The uses of sophistry

Kerry is practicing the time honored technique of accusing your opponent of doing exactly what you've been doing to him. Fred Barnes points out that Kerry treats any criticism of him as "smearing and sliming" while he denounces Bush as being behind the Swift Boat Vets for Truth. Kerry's campaign undoubtedly does more to coordinate with 527s than Bush's ever has.

Why does he employ such blatantly dishonest tactics? Because they work. He can't publish the truth about his vaunted service in Vietnam, because he knows it will only raise more issues than it will solve, so he has gone to the Goebbels "Big Lie" technique, which he knows no Democrat will question. Basically he's depending on the basic ignorance of Democrat core constituencies like union workers and blacks who believe whatever inflammatory bilge their leaders dump on them, as well as the ignorance of undecided voters, who if they paid the least interest to this campaign would have made up their minds long ago. The problem for Kerry is that this can only work for so long before people start to notice that he's not offering any evidence for his charges.

Maybe he thinks that his droning rhetoric will put us all into a trance. It certainly glazes my eyes, but the Republicans haven't done a very good job at countering it. Maybe that's a false impression on my part, since I live in Utah, hardly a battleground state.