Dirty Tricks

A couple of libertarian/conservative bloggers have recently threatened to vote Republican because of alleged dirty politics by the Democrats. First up is Eric Raymond, very well known in the Open Source movement, who writes:

For the first time in my life, I find that I am seriously considering voting Republican in a presidential election. What has pushed me to it is this report of shots being fired into a Bush-Cheney campaign HQ in Knoxville. TN.

It's not the first shot fired at the Republicans. And it comes on top of a frenzy of anti-Republican hate speech ...

Yes, shots were fired at Republicans, but nobody knows for sure whether or not it was Democrats who fired the shots. In fact, it could even be Republicans who wanted to elicit this sort of response.

Vodkapundit complains of a different set of Democratic tactics identified in the Drudge Report.

If Drudge has it right, then the Kerry-Edwards campaign is going to do its damnedest to turn our fine nation into a banana republic. [...]

[F]or the first time in 16 years, I'm going to vote Republican straight down the line.

The Drudge Report article claims that a manual for Democrat operatives contains instructions to call attention to past Republican frauds. The following is the "offending" page:

I look at it and still can't figure out what has Vodkapundit so upset. It just tells Democrats to call attention to past Republican abuses. I can't see why that's so terrible.

Even if it were terrible, it's hard for me to believe that either of these guys is so naive that they believe that Republicans as a group are any better. Have they never heard of Nixon and Watergate? Maybe they're not old enough to remember it.

There are lots of unethical people in the world. Some of them go into politics. Some of those end up Democrats and some end up Republicans. I doubt that one party breeds corruption substantially more than the other. To hear of one or a few incidents like those described above and change your vote because of it seems somewhat short sighted to me. Punish those that commit crimes through the legal system, not the political party they happen to belong to. Make your vote count.