[DeltAlum]

Great news for "rumor" fans.

I checked the Boston Globe, Newsweek, NBC, CBS, ABC, FoxNews, CNN, Time, The Washington Post, NY Post and a few others and:

I finally found a mention of a possible "affair" in the NY Daily News.

You have to look hard, so I added bold type.

Way down at the bottom, it mentions a "rumor..."

It is in an article called:

Dirtiest election campaign ever?



By THOMAS M. DeFRANK
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF


John Kerry on the election trail.


President Bush

WASHINGTON - It's ugly, early.
With 37 weeks left until the balloting, the battle for the White House is already awash in the kind of character assassination and bare-knuckled innuendo usually reserved for the closing days.

"It's meaner, sooner, and it's going to be meaner, longer," says Thomas DiBacco, an American University professor emeritus and author of a popular U.S. history textbook.

Why the premature nastiness?

Several operatives from both parties and political historians agreed that deep emotional divisions in an unusually polarized electorate are largely to blame.

The intensity of the personal antipathy toward Bush by many Democrats is matched by deep-seated animosity toward Kerry and his liberal voting record by Bush's conservative backers.

Fordham political science Prof. Thomas De Luca noted that such personal demonization of candidates has been getting worse for at least a decade.

"There's been a tendency to judge the agenda of a candidate by his moral propriety," De Luca said. "If Bill Clinton was [allegedly] evil because some of the things he did, then his policy agenda must also be evil. That kind of attitude creates even more intensity."

Already in this campaign, Bush has been accused by Democratic Party chief Terry McAuliffe of going AWOL from his National Guard duties in the 1970s - a felony - and Kerry is the target of rumors about alleged extramarital encounters.

Democrats also have charged Bush with lying to the country about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and Vice President Cheney with jawboning CIA analysts to doctor intelligence estimates to justify the Iraq war.

Firing back in kind, Republican national chairman Ed Gillespie complained in a Nevada speech:

"It's only February, and [the Democrats] have made clear they intend to run the dirtiest campaign in modern presidential politics."

Simultaneously, the Bush-Cheney campaign E-mailed 6 million supporters a Web video slashing Kerry as a tool of special interests. The video is titled "Unprincipled, Chapter 1."

Not to be outdone, a DNC spokesman trashed the video, noting: "George Bush has taken more special interest money than any person in history. He couldn't even put this ad on television, because he knows he can't appear in it to back it up."

White House press secretary Scott McClellan, meanwhile, has angrily accused Democrats and reporters of "gutter politics" and "trolling for trash" by pressing for answers on Bush's military service.

There's little doubt the scorched-earth rhetoric will only get worse as Nov. 2 approaches. Both parties have spent millions of dollars on opposition research, and as one expert in such black arts said, "You save your best stuff for later, when people are paying attention and it has more impact."

DiBacco, for one, isn't concerned about more mudslinging: "Dirty politics is actually good, because it puts the candidates to the test and gives people a chance to see their character."

And of course, it's nothing new. Some of America's political paragons regarded smear tactics as just part of the price of doing business.

"If I were to try to read, much less answer, all the attacks made on me, this shop might as well be closed for any other business," Abraham Lincoln once wrote after a barrage of attacks.


The mudslingers' guide

Kerry

- Accused of being 'tool of special interests'

- Target of rumors about an extramarital affair

- Relentless criticism of his liberal voting record


Bush

- Accused of going AWOL from National Guard duties

- Accused of lying over Iraqi weapons of mass destruction

- Accused of taking special interest money

Originally published on February 15, 2004


Look, friends. It may well be that Kerry had this affair. And maybe some news organization will publish the "proof."

What drives me crazy is when folks look at a self proclaimed right or left wing secondary media and decide it must be the truth. They see something the want to believe, and suddenly, it's Gospel. These guys have their own agenda, and it's just nuts to believe everything they say.