FINGERED

The latest campaign Brouhaha over John Kerry's "Outing" of Lynne Cheney seems ridiculously overblown to me. Of course, in a close election like this one, everything gets ridiculously overblown. Like the notion that either candidate will measurably impact your life right now, for instance. Some truths:

• You won't get drafted.
• Your tax bill won't change -drastically.
• We'll still be in Iraq on November 3rd, 2004 and November 3, 2005 for that matter.
• Israelis and Palestinians will still hate each other.
• We'll all still hate strongly dislike the French.
• Lynne Cheney will still be gay.

I mean, really. What did Kerry do? He did not slander anyone -not even close. We all knew Lynne was gay. If we didn't before the campaign we sure as hell did after the Vice-Presidential debate. Like the issue of who did what during the Vietnam years, this issue is just random campaign noise to me, to be treated and discarded as such and in no way an issue of any import.

The larger "truth" that I'm beginning to realize is that the Democratic claim of Republican dirty tricks is not wholly unfounded -with a caveat. The Republican campaign is only doing what the Democratic rank and file routinely perpetrate : Mercilessly slander and libel/label the opposition. For every Karl (that's with a K, as is Marx) Rove, there's a Dan Rather; for each swift boat vet ad there's a Michael Moore. To insist that either side has a monopoly on the truth is nonsensical. If you have any gray matter at all, you'll just need to figure it all out for yourself. And for G-d's sake, watch more than one news channel and read more than one newspaper on a regular basis. If you don't, you'll elect what you deserve. It's called due diligence, exercise it!

GOOD READ DEPT: Deconstructing Bob Herbert. I never much cared for Mr. Herbert's columns anyways. He's not only a glass-is-half-empty kind of guy, he's a glass-is-broken-and-leaking-water-like-a-sieve kind of guy. Mr. Herbert doesn't seem to have ever met a party he couldn't rain on.