Didn't John Kerry ever read about rope-a-dope? Karl Rove must be kicking his heels with merriment at the way the horse-faced son of Boston is tangling himself up in the Swift Boat comedy. A couple of weeks more and I reckon Kerry will start crying on TV at the besmirchments of his war record, and it will all be over.

Are there any skins thinner than those belonging to Democratic Loyalists for Kerry? The other night Jeffrey St. Clair, who co-edits the political website and newsletter CounterPunch with yours truly, found himself to a gathering of antiwar activists in downtown Portland, Oregon, touting our new book, Dime's Worth of Difference: Beyond the Lesser of Two Evils. There were about a hundred souls assembled, and Jeffrey's seasoned eye assayed the political temper of the throng. Sure enough, at least a score had that fixity of gaze and tensed naso-labial musculature that betrayed the presence of Zombies for Kerry.

Jeffrey plunged into his talk, an evenhanded assault on both Bush and Kerry. First he whaled away at Bush, tracing the shameful decline of this war resister from the moral Everest of his Quaker-like refusal to spill Vietnamese blood (or his own) to his latter-day militarist posturing and use of the National Guard as a de facto draft, with the draftees press-ganged into indentured servitude by stop-loss orders, now under court challenge.

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