Bloodless Coup

Hold your horses, there, Tonto. Your article talks about how Kerry eliminated those lines from his speeches yesterday evening, after taking flak for two days about shooting off an opening salvo against the President when he first heard news of the tape. The Presidential President, on the other hand, said this shouldn't be a political issue. And quoting an unnamed GOP strategist in the last weekend of the campaign is just a little more than suspicious.

i also remember reading quotes of bush campaign officials deriding kerry for not allowing twelve hours to pass for the nation to absorb the information. needless to say, bush didn't wait so long, nor could he; and since he turned his response into a political rally as well, what this amounted to was a plea to let bush have the first and only opportunity on friday to spin the event to his benefit. needless to say, had kerry followed this advice, he would have missed one whole news cycle, of the four news cycles remaining before election day. it's a good thing bush has americans' sensitive psyches at the top of his priority list.

more: it's an unnamed GOP strategist as well as another individual associated with BC'04. and if you're going to question their veracity, then you really shouldn't go on to turn the one-line throwaway about what kerry may or may not have eliminated from a speech, which of course came from an unnamed source, into a counterattack on this point.

if you really believe that the lines attributed to the two GOP sources don't fit with a campaign run by carl rove and manifesting the sort of tactics we've been incapable of ignoring for the past few months, then there's no discussion to be had. but in all seriousness, this sort of thing is a fact of life in all campaigns, where the focus has to be on the effect of different things; it just so happens that somebody in the GOP camp has loose lips, and confirmed what anyone could have inferred. life's tough when your own people are leaking like a seive in the week before the election.