Dole Gets More Pompous

I saw a preview (trust me, my stomach and sanity won't permit me watching the whole thing) of Joe Scarbrough's show on MSNBC tonight where Bob Dole responds to charges that he was improperly critical ("hey, your wound didn't bleed") comments about John Kerry on CNN's Late Edition on Sunday.

What little I saw showed classic Dole: mean, little, snide, arrogant (but with his also classic obvious insecurity underlying the bravado), and far more critical of Kerry. This seems strange considering there remains, all these decades later, some critics of Mr. Dole's self-reported bravery in an earlier war.

This seemed so strange to watch after just hearing about the Marine soldier's father in Florida who, upon getting the news of his first born son's death in Iraq, set a military van on fire and climbed in, being wrestled out by the military folks who came to give him the horrible news.

Is someone like Mr. Dole going to come out later and question this young man's heroism in Iraq as Mr. Dole has Mr. Kerry, the entire GOP did with Max Cleland? Before you insist, "Of course not", think again. Are you sure? If it's for Mr. Bush's political gain, I think it is certainly possible this could happen. Nothing, after all, matters as much to the right as Mr. Bush's re-(s)election.

Already, the right is respinning the focus saying that Kerry is telling any veteran who doesn't support him to shut up. That's hardly the case. But the right is very good at what they do: defining a debate (even if there is no truth to that definition), and the press AND the Democratic machine allowing them to do so.