Joe doesn't get it

Poor Joe Klein just doesn't get it.

Kerry's only hope is to get nasty? Repeating the National Guard AWOL myth months after Bush's fellow Alabama Guardsmen came forward to share memories of his service during the time he was supposed to be missing isn't nasty? Responding to the President's falling off his bicycle with a crack about training wheels wasn't nasty? An entire campaign full of slander, personal attacks and outright falsehoods about one's opponent isn't nasty?

The past four years of Democratic rhetoric hasn't been nasty?

In the last analysis, a record of having voted against just about every major weapons system the country has deployed over the past twenty years and a hopelessly weak record on funding just about every aspect of national defense and intelligence during the same period can't be offset by simply trumpeting, "But I served in Vietnam, and they didn't!" Nor can the Kerry campaign be rescued by descending further into the muck by fighting even dirtier than they have all along.

Nor, finally, was there anything even slightly nasty or inappropriate in the Republicans holding Kerry accountable for his own record last week- though with his record, I can understand Kerry and his supporter Joe Klein feeling otherwise.

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