Republican's A Short History of how Family Is Open Game

[AuntPatsy]

Anyone believing that the republicans are the good guys in all this need to go back in time...just a snippet of what they so love to do and what the MEDIA did not call them on once in eight years!


http://hnn.us/articles/8008.html


A look back at previous Bush family presidential campaigns—in 1988, 1992, and 2000—reveals a disturbing pattern of personal attacks on the families of their opponents, a variation on the larger theme of character assassination that also has included impugning the patriotism of opponents (Dukakis, Clinton, McCain, and Kerry) and questioning their mental health (Dukakis, McCain, Gore, and Dean). Perhaps at this point, in the middle of the fourth Bush presidential campaign, the increasingly docile media simply accepts this strategy as business as usual.

The smearing of Teresa Kerry by Bush surrogates was already under way as Kerry spoke, and has only increased in frequency and vitriol. Radio-show host Rush Limbaugh, who was praised by Bush as “a national treasure” when his drug habit got him in trouble with the law last year, has mocked Mrs. Kerry’s personal appearance and refers to the Kerrys as “Mrs. John Heinz and John F-ing Kerry” on his website. Fellow radio conservative and best-selling author Michael Savage, who has hosted Dick Cheney on his show, has spent hours fixated on the “wife who looks like a deranged lunatic,” describing Teresa Kerry as “sinister” and “spooky” because of her accent. “This is America—foreign accents don’t sell,” declared Savage, who also called the Kerry daughters “losers” and Elizabeth Edwards “a disaster” and “a deficit to the campaign.”

In what might be the first-ever racial attack on a presidential candidate’s wife, a radio ad directed at black voters denigrates the African-born Mrs. Kerry as “a white woman, raised in Africa, surrounded by servants”—essentially, a colonialist oppressor, although in reality she actively protested apartheid.

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The accounts by Wilson and Clarke are remarkably similar to President Bill Clinton’s recent revelation of the threats he received when he was considering a presidential run. In My Life, Clinton describes a 1991 phone call from the Bush White House’s Roger Porter, threatening to destroy him if he runs: “We’ll spend whatever we have to spend to get whoever we have to get to say whatever they have to say to take you out.”

Looking at subsequent personal attacks by the Bush machine, it appears that Clinton was not exaggerating. Four years ago, after Senator John McCain defeated Governor George W. Bush by a shocking 19-point margin in New Hampshire primary, a follow-up victory in South Carolina might have propelled McCain all the way to the nomination had he not been stopped by an intense campaign of dirty tricks.

“They know no depths, do they? They know no depths,” McCain said at the time, reacting to the misleading ads being run against him. Yet the negative ads about his voting record were a minor matter compared with the smears of McCain’s family. In an article for the Boston Globe, McCain campaign manager Richard H. Davis recalled:

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http://www.perrspectives.com/blog/archives/001059.htm

McCain's past hatred for George W. Bush is the stuff of legend. As Time reported in March 2000,

McCain showed a visceral disgust towards Bush and his scorched earth campaign:

But many close McCain advisers think the personal rift between the two men is too wide to bridge, at least in the near term. After all, the last time Bush tried to smooth things over-at a South Carolina debate in early February-the result was less than promising.


During a commercial break, Bush grasped McCain's hands and made a sugary plea for less acrimony in their campaign. When McCain pointed out that Bush's allies were savaging him in direct-mail and phone campaigns, Bush played the innocent. "Don't give me that shit," McCain growled, pulling away. "And take your hands off me."


John McCain could certainly be forgiven for his anger, given the painful memories of character assassination, smears and lies the Bush camp dished out during the 2000 campaign. After McCain's upset win in the New Hampshire primary, Bush operatives during the critical South Carolina contest phoned voters with push polls implying McCain was anti-Catholic, his wife Cindy a drug addict, and that he had fathered an illegitimate black child with a prostitute.

(In reality, the McCains had adopted a baby from an orphanage in Bangladesh.) McCain even received an early version of the Swift Boat treatment, with allegations that his Vietnam War captivity in Hanoi left him mentally unstable. All of these slurs came as candidate Bush chastised McCain that he couldn't "take the high horse and then claim the low road." It's no wonder he angrily rejected Bush's feigned attempt in 2000 to bury the hatchet.

But by 2004, John McCain was looking towards his next White House run - and life after Bush. McCain's presidential ambitions let him forgive sins past in order to rebuild relations with Bush and the Republican establishment. McCain's long road back began during election 2004. McCain not only stumped for George W. Bush, but joined the chorus of the Swift Boat hacks by stating that "what John Kerry did after the war is very legitimate political discussion."

(Only the previous month, McCain himself called the attacks on Kerry "dishonest and dishonorable.") Dana Perino was exaggerating only slightly when she claimed today that "in 2000 and 2004, Senator McCain went on to work his tail off to help this president."