Free Republic

The dead have been used, the admired exploited, and the gay outed. The 2004 election is certainly not the dirtiest campaign in American history - no sexual sleaze or corruption charges, so far - but this week has seen its share of the distasteful. Less than a day after the actor who personified Superman died, John Edwards was on the stump in Iowa: "If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to walk, get up out of that wheelchair...

But Droz, a key witness in the ongoing debate over Kerry's service record, is missing from it, killed in a rocket attack in Vietnam in April 1969 days after Kerry returned home. While Droz cannot defend Kerry, his widow, Judith Droz Keyes, said she feels she must. She said she is confident that her husband would defend both Kerry's record in Vietnam and his antiwar activism. "John Kerry was a good friend, and a loyal friend to my late husband," she said in a telephone interview from her office in San Francisco. "My husband isn't here to speak, and all...