Frank,

those were the titles of Kerry's press releases. Each one was an unfair attack. To say that something was a "flub," for example, is clearly a judgement call, not a fact. Therefore they were examples of the "negative campaigning" you accuse Dean of.

To use the "flub" as an example: Dean said that when sitting down to a bargaining table with Israel and the Palestinian authority, we had to be impartial to be seen as a credible mediator. He used the word "even-handed." Kerry and the other candidates piled on, saying that we are Israel's ally, and how could Dean say we needed to be "even-handed" or impartial? My God, they railed, he wants to pull out of our alliance with Israel!

No one could seriously believe that Dean (whose wife and children are Jewish) would abandon our support for Israel, but they decided to pretend that was what he said. In fact, e-mails claiming that Dean was a rabid anti-semite circulated in the Jewish community, but I don't guess that John Kerry had anything to do with that (I suspect Lieberman, who needs the Jewish vote, but there's no real evidence). It's just another example of Kerry's false outrage.

Of course, it has been the policy of every American administration at least since Carter that in negotiations between Israel and its neighbors we act as an impartial mediator. As usual, there was no real controversy, just a bunch of blustering legislators.

"Kerry is as guilty as anyone. My favorite was his mock-outraged cry of "what were you thinking?" after Dean said that Osama Bin Laden should be tried if caught."

Is this an implication that Kerry would want bin Laden executed without a trial? What's the point here?

No, that's exactly the point. Obviously, anyone who was really the president would have to accord Osama Bin Laden a trial. But when Dean actually said that, Kerry and all the others (except Kucinich, Moseley-Braun and Sharpton) railed against it, suggesting that they would, in fact, summarily execute Bin Laden. They made a political judgment that Americans want a tough commander in chief who would just shoot OBL, while Dean quite rightly said (and I quote): "As a president, I would have to defend the process of the rule of law."

This is the kind of distortion Kerry does all the time. For example, his bluster that Dean has a "secret tax code" is a reference to Dean's statement that he would deal with the issue of improving tax fairness after he had repealed the Bush Tax Cuts and gotten the budget back closer to balance. Only then could he codify a realistic tax plan. (You can tell he has actually DONE this before, unlike any of the others.) Dean says he does have tax advisors who are working on the general principles, but that it is too early to make rash promises. Kerry spins that to mean that Dean has a sinister plan but is keeping it secret.

The reference to the Enron ad is more complex. Dean made an ad criticizing Bush and Cheney's ties to Enron. Kerry calls it ironic because of his own baseless (but not scurrilous) attack on Dean: that Dean had secret dealings with Enron himself.

In fact, Dean created policies while governor of Vermont that encouraged large corporations to set up captive insurance subsidiaries in Vermont rather than offshore. In this way, he collected a lot of taxes from them that otherwise would have gone unpaid, and so did the Feds. Kerry has tried to spin this as a "tax break" to these companies by comparing the taxes paid in Vermont to those that would have been paid in the corporations' home states. That's a red herring because the captive insurance company would never have been in the corporation's home state, it would have been tax free in the Cayman islands. So Kerry claims that Dean gave "tax breaks" to these companies when actually he collected millions more from them in taxes.

One of these companies was Enron. So Kerry claims it is "ironic" that Dean would criticize Bush's dealings with Enron.

etc, etc. It's all a bunch of bull, spouted by Kerry.

Okay, that reference to "bull," being short for "bullshit," came close to being scurrilous :-)

As to your final question, I have no particular investment in Dean beyond maybe 200 bucks I've donated to his campaign. I've just been paying attention to this race for a while, and seen as many of the candidates in person as I could. I work in a low job security field (I'm a folklorist) and worry particularly about health coverage if I should be laid off. Kerry's plan does not deal realistically with this issue in my estimation, passing the burden on to the States in what looks like a potentially unfunded mandate (he proposes to "swap" children's coverage with the states for coverage of adults, but provides no figures as to whether these costs would be equivalent. If they're not, it's an unfunded mandate to the States). The candidates pushing for a single-payer system almost certainly won't get it past congress.

That leaves Dean's system, by far the most practical, and the only one that has ever been tried anywhere. That's one of the things that first convinced me.

Also, my wife is from Vermont and has known the Governor's record for many years.