Republican degeneracy is its own reward?

Posted on by

Rafe Colburn comments on the slime machine:

“On some days, I try to convince myself that all politicians are the same, that they all run negative campaigns, and that they all try to smear their opponents. But the truth is that they’re not all the same. The awful truth, though, is that the Bush campaign and the Kerry campaign are not the same, and the Bush supporters and Kerry supporters are not the same. What this campaign is really teaching us is that if you want to be President, it is better to do nothing in life than to attempt to distinguish yourself in any way before aspiring to higher office. Kerry’s service in the Vietnam war and tenure in the Senate are being used to bludgeon him in ways that I honestly wouldn’t have imagined before the campaign. George W Bush accomplished nothing before he became governor of Texas, and he’s better off for it. “

Colburn is despondent today, thinking that the Swift Boat Veterans will torpedo Kerry’s chances to win the presidency all on their own.

“It’s been a lot of work for me to keep up with the inaccuracies and outright lies from the Swift Boat Vets, and I know that most people aren’t putting in the effort that I am. Unless people do begin to see this group as an unofficial arm of the Bush campaign willing to tell any lie to smear Kerry, I think that Kerry’s campaign is basically over.”

But Josh Marshall thinks Kerry is getting fighting mad, discussing a new Kerry campaign ad which uses 2000 footage of John McCain castigating candidate Bush’s attempt to besmirch his war record, finishing with a shot of Bush’s speechless trapped face that cannot fail to convince us what a shameless coward he was, and is. It strikes me that this is as much Kerry’s response to McCain’s re-embrace of the President, about which I wrote below, as to Bush’s smear attack.

And Ed Fitzgerald holds a hand out for people trying to find a way to kick the self-deceived-Republican-vote habit:

“…We’re here to say that we’re not holding it against you folks who voted for Bush, somehow deluding yourselves into thinking that the President of the United States can effectively make good decisions by picking them from a menu provided by his staff and advisors, without himself having much of an idea what it all means.

Don’t feel embarrassed, we’ve all done stuff we’d like to forget, but also don’t think that you’re locked into position on this thing just because you made a mistake four years ago. Look around — there are plenty of people who did the same thing as you did and who have now recognized their error and mustered the will to make the big change. You can do it too, we’ll help you get through it.”

Fitzgerald is building on this wonderful plain speakin’ from Matt Yglesias:

“The job of the president of the United States is not to love his wife; it’s to manage a wide range of complicated issues. That requires character, yes, but not the kind of character measured by private virtues like fidelity to spouse and frequency of quotations from Scripture. Yet it also requires intelligence. It requires intellectual curiosity, an ability to familiarize oneself with a broad range of views, the capacity — yes — to grasp nuances, to foresee the potential ramifications of one’s decisions, and, simply, to think things through. Four years ago, these were not considered necessary pieces of presidential equipment. Today, they have to be.

…(T)o state what should be obvious, the president is not your father, your husband, your drinking buddy, or your minister. These are important roles, but they are not the president’s. He has a job to do, and it’s a difficult one, involving a wide array of complicated issues. His responsibility to manage these issues is a public one, and the capacity to do so in a competent and moral manner is fundamentally unrelated to the private virtues of family, friendship, fidelity, charity, compassion, and all the rest.”

Reduced to its essence, Yglesias is trying to hammer home a single concept, on which I repeatedly harp here — that, as he puts it, “intelligence matters more than character.” FmH readers will know that I have been pretty despondent about the voters’ receptivity to this notion.

But, hey, Bush and his slimy ilk just sink further and further into their sleazy morass, as made clear by this pair of columns from Bob Herbert and Paul Krugman on their latest Florida dirty trick. Maybe even the voters who still believe they need to vote for righteousness regardless of brains will have their eyes opened if this sort of thing continues.

PS: Do voters who like South Park have a sense of humor?