After a week of letting Kerry baste in the sort of 527 funded vitriol that President Bush has faced for the last year, Bush has stated his beilef that the swiftboat vets should stop airing the ads attacking Kerry's service. The brilliance is in the timing. The Kerry campaign just invested millions in an ad, which in a defacto accusation of illegal collusion between Bush and the Swiftboat Vets, calls on Bush to do just that. Bush stole the thunder from that ad after it was paid for, and before it got much publicity.

Also brilliant is how bad this makes Kerry look. Kerry comes off as desperate in his baseless accusation that Bush was behind the ads, which as I pointed out, would have been illegal. Bush gets to look like the bigger man by calling for their halt. The Swiftboat vets, being a private group protected by the First Amendment, will likely keep runnng the ads, proving that Bush isn't behind them.

Finally, the move is brillian because Kerry's hypocisy will now be exposed if he continues to ignore Bush's call for him to join him in renouncing all 527 ads, which Kerry won't do because the truth is that the Democrats have been using them to smear Bush for years via the likes of George Soros, Americans Coming Together, MoveOn, who have outspent Republican affiliated groups by over 200 to 1.

If Bush is so stupid, how is that he keeps outsmarting Kerry and what does that tell us? Bush has endured the slings and arrows of Michael Moore and MoveOn without whining - actually without even acknowledging their existence - remaining above the fray in a way that befits a man in the highest office in the land. Faced with the same kind of attacks, Kerry wallows into the mud and comes out slinging.

update: web of connections between campaign and vile 527 ads exposed! Another debunked.

update: Glenn provides some more background in what is sure to have a lot of ear plugging moonbats sing songing "I can't hear you." Jay Caruso has them doing the 3 monkeys routine. Captain Ed piles on.

update: NZ Bear believes, as I have described, that this is the mother-of-all rope-a-dopes. The ineptitude of the Kerry campaign is staggering.

update: Ok, this is too much. Not to mention this. What a bunch of f***ing hypocrites.

update: newly minted fans of the vietnam war and its combatants won't want to read this - Mark Stein takes Kerry and company to the woodshed. It sure is funny to see all these people who loathed the Vietnam war and and the soldiers who fought in it (a group which includes Kerry, btw) now so quick to defend and honor the troops after all these years. Well, a small group of the troops, anyway - one that only includes Kerry, as well as a handful of soldiers who back him.