From the second presidential debate, it appears that the latest Republican attack strategy is to attack John Kerry by lying about his liberalism, and John Edwards by lying about his law career.

John Kerry is not the most liberal senator, and anyone who believes he is after reading the linked site is wearing highly fetching partisan blinkers.

Nor is tort law a significant burden on American business – in Mr Edwards’s specialty area of medical malpractice, insurance and payouts haven’t been increasing significantly and don’t account for a substantial proportion of costs anyway.

The current administration, lying to smear their opponents? What *is* the world coming to?

Oh, almost forgot: the third prong is going to be another round of Swift Boat Lies. This time, they’ve apparently rounded up Bud Day, the official Best Vietnam Hero Ever for the campaign (a man whose bio reads rather like Christopher Walken’s monologue in Pulp Fiction).

This is bad news. Mr Day is entirely wrong (like many Germans after 1918, he incorrectly believes that America would have won the war had the antiwar left not sold them out), but he’s not a vicious partisan hack like the leading Swifties in the previous campaigns. Shifting the focus from ‘did John Kerry lie about being a war hero?’ to ‘did John Kerry sell out brave POWs like Bud Day?’ can only harm the Kerry campaign, because the latter accusation is a matter of opinion rather than a blatant lie.