David Horowitz wrote the following editorial at the invitation of The Philadelphia Inquirer. The Inquirer is running 21 anti-Bush editorials between now and election day as part of its "21 Reasons to Elect Kerry" series. The Inquirer has invited conservative op-eds like this (the first) for the sake of balance. FrontPage Magazine believes in political balance and is happy to see a different viewpoint added to the liberal media. -- The Editors.

In 200 years of this nation’s political history, there has never been a hate campaign as massive, as nasty, and as personally vicious as the one directed against President George Bush. Part of this hate is a product of the generic politics of destruction practiced by Democratic Party leaders in every election cycle as a matter of course. In the 2000 campaign the Democrats placed ads in black communities across the country accusing the President of killing a black lynch victim “a second time.” They even got the daughter of the lynch victim to do the dirty work voice over for them.

This year the Democrat who would be President is touring the country telling black audiences that George Bush won the election in Florida by “stealing one million black votes” – an ugly, racially divisive and mendacious charge which, if Republicans were behind it would elicit howls of foul play from the nation’s (leftwing) press, instead of their present discreet silence on the subject. Not a single actual victim of such theft has been identified by civil rights organizations or the Kerry campaign because none exists. The Civil Rights Commission and the press investigated these charges at the time and found them baseless. As of course they would, since all the contested precincts in the Florida recount were in Democratic counties.

But it is the specifically personal attacks on Bush that reveal the ferocious insanity of liberal hate in this political season. For two years, George Bush has been derided as a “moron,” a “dummy,” and a Cheney “puppet” by liberal elites, even though his college test scores rank him in the top 10 percent of the nation, and even though newspapers such as The Philadelphia Inquirer give him full credit for orchestrating his own alleged vendettas. He has been accused of being a military “deserter” despite the failure of the media to prove this charge in four election campaigns, despite his logging 574 air hours in a plane dangerous enough to be referred to as “the widow-maker,” and despite his honorable discharge from the service.

As President, he has been denounced as a traitor who has “betrayed” Americans, a liar, a corrupt manipulator who misled America and sent its young and innocent to battle in full knowledge that their mission was fraudulent and their deaths needless. It has been charged that the sole reason he sent the young to die was to line the pockets of his corporate Texas cronies. He has been accused in advance of being responsible for any dirty nuclear bomb that terrorists detonate in the United States. And these are merely the attacks originating with Al Gore and Ted Kennedy to be spread then through the Democratic ranks. Not a single Democrat, by the way, has stood up to deplore the recklessness of these smears, or to speculate on how such attacks might affect the fortunes of the troops under the President’s command. Instead of fulfilling their role as neutral arbiters of the facts, the media have regularly given these destructive and despicable accusations a free pass.

The personal attacks on Bush began even before the war in Iraq started -- a war which was authorized and justified by Bill Clinton and Al Gore and ratified by the majority of congressional Democrats in the Iraqi Liberation Act of 1998; then ratified again in the congressional Authorization of Force Act of October 2002. John Kerry signed on to both resolutions before he turned his back on them because Howard Dean was passing him in the polls. These attacks on a President carrying out a bipartisan policy began with an unconscionable personal strike by Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle on the very eve of the war. Even as our troops moved into harm’s way to enforce United Nations Resolution 1441 – an ultimatum that called on Saddam to disarm or else -- Daschle claimed that Bush’s “failed diplomacy,” not Saddam’s intransigence, was responsible for the war.

I have been invited to respond to today’s Inquirer editorial, which takes aim not at the Democrat hate mongers, but at their target, describing him as a vindictive politician with an “enemies list.” How’s that for a fair-minded press! Inquirer editors have every right to be partisan, but what kind of judgment would make a man more sinned against than sinning, and responsible for the security of us all, the butt of an editorial like this?

The Inquirer editorial rehashes a discredited canard about Joseph Wilson and his wife who, it claims, were punished by Bush for revealing that he had lied about Saddam’s attempt to get nuclear materials from Niger. Yet a bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee investigated Wilson’s charges and rejected them, concluding that the President’s statement was “well-founded.” Wilson’s story was evidently a political dirty trick to undermine the rationale for the war, but the media are so consumed by their own anti-Bush passions that they can’t even play fair a year and a half later, when the accusation they endorsed turns out to be false.

If George Bush loses this election to a man who has been on all sides of the issue of war and peace, and has shifted his positions according to which way the political winds blow, Americans will surely suffer consequences in the coming months of the war on terror. But then they will have only themselves to blame, along with media that did not meet their most fundamental obligation to stay above the political fray and tell the American people the truth.