It's only natural for you to think that way. After all, the Democratic slime machine has just hit Arnold in Cali, Rush on TV, and Bush on Iraqis.
And it's natural to want to hit back in kind. But adopting their tactics would only give us their results.
Since becoming 24/7 slimers, the Democrats have progressively lost the House, the Senate, the presidency, most state legislatures, and most state governorships. Sliming has short-term value at long-term expense.
Now look at how Bush handled the CIA leak slime attack...he said that he wanted to know if anyone in his administration had done the leaking, and that such leaking wouldn't be tolerated. Bush will win re-election next year, too. Likewise, watch how Arnold handled the LA Times sexual harassment hit piece. He took the high ground for any such behavior, apologized, and promised to lead the way for women's rights. Arnold will win California's governorship on Tuesday, too. That will take the Democrats' last major political prize (i.e. the governorship of the state of California). Democrats have already lost the major states of New York, Georgia, Florida, and Texas, after all. Even Kennedy's state of Massachusetts now has a Republican governor, as does Dean's home state of Vermont.
Everywhere that you look, the Democrats and their media allies are sliming Republicans, and yet everywhere you look the Democrats are losing...and losing, and losing.
This is what we want. We **want** the Democrats to poison the debate. We **want** them to be fixated entirely upon their politics of personal destruction. We **want** them to go year after year with no new political ideas. We **want** them to instantly latch onto every new fad that comes along even when it means reversing their own positions of a few years or even months ago (e.g. voting to authorize using force against Iraq, then criticizing us being in Iraq).
We **want** them running push polls that show the temporary gain for their candidates and temporary setbacks for our own each time that they unleash their slime machines. We **want** them to be addicted to the temporary highs of such etheral "victories."
We **want** them to be fixated on filibustering and sliming our judges while we are passing wholesale bans on their beloved partial birth abortions. We want them critizing our Iraq efforts while we are rolling out real, viable ABM defense systems in Alaska and California. We **want** them to be critizing our private school vouchers plan even while their own constituents in Washington, D.C. insist upon enacting our idea.
And we want all of what we are seeing because politics moves very slowly. Radical change really isn't possible in our system, but gradual long-term change can be accomplished if our opponents are mis-focused on the short term.