Oh, fer chrissakes: Kerry unfaithful? Now we have Drudge with the flashing-light logo and five scare headlines (all linked to the same speculative story).

Gee, I guess the GOP has unilaterally repealed the "Schwarzenegger rules" (you know -- everything a candidate ever did is off limits, even the illegal stuff, if it happened prior to the Oprah appearance).

Damn, it's only February. Where do we go from here? If Kerry weathers this, remember than an aide of his told The New York Times,

This is not the Dukakis campaign. We're not going to take it. And if they're going to come at us with stuff, whatever that stuff may be, if it goes to a place where the '88 campaign did, then everything is on the table. Everything.

Everything? The cocaine? The rather alcoholic-seeming wedding video? Laura's car accident?

"Bring it on," a lot of you are thinking.

But eventually one of the candidates is going to climb up onto the high ground, however disingenuously, and say, "Enough" -- and the Leader of the Fight Against Terror might look rather credible to a lot of voters if he does it first. Also, a lot of anti-Bush dirt is unverifiable (if only because no one will step up and do the verifying), while some, surely, is just untrue -- and unverifiable charges don't do us much good. Plus, very dirty campaigns just confirm most voters' belief that politics is a cesspool -- and the party that gains from that is the one that, even though it's run the federal government for most of the past quarter century, always manages to persuade voters that it's the anti-government party. Finally, er, wasn't this campaign supposed to be about how the Bush administration is governing?

So OK -- some carefully targeted scrutiny of Bush's life is worthwhile. I just worry about losing an all-out war.