Repub Distortions/Distractions Against Edwards/Gore/Obama Examples of Coming Campaign...LINK

This clearly explains what the Republican gameplan is in the upcoming 2008 Election Campaign.

Edwards and Gore are the butt of their attacks as they get warmed up to attack the character of Democratic Candidates.

If Democrats are smart, each Democratic Candidate will speak out in condemnation of these attacks on their fellow Democratic Candidates. IF they do not, they will be aiding and abetting the Republicans in their efforts to paint the entire Democratic Party with the distortion/distraction brush.

LINK http://journals.democraticunderground.com/Paul%20Rogat%20Loeb/21

The Haircut That Won't Die
Posted by Paul Rogat Loeb in Editorials & Other Articles
Sat May 19th 2007, 05:39 PM

"As Edwards explained in a North Carolina Town Hall meeting, the haircut was scheduled by staff, squeezed in between the nonstop timetables of campaigning. "When you are a presidential candidate going all over the country you do what you have to do where you have to do it--you don't have any choice. And they get people, because you don't have any time, they get people to come to you--they don't give you the bill, they send the bill so I didn't know it would be that much. I knew it would be expensive now, I don't want to mislead--when a haircut guy comes to your hotel to do your hair it's not going to be cheap, so I knew that, but I did not know it was this expensive... nobody should be paying four hundred dollars for a haircut."

With pseudo-populist resentment a foundation of the political right, the Republican echo machine made much of the cost of Clinton and Kerry's haircuts as well. Richard Mellon Scaife's Pittsburgh Tribune-Review even picked up an anonymously sourced Drudge story to claim that one Kerry haircut cost $1,000. However much Republican candidates spent looking good for TV was irrelevant. The false or inflated character attacks happen to other candidates (as in the false Fox story claiming Obama was educated in a fundamentalist Madrassa). And even to non-candidates as in the way that right wing talk of Al Gore's massive electrical bill has become a staple of those who global warming deniers. (His bill is high because he has staff using the house as an office and because he buys more costly green power-- he isn't running 27 electric dryer loads a day.) Edwards is just the latest example, fed by the media pile-on. The original AP story even tried to make an issue of $75 charges to an Iowa Beauty Salon (adding the not so subtle implication that anyone who goes to a "beauty salon" is less than a real man). It turned out to be for TV makeup, something stations insist on even for non-celebrity guests so the lights won't make them look like creatures out of Night of the Living Dead. So the issue isn't Edwards's haircut, but how to respond to the lies and exaggerations that now masquerade as politics."