The first and obvious question to be asked after Karl Rove’s latest Swift Boat Stooge assault is, “What else can you expect?” Rove is like Murray Chotiner was to Richard Nixon, Rove’s political idol, and what the late Lee Atwater was to Bush’s father, George I, an unsubtle attack dog. Unleashing Republican hacks to attack John Kerry’s war record was clearly to be anticipated. As Maureen Dowd predicted in a well done opinion piece in the Sunday New York Times, this was only a prelude to a second and more prolonged attack on John Kerry’s war opposition, which is already in place with a second ad taking anti-war activist Kerry’s comments to the United States Foreign Relations Committee totally out of context.

While Kerry ultimately responded, challenging Bush to debate their respective military service records face to face, which certainly will not occur, it was lamentable that the response took so long. Another point was also lamentable, and hopefully the strategy will be corrected before major harm ensues. Kerry is allowing Senator John McCain to emerge as the “campaign’s conscience,” to use the term employed by pundit Mark Shields last week on The Lehrer News Hour. This is a foolhardy strategy, as evidenced by what it has wrought thus far.

When Houston lawyer turned author and Vietnam veteran John O’Neill’s attack book was released and the first Swift Boat attack ad was launched, the Democratic activist bloc MoveOn.org was much swifter off the blocs than Kerry. MoveOn met the assault head-on with a devastating ad sharply condemning Bush for distorting Kerry’s record and seeking to divert attention from his own appalling record of unexplained absence in Alabama during what was supposed to be a period of National Guard duty.

Backing Kerry up and supporting the ad were two bona fide military heroes, former NATO commander General Wesley Clark and Jimmy Carter’s CIA director, Admiral Stansfield Turner. This counterattack was squarely within the Bill Clinton-James Carville strategy employed against Bush I in the winning 1992 presidential campaign, part of a rapid response team assault. Kerry would do well to emulate Clinton in that regard by launching a rapid response team, as was suggested by this columnist weeks ago.

So what happened when the MoveOn.org ad surfaced? Kerry requested that it be removed. Why? Because John McCain, who had previously denounced the initial ad featuring Rove’s Swift Boat Stooges, complained that this ad was also out of bounds and should be removed. Kerry listened and the request was made.

Should McCain be dictating Democratic strategy? It has just been announced that Bush will be using him in all of the battleground states and that he is expected to campaign hard on behalf of the man whose operatives unleashed a disgraceful assault on him in South Carolina in 2000. McCain has praised Bush for valiant leadership in what Democrats correctly call a tragic quagmire, Iraq, and he is scheduled to be one of the key speakers at the upcoming Republican convention.

McCain was also more than willing to participate in a fallacious ad after Kerry selected Senator John Edwards alleging, without proof, that the North Carolinian had been Kerry’s second choice after McCain. Does it make sense, therefore, to be following up on McCain cues?

The Kerry response plays into the hands of what certain Republicans are saying about the military service issue. Some, like John Fund of the Wall Street Journal, believe that if the debate is played out fully that it is a loser for Bush. In a recent television appearance Fund nervously sought to dismiss the whole issue relative to the Bush AWOL question by stating nervously, “He received an honorable discharge.” Certain Republicans have stated that the Democrats cannot have the issue both ways, and that if Democrats want to complain about the Republican ads, then they in turn have no right to make an issue of Bush’s service record.

This argument has one basic flaw. Military records, as well as past statements from current Swift Boat critics, support the position that Kerry’s citations were earned and deserved. In legal circles there is a term called percipient witnesses. In this case the percipient witnesses, those on the scene, support the same view, that there was enemy fire and that Kerry acted courageously during the conflict in question. Another fallacy is that Kerry served as his own public relations mouthpiece to secure the citations. Kerry had to be recommended by others for such distinguished honors, and was.

As for Bush and his military service, records have allegedly disappeared and nobody can be found who actually saw him in Alabama performing his National Guard duties during the period under scrutiny. Let us reverse the argument. If the same fact situation existed with any Democratic candidate being in the line of scrutiny, would the tender mercies of Rove, Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Bob Dole, and John O’Neill say, as they would have the Democrats say at present, “Enough, let us move on to other issues”?

An even brief reflection into the history of Rove’s Swift Boat Stooges yields volumes. O’Neill first emerged as a Richard Nixon operative primed by his attack dog Charles Colson to discredit Kerry, who was detested in White House circles in the early seventies. This was the same dirty tricks period that ultimately resulted in Nixon resigning from office in disgrace in the wake of imminent threat of removal by the United States Senate.

The book that O’Neill used as his initial launching pad for the attack on Kerry was published by Regnery. Affiliated with its distributor, National Book Network, Regnery was purchased a little over a decade ago by the parent company that owns Human Events, a publication so extreme that Ronald Reagan’s White House operatives hid it from him for fear he would seek to put some of the dippy far right solutions contained therein into practice. Its current star columnist is Ann “Liberals are Traitors” Coulter.

Regnery has been a cottage industry for irresponsible right wing tomes, including Gary Adrich’s Unlimited Access, in which the author contended that Bill Clinton escaped from the White House to engage in early morning trysts at the nearby Marriott Hotel and that Hillary Clinton decorated that White House Christmas tree with pornographic ornaments. Regnery also published a book by the Los Angeles police officer that presided over the ruthless beating of African-American Rodney King. The company also launched the career of the irresponsible tirade and smear artist Ann Coulter.

O’Neill’s coauthor is Jerome R. Corsi, who has admitted to writing anti-Semitic, Anti-Catholic, and anti-Islamic screed on the Internet. Some right wing blogging sites have sought to dismiss any complaint about Corsi by citing him as an editor not responsible for the book’s content. This is false. Corsi is listed as coauthor. If John Q. Liberal had written a book with a Maoist collaborator we know that there would have been relentless criticism from rightist ranks.

The two Swift Boat attack ads were produced by the same group that did the hatchet job ad on Michael Dukakis riding in a tank. There are also substantial ties of the group to Karl Rove, a leading donor of the Texas Republican Party, and the infamous South Carolina ads against John McCain.

Now George W. Bush has come forward with a blanket denial of all ads produced by so-called 527 groups. He has called for all of them to cease. Very courageous, indeed! Bush knows that these ads have enabled the Democrats to surmount the dominance that the Republicans have through using Bush as a shill for special interest groups. Remember, this was the same bunch that last year boasted that Bush would score a dramatic landslide of Reagan 1984 proportions due to their huge advantage in fundraising.

Bush and his cronies are used to winning in one fundamental way, by exploiting a stacked deck. The one thing they fear above everything else, like the schoolyard bully, is an even fight. The Democrats have a huge edge on the issues. If Kerry can stay on message and allow articulate surrogates, such as the true-life military heroes who stood on stage with him in Boston to refute vicious lies, it is Bush and the Republicans who will emerge as the battered losers as Bush I and his cronies did against Clinton in 1992 after attempting to use the Vietnam War against the skillful Democratic nominee.