With NARAL pulling its scurrilous ad about Supreme Court nominee John Roberts, Democrats are in major whine mode about how they’re not playing it tough enough. Check out Dana Milbank in the WaPo today and listen to Bob (I’ve Lost 7 Presidential Elections!) Shrum and Chris (Fire Me and I’ll Slime You) Lehane moan and cry about how Republicans play hardball and Democrats are too nice. Their operative text seems to be: See, Republicans didn’t repudiate the Swift Boat guys and they told lies, so why can’t we tell lies too?
Well, first of all, in the early going of the Swift Boats, the Wall Street Journal and others did repudiate them — until it began coming clear that they WEREN’T lying, that there was a great deal of truth in their revelations and that wasn’t true might not have been true because of the difficulty of reconstructing the events of the days in question, not because they were intentionally deceiving.
And in the second place, this onanistic praise Democrats like to offer themselves that they’re just too good, too nice, too moral to fight dirty is belied by innumerable instances of Democratic sleaze-hardball that go conveniently down the rabbit hole whenever they speak.
I mean, we’re talking about Chris Lehane here. Google him and see what comes up and him and John Kerry and Wesley Clark and Matt Drudge.