1) The Kerry campaign is calling on George Bush to denounce the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth and tell them to stop airing their ads which question Kerry's service in Viet Nam and criticize him for his anti-war activities after he returned.
The hypocrisy in this situation is that the Kerry campaign is not telling the 527 groups that support it to stop airing their ads that question Bush's service in the National Guard and even declare that he was AWOL. The Kerry campaign itself has raised this issue. Bush himself has never questioned Kerry's service nor questioned whether or not he deserved his medals. Yet because he doesn't come out and instruct SBVT to stop their activities, something he has no authority to do anyway, the Kerry campaign is equating it with active support, this despite the fact that the Kerry campaign is acting the same way, and has even gone further.
2) The Kerry campaign has filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission regarding what it calls illegal ties between the Bush campaign and SBVT.
In fact, attorney Benjamin Ginsburg has resigned as National Counsel to the Bush campaign because he had given advice to SBVT. This advice was on how to proceed so that they would not run afoul of campaign law. Here is an excerpt from Ginsburg's resignation letter:
I am proud to have given legal advice to American military veterans and others who wish to add their views to the political debate. It was done so in a manner that is fully appropriate and legal and, in fact, is quite similar to the relationships between my counterparts at the DNC and the Kerry campaign and Democrat 527s such as Moveon.org, the Media Fund and Americans Coming Together.
Neal Boortz outlines what Ginsburg is referring to:
The Bush campaign, though, has released a list of the top 10 connections between John Kerry and the 527s, including: Joe Sandler, who is general counsel to the DNC, while also serving as legal counsel to Moveon.org and Moving America Forward. Also, a Moveon.org staffer recently joined the Kerry campaign as director of online communications and organizing. How's that for extensive connections? There are more, but you get the idea.
These are all extensive connections between the Kerry campaign and Moveon.org, the same group that is smearing President Bush by running ads that lie about his military record in the Texas Air National Guard. These are proven lies, unlike many of the Swift Vets accusations, which Kerry hasn't even responded to.
The list of the top ten connections between Kerry and the 527's can be found here.
Whether or not the various 527 groups are telling the truth or not is coming to matter less and less to me. What is really telling is how the two campaigns are responding to them. The Kerry campaign has not presented sufficient credible evidence that SBVT are wrong in all their allegations (though, at this time, I am not convinced that the allegation that there was no enemy small arms fire during the events for which Kerry was awarded the Bronze Star are true). In fact, one of the allegations (Christmas in Cambodia) has been conceded by the campaign, though they naturally tried desperately to spin it so that it doesn't really appear that's what they're doing. Instead, the Kerry campaign threatens lawsuits and sends poor Max Cleland on an errand to deliver a letter to Bush's Crawford, TX, ranch (and here's the Bush campaign's response).
The Bush campaign, on the other hand, has called for a stop to all of the ads being aired by 527 groups, including SBVT, MoveOn.org, etc. That's still not good enough for the Kerry campaign because they know that their 527's are providing support several orders of magnitude greater than those that support Bush (see: George Soros) and they don't want to lose that support. Sorry guys, can't have it both ways. And if you think the American people can't see that you're trying, well I guess you always did think we all were just stupid sheep that need your benevolent guidance (translation: rule) because we can't take care of ourselves. Not that the Democrats have a monopoly on insulting the intelligence of the American public, but it seems to be standard operating procedure for them because they sure do it far more often.
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