Hitchens blasts off over Kerry

He takes a closer look at some lower than low cheap shots being taken by the Kerry campaign. And I thought this was supposed to be a “positive campaign” by Kerry? Well, I guess it is. Positively rotten. Chris Hitchens explains more:

Allowance made for choreography, stagecraft, and all the rest of it, there need be no doubt that the Democrats in Boston sincerely wish to “project” the idea of compassion for the underdog, inclusiveness in general, and perhaps above all a degree of care and measure in foreign policy. The AIDS victim in South Africa, or the Bangladeshi woman hoping for a new well: These are sufferers and strugglers who would get genuine applause whether it was Barack Obama mentioning them or not. Of course we understand that our future is bound up with theirs.

But in the last few weeks I have been registering one of the sourest and nastiest and cheapest notes to have been struck for some time. In a recent article about anti-Bush volunteers going door-to-door in Pennsylvania, often made up of campaigners from the Service Employees International Union, or SEIU—one of the country’s largest labor unions—the New York Times cited a leaflet they were distributing, which said that the president was spending money in Iraq that could be better used at home. The mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsom, recently made the same point, proclaiming repeatedly that the Bay Area was being starved of funds that were being showered on Iraqis. (He obviously doesn’t remember the line of his city’s most famous columnist, the late Herb Caen, who referred to San Francisco as “Baghdad by the Bay.”) These are only two public instances of what’s become quite a general whispering campaign. And then on Thursday night, Sen. Kerry quite needlessly proposed a contradiction between “opening firehouses in Baghdad and shutting them in the United States of America.” Talk about a false alternative. To borrow the current sappy language of “making us safer”: Who would feel more secure if they knew that we weren’t spending any tax dollars on Iraqi firehouses?*snip*