BUSH HAS NEW AD FEATURING KERRY WINDSURFING
Boy, Kerry's windsurfing must poll terribly.
The Bush campaign is rolling out a new ad, featuring Kerry windsurfing, with the image of him surfing, changing from left to right and back and forth, as an announcer points out his rapidly-changing positions for and against the same bill or issue.
The closing line: "John Kerry: Whichever way the wind blows."
THE MEDIA ANGER AGAINST CBS BUILDS
From The New York Daily News' Michael Goodwin:
Would you trust anything you saw on CBS now? I wouldn't. Until we know exactly what happened, the entire news division has forfeited our trust and the benefit of the doubt. Guilty until proven innocent.
Even David Letterman, the network's funnyman, poked fun at the news division. His Monday show spoofed an evening-news lineup, then asked, "Can you guess which story isn't true?" Ha-ha.
The line that you're in trouble when late-night comedians make fun of you has a new corollary: You're in really big trouble when your own comedian makes fun of you.
Maybe Rather will come to his senses. He told The New York Times he wasn't worried about himself, adding: "I am concerned about the reputation, integrity and honor of CBS News and the people that I work with. . . . I love the place. I would never do anything to harm it at whatever expense to myself."
Okay, big fella, prove it. Step aside until all the facts are on the table. In this case, that's what love means.
As the Daily News is a non-conservative New York paper, this article is likely to cause a stir in the CBS Newsroom.
COVERAGE OF THE SWIFT BOAT VET AD
From the Washington Post:
The meeting, however, was not a secret. Kerry, a leading antiwar activist at the time, mentioned it in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April of that year. "I have been to Paris," he testified. "I have talked with both delegations at the peace talks, that is to say the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and Provisional Revolutionary Government," the latter a South Vietnamese communist group with ties to the Viet Cong.
Kerry's campaign said earlier this year that he met on the trip with Nguyen Thi Binh, then foreign minister of the PRG and a top negotiator at the talks. Kerry acknowledged in that testimony that even going to the peace talks as a private citizen was at the "borderline" of what was permissible under U.S. law, which forbids citizens from negotiating treaties with foreign governments. But his campaign said he never engaged in negotiations or attended any formal sessions of the talks.
"This is more trash from a group that's doing the Bush campaign's dirty work," Kerry spokesman Chad Clanton said. "Their charges are as credible as a supermarket rag."
In an interview yesterday, John O'Neill, an organizer of the Swift boat group and co-author of the anti-Kerry book "Unfit for Command," said it would be "unprecedented" for a future commander in chief to have met with enemy leaders. "It would be like an American today meeting with the heads of al Qaeda," he said.
Thought One: Boy, another great, specific, detail-filled rebuttal from the Kerry campaign! Couldn't they have at least tried to argue that the Paris meeting was innocent, and try to describe what Kerry did at the meeting?
Thought Two: "It would be like an American today meeting with the heads of al Qaeda." Team Kerry better have a good defense to refute that talking point, because if that one sentence comparison breaks through the media static and gets into voter's heads, Kerry will make Walter Mondale look like Bill Clinton.
KERRY WAS BRIEFED ABOUT LOCKHART'S CALL?
From Wednesday's edition of the New York Times:
Michael D. McCurry, a former press secretary to President Bill Clinton who recently signed on as an adviser to Mr. Kerry, told reporters traveling with Mr. Kerry that the campaign was trying to determine who in its ranks had been in contact with Mr. Burkett.
Mr. McCurry said that Mr. Lockhart had approached Mary Beth Cahill, Mr. Kerry's campaign manager, in the last few days to tell her that he had had a brief telephone conversation with Mr. Burkett. Ms. Cahill, he said, told Mr. Kerry, who did not think anything needed to be done in response.
Mr. McCurry said that he believed that the only other contact was a telephone conversation between Mr. Burkett and former Senator Max Cleland of Georgia, a prominent Kerry supporter among veterans.
Oh, how I hope John Kerry's response to Cahill was, "Uh, Mary Beth, why on earth was Lockhart wasting his time talking to that guy? Didn't I hire old Bug-Eyes to, you know, help with the campaign's message?"
Oh how I suspect it wasn't.
Another interesting bit from that story:
"I think, as a practical matter, that anything about Bush's record has become about the CBS documents," said Mark Penn, a Democratic pollster. "It is hard to generate a story about Bush's record that isn't regurgitating how Dan Rather apologized for those documents."
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