Briar patch?

Speaking of wickedness hijacking the brainspace of the 2008 presidential election: in the circles where I travel, and I bet in the circles where you travel, too, there's been much talk of the need for "rapid response" against, well, wickedness hijacking the brainspace of the 2008 presidential election, especially when it appears in book form.

But what do you think of this argument I got in an email from a conservative friend of mine? (reprinted with permission):

-----Original Message-----
From: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To: xxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Sat, 16 Aug 2008 10:34 am
Subject: Re: Obama attacks book as poisonous crap -- ALL THIS WILL DO
IS SELL MORE CORSI BOOKS

Corsi's a bad egg who takes extreme positions
"based" on the flimsiest of "facts." He's bashed President Bush and he
writes for World Nut Daily (home of Bigfoot and Y2K).

That being said, Democrats wrote themselves into a
corner by repeatedly claiming...in fact making it into a mantra and
entering it
into their ideological mythology...that Senator Kerry didn't respond
forcefully
enough to "Swiftboat lies" in 2004.

In reality, Senator Kerry played the Swiftboaters
properly, considering that they weren't lying (e.g. Kerry really wasn't
sent to
Cambodia by President Nixon in Christmas of 1968...if nothing else
because Nixon
wasn't President then). But from here on out, Democrats are going to
go on
the offensive against critical groups/books lest they become
"Swiftboated" by
not responding aggressively.

Which is to say that since we know how the
Democrats are always going to respond, we can bait them into that
response at
will. But in Corsi's case, he's likely to have enough errors in his
book
for a full scale media blitz to discredit him (good riddance)...which
will
further ingrain the swiftboat myth into Democratic History because it
might
actually work this one time.

But such a strategy of going on the
discredit-the-source offensive will *not* work when a respected author
writes at
some point in the future a true fact that can't be spun. And at that
point the
Dems' "swiftboat response" strategy will backfire on them in a big
way...a
large, predictable way.

Views expressed on this page are those of the authors and not necessarily those of Campaign for America's Future or Institute for America's Future