...why he, for all intents and purposes, took a month-long "time out" in August while Rove and his Texas money men HAMMERED him with the Swift Boat ads. FREE airings of the FULL CLIPS as "news items," 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, on MSNBC, CNN, Fox...and while others expressed their outrage, there was no "damn the results I will speak my conscience" speech from the target of the attacks.
At the time, on DU, posts from people asking "What is Kerry doing? Why isn't he responding and challenging this?" were most often met with replies of "Shut the f**k up, Kerry knows what he's doing."
There were a LOT of flame wars on these threads about Kerry's "strategy" in dealing with attacks from Rove, Hughes and Bush.
Newsweek claimed (if you want to believe them) that in private with friends and family members, Kerry regularly and emotionally vented about the Swift Boat ads during that "silent" time...the article specifically mentioned several calls he made to his daughter Vanessa.
Then there are the comments from Keith Olbermann (
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6210240/) on Kerry's latest e-mail and video:
"But the video is just plain weird. The phrasing of the start of the relevant passage—“Regardless of the outcome of this election”— is open to the same kind of parsing and confusion usually reserved for the latest release from Osama Bin Laden. Those seven words are extra-temporal; they are tense-free. In them he could be describing an election long-since decided, or one whose outcome is still in doubt.
And the timing and delivery of the message are equally confusing. No notification to the media? When much of the mechanism of political coverage is kick-started by statements like this one? And its issuance on a Friday afternoon— the moment of minimum news attention so famously titled “Take Out The Trash Day” on the NBC series “The West Wing”?— is perplexing, if not suspicious.
It has the vague feel of deliberate ambiguity, as if Kerry is saying to those who are plagued by doubts about the vote just seventeen days ago, that he agrees with them, but they shouldn’t tell anybody. It’s exactly what these confusing times do not need: more confusion."
So I just...don't...know.
:shrug: