Seattle Post-Intelligencer Friday editorial, reproduced in <$NoAd$>full …
The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign is taking on water. Hole after hole has been blown in the group’s credibility. We hope the damage is sufficient to finally sink 30-year-old anguish over the Vietnam War as a campaign issue.
The campaign to smear Sen. John Kerry took three more direct hits this week.
Despite repeated assertions that the Bush campaign had no connection to the anti-Kerry group, the campaign’s counsel, Benjamin Ginsberg, resigned, conceding that he’d provided legal advice to the swift boat bunch. One of the group’s founders was commander at the time of a task force whose report confirmed that on March 13, 1969, Kerry’s boat was involved in “an enemy-initiated firefight.” And an Oregon lawyer who appeared in a Kerry-bashing ad faces a state bar association complaint that he was misleading in a sworn affidavit alleging that Kerry had not earned his Purple Heart medals.
One man who can — and should — blow this nasty campaign out of the water is President Bush. His recent call to ban all campaign advertising by all such outside groups — known as 527 committees — is not only insufficiently critical of the swift boat campaign but also restraint of free speech.
The answer, Mr. President, is not to restrict the use of political free speech, but to condemn its abuse.
Exactly right.
Later we will discuss the unfortunate fact that the Executive Editor of the Washington Post doesn’t seem to understand what his job is.
