Today's Political Rant

Robert Novak, the columnist who is fast becoming the media's chief douchebag, is at it again in this column. I've linked to it for you to judge for yourself. Novak interviewed Retired Rear Admiral William Schachte Jr. who seems to have a differing account of an incident involving John Kerry's first Purple Heart than the one Kerry presents. The primary differences, from what I can tell, are that Schachte says he was there and Kerry wounded himself, whereas Kerry says Schachte was not there and that the wound was not self-inflicted. I'm not paying too much attention to this because it is completely irrelevant to the process at hand, but that seems to be the gist of this particular facet of the argument over whether John Kerry really deserved the medals he was awarded (for my money, the Navy said he deserved them and since they're the ones giving out the medals, their judgment stands). However, I had to check one little tidbit of the retired Admiral's story because, well, with the Internet, I can. The final paragraph of the Novak column is as follows:

Schachte said he never has been contacted by or talked to anybody in the
Bush-Cheney campaign or any Republican organization. He said he has been a
political independent who votes for candidates of both parties.

However, if you go over to this website where you can look up contributions to political campaigns and look up "Schachte, William," you will find that he gave $500 to the election campaign of a South Carolina Republican and (wait for it) $1,000 to the campaign of a certain "Bush, George W" on 2/18/04. Now, the way campaigns work is that donors send campaigns money, and campaigns send donors thank-you notes. Now, I'm sure a "thanks" for the 10 C-notes" is not the kind of contact meant in the above quotation, but it is contact nonetheless. Whether this is intentional dishonesty, and if so if it extends to the rest of his statements is not for me to call. However, it is for Robert Novak to research statements like that, and the rest of the article, before he prints something that can be demonstrated as false by anyone with an internet connection and 10 minutes to kill.

I propose a statute of limitations on slingable mud in political campaigns. Unless something involves actual criminal charges being brought, I'd say anything more than about 25 years old should be deemed irrelevant to the process. To put the current fracas in perspective, two generations of the current electorate were not even of legal voting age when the Swift Boat incident in question occurred.