E-Mail This Article to a Friend Lying liars George W. Bush’s re-election campaign is a disgrace. Plus, why we need an innocence commission, and a human-services advocate faces his toughest fight.

THIS PAST MONDAY was a holiday, a time when even a story published on the front page of a national newspaper might as well have been buried on page C17. That’s a shame, because the Washington Post’s page-one Memorial Day report on President Bush’s lying, negative attacks on Senator John Kerry was perhaps the most important article on the presidential campaign to date. It should serve as a goad to the rest of the mainstream media to hold Bush accountable for his and his surrogates’ numerous false statements.

In just the first few paragraphs, the Post documented a mind-boggling series of untruths — from Vice-President Dick Cheney’s claim that Kerry "has questioned whether the war on terror is really a war at all" to a Bush ad asserting that Kerry wants to do away with wiretaps in terrorism cases; from a memo sent to reporters saying that Kerry will seek to raise the gasoline tax by 50 cents to yet another ad stating that Kerry has turned against an education-reform law he supported just three years ago. "The charges," the Post noted, "were all tough, serious — and wrong, or at least highly misleading."

Here in solid-blue Massachusetts, we tend to be blissfully unaware of the trench warfare that’s taking place in the swing states, where the election will be decided. Neither Kerry nor Bush wants to waste money by advertising in a state that is guaranteed to vote Democratic this November. But the numbers reported by the Post were stunning: so far, the president’s re-election campaign has run 49,050 negative ads in the country’s top-100 media markets. Three-quarters of Bush’s ads have been negative. By contrast, Kerry has run 13,336 negative ads, or just 27 percent of his total.

Of course, ads that are both negative and true can have a salutary effect on the political process. But that’s not the case with the Bush campaign. Though the Post found that "Kerry ... has made his own misleading statements and exaggerations," he has been far outdone by his opponent. "The balance of the misleading claims tips to Bush, in part because the Kerry team has been more careful," University of Pennsylvania professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson told the paper.

Bush has resorted to such tactics because he knows it’s the only way he can win. With his approval rating low and the situation in Iraq deteriorating, his only hope is to convince voters that they should fear Kerry more than they detest him. It’s a despicable strategy, but with some $200 million in corporate-fueled campaign contributions at his disposal, it’s one he can certainly afford to indulge.

It’s no wonder that the Kerry campaign briefly considered delaying the actual acceptance of his nomination until early September, which would have allowed him to keep pace with Bush’s fundraising for another five weeks. The idea, sure to be controversial in any case, was handled awkwardly by Kerry and his staff, and it’s just as well they backed away. But it served to highlight the financial disparity between the two candidates, and the media’s mockery was unwarranted.

In fact, the media have been far more willing to parrot the Republicans’ phony charges that Kerry is a liberal, tax-hiking, soft-on-defense flip-flopper than to report the reality that Bush and his minions lie without consequence. Maybe that is changing. The Washington Post story was a good start.

ATTORNEY GENERAL Tom Reilly and the state’s 11 district attorneys appear more concerned about covering their asses than about dealing seriously with the reality that innocent people continue to rot in prison. That is the only explanation for the "Justice Initiative" they announced last week, which is aimed at identifying and fixing flaws in the criminal-justice system (see "The Least They Can Do," This Just In, May 28). The initiative was a tiny step forward, but it falls far short of the innocence commission needed to reform the system once and for all — and, more important, to free those behind bars who did not commit the crimes for which they were convicted.

As noted civil-liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate argued in these pages recently (see "Freedom Watch," News and Features, April 9), a statewide innocence commission — empowered to subpoena witnesses, investigate cases, determine the causes of wrongful convictions, and punish errant police and prosecutors — would be a powerful tool for fixing a system that is clearly broken.

It’s certainly needed. According to the New England Innocence Project, 23 prisoners in Massachusetts have been released during the past 22 years on the basis of new evidence, including DNA. Nine men have been released in Suffolk County since 1997. Though it is heartening that wrongly convicted men such as Shawn Drumgold, imprisoned for 15 years for the notorious murder of 12-year-old Darlene Tiffany Moore, and Stephan Cowans, who served more than six years for the nonfatal shooting of a Boston police officer, have won their freedom, they shouldn’t have gone to prison in the first place. And the numbers raise questions about how many more innocent men and women may be behind bars.

The "Justice Initiative," by contrast, is a public-relations gambit, designed at least in part to alleviate the political pressure that has been building for an innocence commission. The initiative will "identify the factors that have contributed to erroneous convictions," according to the announcement — but, crucially, it will not look into the actual convictions of those who might be innocent.

Middlesex district attorney Martha Coakley has been quoted as saying that an innocence commission would be "backward-looking instead of forward-looking." Well, yes. That’s exactly the point. Surely looking back and freeing the innocent is at least as important as preventing such miscarriages of justice in the future.

THE NEWS that Stephen Collins, executive director of the Massachusetts Human Services Coalition, is terminally ill with pancreatic cancer is a tragedy not just for Collins and his family, but for all of us. Collins is a man who possesses a deep sense of right and wrong, and a passion for social justice. He has always put the needs of the forgotten first — the welfare recipients, the homeless, the mentally ill, the mentally retarded, the disabled, the folks who are all too often vilified during the budget-making process.

Collins is one of the few human-services advocates left who is not afraid to tell the truth when it comes to the cruel policies of Governor Mitt Romney and his administration. This separates him from those advocates who clam up during budget deliberations for fear of losing what little state funding they now receive. Collins exhibits unrelenting passion for the dispossessed. He is, in essence, the heart and soul of the human-services advocacy community.

His shoes will be tough to fill. Since Collins has gotten sick, reporters have stopped receiving updates on the devastating budget cuts that human-service programs are sure to face, which has no doubt led to less coverage for the needs of the poor and others who rely on state-funded services.

It would be fitting if the legislature could salvage some of the programs for which Collins has fought over the years. He is particularly concerned about small, forgotten agencies such as the Massachusetts Commissions for the Blind and for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing. Funding those programs would be a fitting tribute.

Stephen Collins will leave behind a tremendous legacy. Who will advocate for the poor and disadvantaged in his absence?

What do you think? Send an e-mail to letters[a]phx.com.