Watch out, the professional dirty-tricks teams are beginning to show their colors.

Kerry has already withstood three dirty-tricks attacks, all of those coming from Matt Drudge. The first was the Botox scam, where Drudge chose two groups of photos–one where Kerry had his eyebrows raised and was lit from above, accentuating his forehead wrinkles, and another group where Kerry had his eyebrows lowered, had a relaxed expression, and was photographed with straight-on flash lighting, thus de-accentuating the wrinkles. Drudge then called these evidence that Kerry had Botox treatments. The charges were ridiculously false, of course.

Drudge’s second attempt was to try to frame Kerry as being diabolically in league with “Hanoi Jane” Fonda. The evidence? A photo of Kerry in an audience standing several rows back and many meters away from Fonda, two years before she went to Hanoi. The fraud was initially taken as serious when another photo of Kerry and Fonda on stage next to each other was discovered, except that photo turned out to be a fake. The frame-up died a silent, withering death.

Drudge’s final attempt was his most bold: a claim that Kerry had had an affair with a woman who worked for the Associated Press, labeled an “intern,” who “fled to Africa” to escape the scandal; Drudge claimed this was being seriously investigated by several major news agencies, and claimed that three reporters had revealed to him that Wesley Clark, in an off-the-record comment, had claimed that Kerry would “implode over an intern scandal.” Well, the intern was not an intern, there was no affair, the woman’s parents, who were quoted as saying Kerry was a “scumbag” said nothing of the sort and planned to vote for him, and the woman had gone to Africa to be with her fiance. And the Clark quote was fake as well.

That was strike three for Drudge. I don’t know if he’s tried to put any more whoppers out there, but if he ever does, it is doubtful that anyone but the GOP faithful will take him as anything other than a sad joke.

Time for the next batter: the real dirty tricks artists. And they’ve just taken two swings at the plate.

First was an attempt to silence the public opposition with a letter to TV stations “urging” them to yank ads critical of Bush. The letter, fired off by the Republican National Committee (RNC) counsel Jill Holtzman Vogel, claimed that ads produced by the liberal advocacy group “MoveOn.org” violate federal campaign laws. The letter from the RNC chief lawyer name-dropped the FCC in a threatening manner, obviously intended to scare the stations into pulling the ads immediately.

MoveOn.org drew attention a short while ago when it put out the call for Americans to come up with “Bush in 30 Seconds” ads, designed to showcase the damage done by Bush, and reasons why he should not be re-elected. Many ads were submitted, a great many making salient points in both entertaining and sometimes poignant ways. These ads have been running on cable for a while, and MoveOn tried to get one aired during the Super Bowl–but CBS shot it down, claiming that it did not air “advocacy ads.” But recently, MoveOn has spent $1.4 million of small-denomination donations to air the ads nationally, with another $1 million coming soon. In steps the RNC, trying their hardest to distort the law and get TV stations to pull opposition ads while at the same time trying to smear the other side, not being able to fight on the actual issues themselves.

The RNC lawyer claims that MoveOn had to have used donations that exceeded the legal limit and pointed out big donations from George Soros and Steven Bing, and hinted that MoveOn could not possibly cover the ads with smaller donations only. But the letter is crafted in such a way that it does not actually name specific figures or provide any actual proof of wrongdoing–the closest it comes in actuality is that vague and unsupported claim that there are not enough small donations, and otherwise quotes a lot of legalese to make it sound like there’s an illegality. MoveOn, however, immediately pointed out that they have received $10 million in small donations, and points out that the RNC is distorting the law in order to scare FCC-regulated broadcasters into silencing the president’s critics.

So strike one. Next comes the second pitch, a wild throw, this in the form of a bizarre accusation against Kerry himself. The claim is that a Harvard Crimson reporter, some 30 odd years ago, trailed Kerry for a time and learned that Kerry had asked for a student deferment to study in Paris for a year, but was turned down, and that in response to that, Kerry volunteered for the Navy. Reported by the right-wing Telegraph news agency in the U.K., it quotes none other than veteran Republican dirty-tricks master Lucianne Goldberg as saying, “This means that Kerry didn’t jump into all that heroic service until he was pushed, and it is a very nice piece of information.” Republican strategists tagged this story as somehow canceling out Bush’s evading Vietnam by joining the National Guard.

That reaction is not just bizarre, but utterly insane. Those two cases are equal? Bush asked for, and got, student deferments all the way through Yale, and only after he had finished them and no more were forthcoming, did he use privilege to jump over 500 people in line and get the red-carpet welcome into the Texas ANG, his golden ticket out of Vietnam service–and after savoring several luxuries awarded solely for being the son of a politician, he went AWOL and then got out early. And let’s not even talk about Cheney’s string of deferments, because he had “other priorities” than serving the nation at that time.

Kerry, on the other hand, asked for one deferment to study, did not get it, and volunteered for actual duty in combat. And then he served in combat, saved lives, got shot, performed heroically, was awarded some of the highest decorations there are, and came back a veteran. And that’s the same thing?

Fortunately, it looks like this fell so spectacularly flat that Republicans have taken their hands off it like a red-hot potato (excuse me, “potatoe”). After the initial release of the story, few are jumping on it any more.

Strike two.

Anyone want to wager on what the third pitch will be, and how the RNC will strike out with it?

After that, it’s either Bush or Cheney left to come up to bat, and they’ll have no one on base to clean up with. Pity.