An Age-old Question and Smears

Will John McCain's age be a factor in this year's election? Probably less so that Barack Obama's inexperience and rookie mistakes on foreign policy.

The McCain campaign has done a pretty good job at combating any of those concerns by 1. Trotting out his quite sharp, 95-year-old mother to stump for him. And 2. Cindy McCain's invitation to reporters to keep up with her husband's hectic schedule.

I think Democrats would be smarter to ask the American people if they want to elect a jail-bird to office. After all, someone who spent 7 years in prison has to be worrisome.

Blogger Dick Polman raises the age question and commited a howler in the process.

According to Polman: "Republicans are accustomed to smearing Democrats as terrorist-friendly weaklings on national security and not suffering any verbal blowback."

Polman must have missed the hysterical reaction of the Democratic establishment when George Bush recently denounced appeasement as an effective way of dealing with terrorists and the states that sponsor them. Bush didn't mention any political party or any person in particular and the highest ranking Democrats in the land assumed Bush was talking about them.

Well, maybe he was in a round about way. Certainly, Obama has left himself open to criticisms of naivete when he said he would meet with terrorism supporters like Hugo Chavez, Mamoud Ahmadinejad, etc. without preconditions. And certainly it doesn't breed confidence in Obama when a spokesmen for a terrorist organization like Hamas says they would prefer him to be the next president of U.S.

But no verbal blow-back?

Maybe Polman thinks this is the exception that proves the rule. But Democrats have been whining loudly and for years about Republicans who have supposedly questioned their patriotism and stength in dealing with foreign enemies.

However, the strongest critics of the Democrats' weakness on national security has come from other Democrats, like Georgia's Zell Miller and Connecticut's Joe Lieberman.

In the meantime, when it comes to "smearing," they have been happy to engage in calling specific Bush administration officials liars, supporters of torturer, criminals, etc. over the past 7 years.

When it comes to smears, the Democrats and their fellow travelers on the left are peerless.