Dana Milbank and Jim VandeHei committed journalism on Monday, drawing together isolated observations and painting a well-sourced Big Picture with them:

From Bush, Unprecedented Negativity (washingtonpost.com)

Scholars and political strategists say the ferocious Bush assault on Kerry this spring has been extraordinary, both for the volume of attacks and for the liberties the president and his campaign have taken with the facts. Though stretching the truth is hardly new in a political campaign, they say the volume of negative charges is unprecedented -- both in speeches and in advertising.

Three-quarters of the ads aired by Bush's campaign have been attacks on Kerry. Bush so far has aired 49,050 negative ads in the top 100 markets, or 75 percent of his advertising. Kerry has run 13,336 negative ads -- or 27 percent of his total. The figures were compiled by The Washington Post using data from the Campaign Media Analysis Group of the top 100 U.S. markets. Both campaigns said the figures are accurate.

... Scott Reed, who ran Robert J. Dole's presidential campaign [in 1996], said the Bush campaign has little choice but to deliver a constant stream of such negative charges. With low poll numbers and a volatile situation in Iraq, ["Desperate George"] Bush has more hope of tarnishing Kerry's image than promoting his own.

"The Bush campaign is faced with the hard, true fact that they have to keep their boot on his neck and define him on their terms," Reed said. That might risk alienating some moderate voters or depressing turnout, "but they don't have a choice," he said.

Nice fascistic image there, Mr. Reed. Which party are you with again?

Milbank and VandeHei perpetuate some misleading spin by approving of certain attacks on Kerry as 'based in truth' (ATTENTION: All the Republicans who act all SHOCKED! that someone could vote for one version of a bill and then vote against a variant of it, please turn in your junior high school Civics textbooks - you too, Sullivan), but on the whole this article is much worse for Bush than Kerry.

From ABC's The [annoying, corrupt] Note, one useful observation:

It's not as though the unprecedented negativity of this campaign has gone unnoticed by anyone, or that no one knows that when challenged on specific charges against Kerry that the good folks at BC04 often refuse to answer outright. And it's not that the Kerry camp hasn't picked and chosen its own distortions to promote [uh-huh...]. But this is a far cry from the "pox on both their houses" stories that define most political journalism...

It's almost like... the difference between the campaigns is too big to ignore any longer.

Desperate George has nothing to run on but nasty and he knows it; good job by Milbank and VandeHei of making that clear.

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One other note on language - I've said it before, and I'll repeat myself:

Calling a candidate a liar triggers the self-righteous howling about "civility" and faux-fainting of both party hacks and journalists, which leads to shouting matches and the tuning out of the dispute by disgusted 'centrist' listeners, whom we need in order to bury the Republicans in a landslide.

To avoid that, I suggest appropriating the label that worked against Gore when discussing the clear misrepresentations by this administration of everything it does: This President is a Serial Exaggerator.

Gets the point across sufficiently, and is harder for them to get so worked up about without being obviously shrill.