Rove and the Swifties are back -- and the media is still their toy

Krugman marks the event. Rove and the Swifties are back, with or without Rove the man. They serve John McCain, aka Bush III -- aided mightily by a dying, desperate, media engine:

Op-Ed Columnist - Rove’s Third Term - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

... It was predictable that the McCain campaign would go wild over the Clark remarks. Mr. McCain’s run for the White House has always been based on persona rather than policy: he doesn’t have ideas that voters agree with, but he does have an inspiring life story — which, contrary to the myth of the modest maverick, he talks about all the time. The suggestion that this life story isn’t relevant to his quest for office was bound to provoke a violent reaction.

But the McCain campaign went beyond condemning General Clark’s remarks; it went out of its way to distort them. “This backhanded slap against John as not being a worthy warrior because he just got shot down is one of the more surprising insults in my military history,” said retired Col. Bud Day, who participated in a conference call organized by the campaign. In fact, General Clark had said no such thing.

The irony, not lost on Democrats, is that Col. Day himself has done what he falsely accused Wesley Clark of doing: he appeared in the 2004 Swift boat ads that impugned John Kerry’s wartime service...

I once wrote that McCain was the least bad of the 2008 GOP slate. That might still be true, but it's like saying that a rabid fox isn't quite as bad as a rabid wolf.

McCain is bad news, because of the party he represents, because he's repudiated almost everything honorable he's ever said (signing on for the torture policies) and because he'll be another Rovian pawn.

I don't love Barack Obama. Anyone capable of winning in modern American politics has to be an egomaniacal loon with sociopathic tendencies. That's who Americans want. Doesn't matter. Obama is light years better than McCain.

The real problem, of course, is that the media is still playing along with Rove and the Swifties. They're playing along because they're drowning and grasping for straws, and the public hasn't rejected these ploys.

It's the 4th of July today. A good time to remember that we are still in a democracy, and that the American people need to stop falling for media ploys, so the desperate media will raise their own game.