And we thought Kerry wouldn't play hardball...

John Kerry really started to put the smackdown on his foes this past week, for which I could not be more thrilled. It's about time he stood up and said "no, you are lying and can't talk about the real issues." Is it just the liberal haze or is John Kerry becoming an even better candidate?

Yesterday, Kerry's team went to town on chief Swift Boat Liar John O'Neill. O'Neill has repeatedly challenged Kerry's statements regarding his crossing of the Cambodian border. Firstly, who cares? It's such a non-story, but since the media won't drop it and seems to fawn all over anything these liars come out with, we'll play that game for a bit.

O'Neill said Kerry would have been "court-martialed" for such an act. Further, that he did the same patrol two months after Kerry and it only ran "50 miles from Cambodia. There isn't any watery border."

But yesterday, the Kerry campaign alerted both Fox and CNN to a taped conversation between O'Neill and Richard Nixon where O'Neill explicitly says the opposite:

O'NEILL: I was in Cambodia, sir. I worked along the border on the water.

NIXON: In a swift boat?

O'NEILL: Yes, sir.

Can they get any more discredited?

And yet the media still gives these whackos air-time and (as an extension) relevancy. Rather than call these attacks for the outright distortions and lies that they are, the media plays the objective observer(yeah, right) and allows the charges to fly without studying them or supplying any context.

We need to prepare to fight back against a lazy media and force them to learn from the mistakes they made during the 2000 election and the Iraqi war coverage. The Swift Boat veteran debacle is the first real sign of this. Brace yourself, all. It's going to be a infuriating Fall.