so. New lies will be told along with the old ones, if either becomes the nominee. It's also wrong to think that we're better off deciding the nominee real early and so get all the hateful stuff out of the way. Again, it won't work that way. They'll come up with new crap every day of the campaign. In fact, it might possibly be better if a true unknown were to come out of a deadlocked convention -- and I realize there is zero chance of that happening -- because then there'd be so little time to mount a campaign against that new, relatively unknown nominee.

In the end, in my opinion, what will matter much more than who exactly is that nominee (and yes, I have ones I'd prefer and ones I'd really hate to see as the president) is that we make sure there really is a free, fair, and honest election this time. In the final analysis Gore and Kerry lost not because of any particular flaws on their part or mistakes in campaigning, but because we did not have a free, fair, and honest election either time.

[Jackpine Radical]

4. You're right.

We have to find ways to get our signals out under the radar, as in using the net. We have to squelch the Swiftboat attacks and instantly counterattack. That's a pretty alien idea for Democrats.