Those Awful Republicans

It's probably the influence of What the Matter With Kansas, but Democrats have convinced themselves that they are fine upstanding campaigners and Republicans are full of dirty tricks. This was a common theme during the primary. Hillary would run an ad like the 3:00 am one and Obama would say that only a Republican would do something so despicable. Obama's justification for not taking public financing was that he needed a big warchest to counter all of the coming Republican dirty tricks.

This post is typical:

Defensive plays like "FightTheSmears" are all well and good, but where's the offense? The GOP keeps throwing roundhouse blows. When they start to lose they make like Mike Tyson and bite somebody's ear off. Meanwhile Democrats fight by Marquis of Queensbury rules -- that is, if they deign to fight at all.

Kerry and Gore were such wooden candidates that the Democrats could as easily have nominated a wooden fencepost but they have convinced themselves that Kerry lost because he didn't fight back hard enough.

So, how clean are the Democrats' hands?

FactCheck.org doesn't think much of Obama's newest anti-McCain ad.

By using months-old quotes and selective editing, the Obama ad distorts McCain's assessment of the economy.

Then there is the way that the Democrats cut McCain's comments on the rich from the weekend His original answer and the way that the DNC cut it are both here. McCain gave a good answer, refusing to divide the country into class warfare. The Democrats totally changed what he said. After this, how can they ever claim that their hands are clean?

Where they ever as pure as they say? In 2000 they obsessed that Bush would pull an October surprise but they pulled a November surprise instead, releasing documentation that Bush had been arrested but not convicted of drunken driving during the days that he drank.

2004 had the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth who meticulously documented every assertion they made about Kerry. The other side ran ads saying that if Bush was reelected he would reinstitute the draft.

Then there was the 60 Minutes story about Bush being AWOL from the TANG. This was totally based on forged memos produced by a Democratic operative who insists that a woman he didn't know passed them to him at a rodeo and that, for his own protection, he copied the then destroyed the originals. The National Enquirer wouldn't run a story that fishy but CBS did and the Kerry campaign had a series of ads already prepared to run when the story fell apart.

The truth is that the Democrats fight dirty and always have. It's just that they don't recognize it because they feel that their cause is pure so anything they do is justified. On the other hand, they see the Republicans as evil so anything that the Republicans do must be a dirty trick.