Oh my. Welcome to the internet age, when nothing like this will be able to be pushed onto the American people with the force that it once was.
It seems that picture of Kerry Standing with Jane Fonda was not real. The man who took it claims that he did not even take any pictures of Jane Fonda at this event.
http://www.newsday.com/ny-kerry0215,0,4733861.story?coll=ny-top-headlines
http://www.snopes.com/photos/politics/kerry2.asp
The second link is a copy of the fake.
The dark world of political hatchet men must now realize what the internet has done to their profession. It has become very difficult, and will grow increasingly more so, to "ratfuck" a political candidate.
There is a small army of amateur opposition researchers out there, and if anything even smells funny, you have a couple of thousand political junkies doing Nexis Searches, Googling, trying to contact the alleged participants.
We now live in a world, where if there is anything demonstrably false about such a claim, the internet community knows this within a very short amount of time. I am now officially calling this time frame "The Bullshit Window." If a claim made by a source against a candidate is bullshit, then this will start making itself known on blogs all over the internet within about 6 hours in most cases. If the events in the claim are more obscure, the window may be as big as 24 hours, but in most cases, such a large amount of time will simply not be necessary.
What should be telling about "The Bullshit Window (TBW)," is that Bush's National Guard problems have managed to make it relatively unscathed through TBW. There has only been one person from that airbase in AL come forward to claim that he saw Bush there and had lunch with him on multiple occasions, and can vouch for him being there.
What is interesting about this man is the fact that he didn't make it through TBW. Within several hours I noticed that he story was being picked apart, and it was discovered that this man's claims did not fit the timeline. He missed it by several MONTHS.
See how this works? Very much in the same vein as Adam Smith's Invisible Hand.
So, let us give praise the TBW, and yet be respectful of it, for it will serve its purpose on Democrats as well.
-SenatorX