In his aptly titled “Ads Hominem” piece for the Weekly Standard, Noemie Emery argues that “the 911-related attacks on Bush began long before his campaign ads.”

Looking back, there is nothing surprising about the carefully plotted spasms of outrage at the reference, in a Bush campaign ad, to the terrorist attacks of September 11 through the fleeting shot of a flag-covered stretcher, and the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center in downtown New York. This has been done, done before, and done for all the same reasons: Democrats have been steadily working to take September 11, its cause, effect, and aftermath, off the table of election-year politics since . . . oh, possibly . . .

September 12. Or, perhaps, to be fair, since some weeks later, when it became clear that George W. Bush’s response to the attacks would be an electoral plus. Since then, a campaign has unfolded to move it off limits, using the charge of obscene exploitation, of unseemly use of the dead. In January 2002, when Karl Rove made the obvious point that the president’s handling of terrorism would be a plus in the elections that fall–“We can go to the country on this issue, because they trust the Republican party to do a better job of protecting and strengthening America’s military might”–Democrats denounced this as “shameful.” They threw a fit in May 2002, when an innocuous photo showing Bush on Air Force One on September 11 was included in a set of three offered to Republican donors. The pattern of attacks accelerated on the news in January 2003 that the Republican convention would be held in New York, and hit new heights when the president made a surprise visit to Baghdad over the Thanksgiving holiday, where he committed the gross indiscretion of dishing out food to the troops. Last week, some even objected to the president’s presence at a ground-breaking ceremony for the dead of September 11 — to which Bush had been invited. Rather brazenly, and with some success, Bush’s opponents have manufactured controversy over a presidential campaign discussion of the central concern of our era. Soon, we will no doubt hear denunciations of any mention of the president’s constitutional duties as commander in chief.

Emery is right, of course — one need only to think back to Robert Byrd’s almost surreal theatrics on the floor of the Senate to recognize how the Dems had already begun testing these waters early in 2002 or thereabouts — and the campaign has continued apace, relying on a steady series of faux outrages and manufactured resentments to place off-limits, politically speaking, any mention of 911. Or as Emery puts it,

[…] Let’s see — an American president in a season of war should not make use of pictures in wartime, mention the war in a midterm election, visit an aircraft carrier, visit the troops in the field, mention the war while running for office, go to Ground Zero, go to New York at all, or draw attention in any way to his role as commander in chief. […]

[…]George W. Bush is under attack for reasons of naked partisanship. The fuss over his ads comes from people eager for him to lose, for reasons having nothing to do with the ads themselves. We’ve seen this sort of thing before. In May 2000 there was a media frenzy over the Million Mom March, organized by a “typical” housewife and mother who turned out to be a PR professional and liberal activist with ties to the Clintons. Something like this is true as well of the protesting family members of 9/11 victims, who turn out to be well connected to left-wing networks. “We are a long way from the land of political innocents,” noted a March 10 editorial in the Wall Street Journal. “What we have, instead, are politically motivated activists standing willingly as a front organization for the Democratic party. They’ve traded on the press’s reluctance to question their motives, hoping for a free run to impugn Mr. Bush every time he discusses terrorism from now until the election.” Indeed, if there is exploitation going on, it is on the part of those who willfully exploit the immense sympathy the American people have for the terrorists’ victims and their survivors for partisan purposes.