Junkyard Politics. . .

. . .cries the Kerry campaign. Which leads to the question, "Where you been?" Since campaigning started, the President has endured: (1)Being the target of a feature length crockumentary given the sort of fanfare normally reserved for Spielberg, with a healthy dose of French film festival adulation thrown in for good measure. (2)CBS aired accusations of special treatment in Bush's Air National Guard service using forged, fake documents in an attempt to influence the election, which even though it ultimately worked against the network, belies the news division's self-portrait of an editorially balanced organization dedicated to objective truth, wherever it may lie. What leads one to wonder just how much they didn't get caught at.(3)Every delusional actor in Hollywood who can be convinced that slandering the President in time of war is a sure career booster has done so. (4)A billionaire internationalist financier has rather openly committed a considerable fortune to the prospect of his defeat.

At the same time, Kerry has enjoyed what for all intents and purposes is a news blackout on the story told by the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth, as well as a press so fundamentally ubalanced (in every sense of the word) that it afforded four days' worth of coverage on the Today show to a book which exists for the sole, undisguised purpose of creating controversy for his opponent.

The only thing Bush can be thankful for regarding his treatment in the media is the fact that Rupert Murdoch hired Roger Ailes.