This is in the Weekly Standard?

Hard to believe, but one of the soberest, fairest assessments of what’s going on with the shrill anti-Kerry crusade is to be found in one of America’s most unappealing journals. So it has a good chance of reaching America’s most conservative readers. I could scarcely believe what I was reading. It’s more typical of the New Republic than the Weekly Standard.

The dissonance and frustration this year’s election rouses in the mind of the dedicated Republican cannot be underestimated. Conservatives actually do revere the military, without reservation. It is not their inclination to debunk combat heroes. Some Republicans, when they drink enough beer, really do wonder whether civilian control of the military is such a great idea. For them, it was never plausible that our boys in Vietnam had “personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads . . . cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians,” and so on, as young John Kerry testified they did.

Yet in 2004, Republicans find themselves supporting a candidate, George W. Bush, with a slender and ambiguous military record against a man whose combat heroism has never (until now) been disputed. Further–and here we’ll let slip a thinly disguised secret–Republicans are supporting a candidate that relatively few of them find personally or politically appealing. This is not the choice Republicans are supposed to be faced with. The 1990s were far better. In those days the Democrats did the proper thing, nominating a draft-dodger to run against George H.W. Bush, who was the youngest combat pilot in the Pacific theater in World War II, and then later, in 1996, against Bob Dole, who left a portion of his body on the beach at Anzio.

Republicans have no such luck this time, and so they scramble to reassure themselves that they nevertheless are doing the right thing, voting against a war hero. The simplest way to do this is to convince themselves that the war hero isn’t really a war hero. If sufficient doubt about Kerry’s record can be raised, we can vote for Bush without remorse. But the calculations are transparently desperate. Reading some of the anti-Kerry attacks over the last several weeks, you might conclude that this is the new conservative position: A veteran who volunteered for combat duty, spent four months under fire in Vietnam, and then exaggerated a bit so he could go home early is the inferior, morally and otherwise, of a man who had his father pull strings so he wouldn’t have to go to Vietnam in the first place.

Needless to say, the proposition will be a hard sell in those dim and tiny reaches of the electorate where voters have yet to make up their minds. Indeed, it’s far more likely that moderates and fence-sitters will be disgusted by the lengths to which partisans will go to discredit a rival. But this anti-Kerry campaign is not designed to win undecided votes. It’s designed to reassure uneasy minds.

Did I really read that in the Standard?? Am I missing something, or is this a confession of sorts, an admission that bush is in trouble with his base? An admission that they can’t stand the guy, and would be tempted to vote for Kerry — so much so that bush had to concoct a false scenario to get them firmly back with him? Again, if this were in a liberal rag I wouldn’t flinch. But to read it in that bastion of right-wing closed-mindendness, the Weekly Standard — well, let’s just say I’m blown away.

Via Meme-orandum

The Discussion: One Comment

I would just to take this moment to say welcome to Bizarro world. Feel free to bring mittens when visiting hell. I am sure next week, we will see Instapuppy praising Hillary Clinton or the drones at the Free Republic hailing Al Gore.

August 21, 2004 @ 11:01 pm | Comment

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