Supporting Bush is immoral--reason number 2

His campaign viciously trashed a Republican war hero, Senator John McCain, in order to obtain votes in South Carolina in 2000.

Dangerous right-wing activist though he may be (and it's amazing how many "moderates" and "liberals" have never bothered to check his record), McCain's extraordinary service and personal courage in Vietnam cannot be disputed, nor can his commitment to war veterans.

But in 2000, it was McCain's commitment to veterans that was twisted, lied about, and used as part of a campaign to defeat him in South Carolina. Charging that Senator McCain had "turned his back on veterans," Bush swept through the state with a huge win. But the charge about ignoring veterans was the nice part of the campaign: The Bush campaign distributed materials calling McCain "the fag candidate" and implying that while he was a POW, he had committed treason. There were also fliers that said that McCain's POW experience had made him too mentally unstable (yes, isn't it ironic?) to be president of the United States, and that his wife was a drug addict. There was also a rumor that the candidate had cheated on his wife.

The clincher, however, was the effort to make sure everyone in South Carolina knew that McCain had a dark-skinned daughter--he and his wife have a child they adopted from Bangladesh. McCain, the rumor went, has a "black" child because he made a prostitute pregnant when he was in Vietnam. Guess those gay soldiers will do anything during wartime.

This especially poisonous campaign was very similar to the one used by Karen Hughes to unseat Ann Richards in Texas. It worked, too, which is the worst thing of all. And which is further proof that Americans are not only racist and homophobic, but that they have no interest in discovering facts.