Democrats Will Lose by Playing Dirty

Democrats have been pummelling McCain recently - pummelling him like a little kitten batting at a wall. Pounding on him like a nightmare fight where your fists move sloooowly through the air and never quite connect. Wailing on him like... well, you get the idea.

There have been two recent points of attack:

The US will stay in Iraq for 100 years
Democrats have been flooding the airways with ads claiming that McCain wants to keep fighting in Iraq for a hundred years. They're calling him a warmonger and a continuation of Bush.

In reality, what McCain said was, "As long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed, that’s fine with me. I hope that would be fine with you, if we maintain a presence in a very volatile part of the world." He specifically said he was not talking about a fighting force, but a presence such as the US has in Japan or South Korea.

The Democrats are slamming McCain for talking about how to manage post-occupation Iraq. Maybe the Democrats should get off their truth-spinning butts and start talking about this important issue themselves.

McCain didn't vote for Bush in 2000
Arianna Huffington is making a huge hullabaloo over a conversation she says she had with McCain in 2001, in which McCain said he didn't vote for Bush. She claims that McCain's current refusal to criticize Bush shows "just how far he has fallen since then in his hunger for the presidency."

McCain denies the whole thing and Huffington has very little credibilty, but let's assume it's true that he didn't vote for Bush in 2000. So what? Bush had just beat McCain in a bitterly contested primary; McCain was probably still licking his wounds.

The fact that McCain is refusing to criticize a deeply unpopular president (currently 28% in the approval ratings) is an honorable move. Unlike Obama, who regularly belittles Bill Clinton's presidency, McCain is standing by his party and his president.

I'm not saying I want McCain to score points. I don't want him to be the next president. But when attacks are stupid and unfounded, as these two are, they might make the rabid partisans happy but they put off thoughtful people. They could even backfire and make some voters more likely to support McCain.

And they certainly don't bolster the Democrat line about change and rising above the fray. They just seem like more dirty politics: lying to the voters, twisting the truth, character assassination, same old same old.

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