Reply #29: Yep, that's more or less it [View All]

In the end, it may be a mutually assured destruction, so I suppose the more vindictive partisans will have their joyous day.

It was sad, though, because Clark improved a lot during the whole thing, and his attacking of Junior's foreign policy was delicious to hear. At the end, of course, Clark erased any emotional appeal by his actions that I mentioned before.

Lying is a light switch, and should be. When a candidate deliberately tells an absolute untruth on a major issue, especially one that's been used and rebutted before, that is a pull the plug act. Dean pissed me off by saying that he was the only Democrat in the house, especially when he was almost the most conservative of the bunch, and he irritated with his fatuous pronouncements, but when he lied deliberately about the tax-cuts, he proved himself not only unelectable, not only reckless, but deeply unprincipled. Add to that moral failing the savagery and incomprehensibility of calling Kerry a Republican, and I really can't understand any who'd not have lost the love by now. Sure, residual affection is to be understood, but undying allegiance? Those who would still stand by a candidate after that are lost in some kind of swirl of denial or equivocation. Beyond that, those who would grant their champion the right to lie are morally suspect themselves.

Sadly, much as the early Clark supporters came in with such fervor and dismissiveness that they even shocked the Dean supporters, many of his gathering supporters--the vast majority, in fact--were very gentle and idealistic types. For them, it must be mystifying to hear this crossfire, not to mention unjustified on our part.