You — yes you — are not allowed to say another damn thing about Kerry until you sit down and read the Rude Pundit’s endorsement of Kerry (via Michael Berube via PuddingBlogmarks).

You are not allowed to say another word about Kerry without thinking about facing down Nixon, facing down Reagan, facing down Bush I, and what kind of a person it took to do that.

The fact that we are not hearing about that stuff from the Kerry campaign shows just how damaged our political world is — the people running the Kerry campaign don’t dare bring up the times Kerry faced down corruption, rottenness, and pure evil in the form of former Republican presidents and their thugs, because people like those former Rethuglican presidents too much. They fondly remember the nuclear brinkmanship and raving, delusional, McCarthyesque anti-Red paranoia of Ronald Reagan. They think of Nixon not as a crook but as an elder statesman. They think of Bush I not as a creepy ex-spymaster who engineered Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait through duplicitous diplomacy (April Glaspie) in order to create a convenient excuse for a nice little war in the Middle East, but as a sane, wise statesman. They forget the history of Republicans busting the budget and accusing Democrats of fiscal responsibility, of shredding safety nets and making America a worse place for anyone who’s not rich to live, of massive deregulation leading to corruption and malfeasance and a degradation of the country’s business climate… After all, the Republicans want to cut taxes for the rich and make everyone rich, right? So we can’t say bad things about them…

And to be honest, Bush II does make his father, Reagan, and Nixon look like Franklin Delano Freaking Roosevelt in comparson, he’s so over the top.

But the whole thing is sad. Kerry isn’t “good enough,” he’s not a “barely adequate alternative.” He’s a great candidate, a great statesman, a great man.

But the Democrats are too fearful and weak and cowed to even speak of the best things Kerry has ever done.

That’s the kind of sickening world we’ve created.

So what I’m hearing is:

• On the Democrat side, some people may have been registering fake people to vote in Ohio. This could be because they intend to fraudulently cast votes, or it could be because they are being paid per voter they sign up and are trying to beef up their payout.

On the Republican side, we have…

• Nationwide efforts to worsen already difficult voting conditions in poor, urban, minority (Democratic) areas by means of an army of “poll challengers” there to make sure any possible vote is blocked

• many thousands of ballots for Democratic areas in Florida “conveniently” lost in the mail

• Republican officials in Wisconsin denying Milwaukee adequate ballots on the theory that they could be used fraudulently

• attempt to throw out Ohio new-voter registrations (largely anti-Bush) by a Republican bureaucrat in Ohio on the basis that they were printed on the wrong kind of paper (failed)

• Directly Republican-funded organizations explicitly instructing their operatives to inquire about people’s party preference before offering to register them to vote, and only offering to sign them up if they’re Republican, and if they inadvertently sign up some Democrats, they shred their registrations so they’ll show up to vote and find they’re not registered.

• The above organization lies about who they represent and what they’re doing.

• Republipundits everywhere alleging Democratic voter fraud left and right on slim to no evidence, in a classic case of projection

• Fraudulent “urgent advisory” letters in heavily Democratic areas of Ohio telling people that if they were registered to vote by a left-leaning organization they were probably registered illegally and they will not be able to vote this year.

Oh, you hadn’t heard about that one? The picture’s really priceless.