PRESTOPUNDIT -- "It's a team sport, baby!"

(via Barking Moonbat)

DID KERRY'S "OTHER THAN HONORABLE DISCHARGE"

THE "BINARY OPPOSITIONS" OF KERRY VS. BUSH --

IN DEBATE:

JOHN KERRY'S

FROM ACROSS AMERICA THEY COME

DID JOHN KERRY TELL THE TRUTH

As a lieutenant (jg) in the Navy assigned as an advisor to South Vietnam river forces near (but not in) Cambodia for a longer tour than Kerry served, I never once witnessed -- nor had reported to me -- a single act of the sort Kerry said -- and Snider believes -- was commonplace. Quite the contrary, I saw firsthand numerous acts of kindness and compassion toward Vietnamese. I served with decent, honorable people in Vietnam -- the ones called baby killers when they returned home -- due in no small part to Kerry's lies about them.

SWIFT VET STEVE GARDNER

"STOLEN HONOR" --

"A PIECE OF SHALLOW, PARTISAN GARBAGE."

JOHN KERRY --

HUGH HEWITT

MARK

[The Duelfer report] renders John Kerry, on foreign policy and national security, either a complacent fool or an utter fraud. It's not about WMD, it's about the top-to-toe corruption of the entire international system by Saddam Hussein. The "global test" is a racket, and anybody who puts faith in it is jeopardizing America's national security.

THE UTTER RUINS

It's hard to pass the "Global Test" when the people grading it are being bribed to administer a failing grade.

BELDARBLOG

(via Discerning Texan)

BRUCE BARTLETT --

Senate staffer Winslow Wheeler, author of The Wastrels of Defense: How Congress Sabotages U.S. Security .. starts by noting that there were certain senators that he always knew would be major players on defense issues. Whether he agreed with them or thought they were dreadfully wrong, the views of certain senators always commanded respect. They came to the Senate floor well prepared for serious debate, commanded facts and analyses supporting their positions, and always contributed something meaningful to every issue they engaged in. "But then," Wheeler writes, "there was also another type of senator I would run across in the elevator or see in the chamber -- the ones I could never associate with any deed or even articulated thought that had any lasting effect. The thought would dash through my head, 'Oh, yeah, he's a senator too; forgot that he was even still around here.' John Kerry was such a senator."

Kerry should have been a major player on foreign policy and defense issues, Wheeler thinks. He is a longtime member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee .. But instead of being a player, Wheeler calls him a "ghost senator." Says Wheeler, Kerry "had all the physical trappings of a senator .. But, Kerry never seemed to make a difference. It was almost as if he was both a member of the Senate and yet not a member, at least not one that mattered. He was a 'ghost senator'; he had all the form, but none of the substance."

CHARLES WALDIE

THE SWIFT VETS

DEAN ESMAY INTERVIEWS

DW: A couple of your group's members claim to have had their statements distorted by papers such as the Boston Globe. Have you experienced anything like that with any press you've talked to?

VO: The distortion that I have seen is that they say that my claims are unsubstantiated, specifically to the March 13th incident, even though we've got 10 other eyewitnesses who tell the same story I do. I have also been taken to task as a liar by the New York Times and the Washington Post by journalists who've never talked to me ..

DW: What do you say to those who say that because you were not on Lt. Kerry's boat, you did not serve with him?

VO: .. our boats served in combat together, we went on missions together, we knew each other intimately and fought together. This is like saying Major Reno and Captain Benteen did not serve with General Custer because they did not ride on the same horse with him.

ADMIT IT.

Right now the president is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to research bunker-busting nuclear weapons. The United States is pursuing a new set of nuclear weapons.

What you've got here is what they call in television John Kerry's "big reveal" -- a reveal exposing the raw passions of the man when you bore down to his core where genuine anger exists. And that man is the same man we've seen often before -- the John Kerry who was deeply passionate about America's guilt in Vietnam, America's guilt in Central America, and America's guilt in the nuclear arms race.

Do I need to spell it out for you?

It's right there in your face folks, so say it. At the core of John Kerry -- when touch something genuinely angry, true and real, something that really fires his soul -- is a deep running BLAME AMERICA FIRST anger. It was there exposed to the country and the world, staring you in the face. But you chose to look away, you chose to watch George Bush make junior high school faces. You chose not to be serious. Is that the President's fault? Perhaps. But you're a grown up. It's also your fault. You didn't have the simple guts to look this truth in the face and speak it out loud. Because if you did, you would have.

UPDATE: See also this and for background read Hugh Hewitt's "virtual symposium on John Kerry's return to his nuclear freeze roots." A reader email's Hugh:

It is absolutely astounding that the principal specific proposal Kerry advanced in response to the "greatest threat" question was one to constrain the strategic options of the United States! It is also noteworthy that this answer was one where Kerry showed the most emotion. He really is outraged that the United States would seek to acquire a weapon not possessed by other states.

We're telling other people you can't have nuclear weapons but we're pursuing a new nuclear weapons that we might even contemplate using. Not this president. I'm going to shut that program down.

INCOMPETENCE AT

Don't they have editors? If they have editors, are the editors idiots?

JOHN LEO --

Media handling of the charges by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth was even more peculiar. Most major news media stayed silent for nine or 10 days as the story of the charges spread over radio and the Internet. A few bloggers argued that this was an attempt by big-time media outlets to rule the Swifties' charges out of bounds. It seemed that way to me, too. When big media finally did rouse themselves and address the issue, they tended to focus tightly on Democratic talking points ..

In the New York Times, Kerry's imaginary Christmas-in-Cambodia yarn was pushed way to the back of an endless story, along with the news that Kerry had told the Senate in 1986 that he had entered Cambodia on his swift boat. The Times apparently had no room to mention that Kerry had told this story many times over 25 years and had described it as a life-changing incident seared into his memory.

But the life-altering experience of Christmas in Cambodia apparently never happened. It was a Kerry fantasy. The press yawned and looked the other way. Kerry said he entered Cambodia with a CIA agent. But how likely is it that the CIA would choose to penetrate an illegal area with a clunky, noisy boat commanded by someone as inexperienced as Kerry?

.. Kerry refused to make public his journal or his military records, and the media seemed uninterested in pushing for him to do so. (Compare this with the energetic media demands for Bush's National Guard records.) Apparently only one media outlet, the Washington Post, made an effort to open up Kerry's records and received only six of 100 pages. On the whole, big-time media reporting on the Swifties was dismal. No wonder the credibility of the news media is headed south.

ROY HOFFMAN,

Douglas Brinkley says he soft-pedaled Hoffmann's role in the book [Tour of Duty], but that he is "the most egregious example of blatant disregard for civilian casualties and for the lives of his men in the U.S. Navy in Vietnam. He infected the lives of a lot of Navy guys down there, and he has a lot of answering to do," Brinkley says about Hoffmann. "He can either recognize he has blood on his hands and deal with his own ghosts or go where it's safe and reach for the flag. He can see a therapist or wage a new war, and he did the latter."

JOHN KERRY WON'T RELEASE

UPDATE: Tom Maguire has the goods on the Times. Here's a teaser:

It might be worth mentioning to the Times that when they reveal such ignorance about the charges made by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, they appear to be flacking for Kerry. Imagine that.

THE BLOGOSPHERE WANTS TO KNOW --

"WHAT

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER.

Here is Kerry, after 30 years of torturous reexamination of Vietnam, coming full circle and running as Nixon 1968: mysterious plan, Iraqification, out in four years. A novelist could not have written this tale.

(via Fish Food).

THE EVIDENCE IS IN --

"NEVER FORGET"

THE QUESTION OF THE DAY.

Clich here for music and lyrics.

More Kerry and Oompa Loompa pictures here (from July!) And Infinite Monkeys highlights these Kerryesk lyrics from the song:

There's no earthly way of knowing
Which direction we are going.
There's no knowing where we're rowing
Or which way the river's flowing.

MSM --

A DAMAGED VET REMEMBERS

JOHN KERRY

THE KERRY PHOTO

BILL DYER

But enough introduction. Go read Bill's latest "Swift Vet / Kerry in Vietman" piece, "A challenge to those who claim that the SwiftVets' allegations have been "debunked" or are "unsubstantiated"." It's brief and to the point. And not to be missed.

Read also this. Quotable:

Those who dismiss critics of John Kerry's Vietnam service as just a bunch of right-wing Republicans out to advance George W. Bush's cause don't know what they are talking about -- or they are engaged in wishful thinking. Okay, I may have once thought that about the critics, too. But after poring over the large volume of e-mail I received after my Aug. 28 column, "What Matters About Kerry and Vietnam," I don't any longer.

BELDAR

And Beldar has this on today's Kerry/Brinkley press release, which is stamped with the disclaimer "Paid for by Kerry-Edwards 2004, Inc.":

I appreciate the frank attribution on this press release; but it ought to also appear on Brinkley's book, Tour of Duty, and perhaps also be tattooed on Mr. Brinkley's forehead to help keep him in sync with the party line.

"UNFIT FOR COMMAND" --

BRINKLEY SHOCKER:

Every American now knows that there's something really screwy about George Bush and the National Guard, and they know that John Kerry was not the war hero we thought he was.

Brinkley is the author of Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War.

UPDATE: The Kerry campaign is circulating the following retraction from novelist Douglas Brinkley:

"A story in the September 24 New York Times leaves the false impression that I think John Kerry was not 'the war hero we thought he was.' Nothing could be further from the truth. He was a great American fighting man in Vietnam and deserved all of his medals. Over the past year I have vigorously defended Kerry's military record and will continue to do so.

"My comment was meant to be about the political consequences of the anti-Kerry Swift boat attacks vs. the anti-Bush National Guard ones. I was speaking about public perceptions not my personal beliefs."

Paid for by Kerry-Edwards 2004, Inc.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

worse than all that was Rather's ten-day denial of reality, culminating in the surreal half-admission that the phony documents could not be verified as accurate. That's the equivalent of saying that a corpse cannot be proven to be alive.

It has taken a lot to end the credibility of the [leftist] dynasty, inasmuch as there were many prior provocations � Peter Arnett airing a blatantly dishonest 1998 mythodrama on CNN about Americans using Sarin gas in Laos; Dan Rather giving a flawed 1988 account of American grotesqueries in Vietnam (The Wall Within), replete with phony veterans spinning lies about horrific war crimes. But then we have not quite seen anything like the shamelessness of airing forged documents backed by unhinged witnesses and verified by suspect "experts" � all in a time of war and with the intent of smearing a sitting conservative president.

.. there also began a professional devolution, as questionable legal and ethical methods were excused in the name of the greater good. We got the Ellsberg pilfered documents, the blank check of "unnamed sources," trips to Hanoi and Paris to meet the enemy, Peter Arnett broadcasting gloom and doom live from Baghdad � all culminating in the two-bit forgeries used for the "higher" cause of unseating George Bush. Daniel Ellsberg, Jane Fonda, and CBS may have done things that were legally wrong .. but in postmodern logic they were morally "right" given their superior knowledge, character, and [leftist] intentions.

BELDAR

To support his claim that there was incoming enemy fire, Sandusky referred to records showing damage to PCF 94; Odell pointed out that those records referred to damage which PCF 94 had sustained on the previous day, and that PCF 94 actually ended up being the boat that towed the striken PCF 3 to safety .. Sandusky had no explanation for how the Swift Boats could have survived the supposed "5000 meters" of heavy enemy fire from both banks without any of the boats or their crew being hit during the hour-plus time it took to rescue and medevac out PCF 3's injured crew ..

MARK STEYN --

BELDAR

Brinkley's book [Tour of Duty] says nothing about Kerry ever meeting with representatives of the North Vietnamese government or Viet Cong in Paris.

from my own admittedly cushy perspective, [the word] "betrayal" [used in the Swift vet ad] is still a stronger word than I would yet feel comfortable using, and it conveys a more damning moral judgment than I am yet comfortable making. Although the circumstantial evidence is powerful, it still requires the drawing of an inference to conclude that there was an express quid pro quo or agreement between Kerry and his VVAW comrades and the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong representatives in Paris. Kerry's resolute silence on all the details of his discussions, what was actually discussed, how and through whom the meeting(s) were arranged [does however cut] against him.

SWIFT VET

HOW ABOUT

THE NEW SWIFT VET AD --

JUSTONEMINUTE

DOUGLAS BRINKLEY

IS JOHN KERRY RIGHT?

In America in Vietnam, Lewy noted the establishment of a veritable war-crimes industry, supported by the USSR, as early as 1965. As Ion Mihai Pacepa, a former Romanian intelligence chief, has recounted, the Soviets set up permanent international organizations � including the International War Crimes Tribunal and the Stockholm Conference on Vietnam � "to aid or to conduct operations to help Americans dodge the draft or defect, to demoralize its army with anti-American propaganda, to conduct protests, demonstrations, and boycotts, and to sanction anyone connected with the war." Pacepa claims to have been responsible for fabricating stories about U.S. atrocities in Vietnam and "flacking" them to Western news organizations. Lewy writes that "the Communists made skillful use of their worldwide propaganda apparatus . . . and they found many Western intellectuals only too willing to accept every conceivable allegation of [American] wrongdoing at face value."

The VVAW, a small, radical group that never exceeded a membership of 7,000 (including John Kerry) from a pool of nearly three million Vietnam (and nine million Vietnam-era) veterans, essentially "Americanized" Soviet propaganda. When he testified before the Senate in 1971, Kerry was merely repeating charges that had been making the rounds since 1965.

CAPTAIN ED --

IF

UPDATE: If you want the truth, don't read the disreputable NY Times Op-Ed, read the Post.

REAR ADMIRAL ROY HOFFMANN --

[John Kerry's] propensity for gross exaggeration and lying was legend to those who knew him, even early on at Cam Rahn Bay, his first duty station in Vietnam. In Tour of Duty, Kerry recounts the story of the seas being so rough during the monsoon season that sailors came in "pissing red and that several people have broken bones" - a ridiculous story that was totally unsubstantiated.

Or consider the story of how Kerry, according to Brinkley, stated, "A sampan navigating in the shroud of darkness was assumed to be Viet Cong and would be fired on" - a breach of the U.S. Navy's rules of engagement. That is an outright defamatory lie. The South Vietnamese National Government had established and promulgated well-defined coastal-control zones to facilitate surveillance, illegal activity, and infiltration of enemy arms from seaward. Although our Swift Boats and Coast Guard cutters did diligently enforce the restricted areas, a boat or ship violating a restricted zone would not be fired upon unless attempting to escape inspection, and only after proper warning in accordance with U.S. Navy strict rules of engagement.

Kerry repeatedly embellishes this lie by referring to "U.S. designated free-fire zones," implying that such zones authorized indiscriminate killing, in order to portray the U.S. military as unwanted, brutish conquerors in Vietnam. In truth, free-fire zones fell within the normal rules of engagement and authorized not an order to fire but discretion to fire first if threatened by, or when confronting, enemy forces ..

John Kerry was the only man in the entire Task Force of 3,600 men - officers and enlisted - to request transfer out of country based on three Purple Hearts. Particularly galling to his shipmates was the fact that not one of his minor nicks was debilitating nor resulted in one lost day of duty ..

Kerry is not a hero. He betrayed his comrades-in-arms in time of war. He is a chronic liar and a fraud. This is not about politics; it's about truthfulness, reliability, loyalty, and trust - all absolute tenets of command. John Forbes Kerry is not fit to be Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States of America.

BELDARBLOG

For example, he's all over the Judicial Watch / John Kerry medals story.

FOOTBALL FANS

WATCH

CORPORATE INTERESTS

SWIFT VET AD #5.

JOHN KERRY

IMUS: Did you read "Unfit for Command?"

KERRY: No.

IMUS: Did anybody on your staff?

KERRY: I have no idea.

IMUS: Why wouldn't you want to know what's in it? It's the No. 1 "New York Times," of course, it says nonfiction bestseller.

KERRY: Because they have right wing people to buy them in bulk, and that's what they're doing.

IMUS: No, I understand.

KERRY: Look, it's a pack of lies. It's an absolute pack of lies. It's been proven to be a pack of lies, and I have no interest in reading it.

FOX NEWS

NEW KERRY DOCUMENTS

A newly surfaced document from John Kerry's Navy record says he shot a lone, wounded enemy who was running away in the incident that led to his Silver Star, his highest military decoration.

Members of the anti-Kerry Swift Boat Veterans for Truth say the report vindicates their claim that Kerry didn't show the kind of valor that merits a Silver Star. The after-action report was obtained from the Navy archives by syndicated TV commentator Mark Hyman of "The Point." A Navy official confirmed its authenticity.

John O'Neill, a leader of the Swift Vets running anti-Kerry TV ads, said the document shows Kerry "was pursuing a wounded man and not charging alone into superior numbers and intense fire," as his Silver Star citation claims.

GEORGE BUTLER'S SWIFT BOAT "DOCUMENTARY"

The movie is based on Tour of Duty, the Douglas Brinkley hagiography that the Swift Boat vets say incited them to action in the first place. More important, Going Upriver seems designed to rebut, one by one, the three campaign ads put out by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth: one questioning Kerry's heroism during the war, one criticizing his antiwar testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and one condemning his decision to throw his ribbons over a fence in front of the Capitol during an antiwar demonstration. Butler re-edited his film in response to the Swift Boat ads ..

SWIFT VET MESSAGE BOARD --

I just got off the phone with the Naval Archives and they have the following on Kerry in their files: (4) Boxes filled with message traffic - CTF 115 messages - COSDIV 11 messages - Kerry awards and admin messages - Command Histories - Misc papers Anyone with an ID can go in and look at the stuff. Copies are .30 a page. It appears the media was wrong about the amount of info released to the public. We need someone inside that Archives!

It looks like the new Kerry documents are coming out of this stash.

MORE

SWIFT VET FACT SHEET --

Also this -- and overview of contributions and contributors to the Swift Boat Vet for Truth (pdf).

JOHN KERRY'S

PCF 94 beached in center of ambush in front of small path when Viet Cong sprung up from bunker 10 feet from unit. Man ran with weapon towards hootch. Forward M-60 machine gunner wounded man in leg. Officer-in-charge, LTjg Kerry, jumped ashore and gave pursuit while other units saturated area with fire and beached placing assault parties ashore. Kerry chased VC inland behind hootch and shot him while he fled -- capturing one B-40 rocket launcher with round in chamber.

To work blogosphere!

UPDATE: Here is an ongoing discussion of the document by Swift Boat vets. A seperate ealier thead can be found .

The key issue -- did John Kerry write the report?

RAMIREZ.

$6.7 MILLION

UPDATE: "Anti-Kerry Veterans' group now political machine with big budget."

TODAY --

A gathering of Vietnam veterans from across America at the Upper Senate Park, Washington, D.C. Sunday, Sept 12, 2004 2:00-4:00 PM (ET). Why: To tell the truth about Vietnam veterans and to counter the lies told about Vietnam veterans by John Kerry.

Who: All Vietnam veterans and their families and supporters are asked to attend. EVERYBODY IS ENCOURAGED TO ATTEND.

MICHAEL BARONE.

Dukakis was hurt because it was pointed out that for 11 years he supported weekend furloughs for prisoners sentenced to life without parole--a policy for which there is no rational argument. Kerry was hurt because at least some of the SBVT charges proved true. On August 11, his spokesman admitted that he was not on an illegal mission in Cambodia at Christmastime 1968--the memory of which, he said on the Senate floor in 1986, was "seared--seared--in me." His campaign left uncorroborated his frequent claims to have been on secret missions to Cambodia at other times. He has not authorized release of his military records. As this is written, Kerry has not taken questions from the press since August 1. Sometimes there is no good defense, and the only thing you can do is try to change the subject.

FISKED --

Dan Ra^ther's defense of himself tonight, while probably impressive to shallow observers was far from convincing. Here's a list of things he ignored, did not properly address, or concealed from viewers. Feel free to send us your suggestions to this live fisking.

Tom Maguire, on the other hand, does a Ra^ther takedown from the comfort of home (perhaps in his pajamas):

Dan [Ra^ther] insisted that these documents are only a part of the story, and that we should focus on the real questions that have been raised. Hmm, questions such as whether Bush disobeyed a direct order? But I think the only source for that allegation is a document that might be forged. Maybe we should establish the authenticty of the document before we worry about the White House response.

Missing from the CBS presentation - any mention of the numerous reports of skeptical experts; any document expert specifically addressing the questions that have been raised (except as noted above); any response to the widow or the son, both of whom dispute the documents.

If ABC and the WaPo have any honor, they will hoot CBS off the stage.

WHERE'S

TRANSCRIPT --

MATTHEWS: We�re joined now by James Warner, who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam. Mr. Warner, tell me about why you participated in this documentary ["Stolen Honor"].

JAMES WARNER: In 1971, I was in a camp with 35 other guys, who were all in solitary. They told us we were there to be punished. In May of 1971, I was taken out to an interrogation, a very long interrogation, the longest one I had without being tortured. We talked for a while, and then the interrogator gave me a storyboard. It was a piece of cardboard with a magazine article cut out, pasted to it. I started reading it, and it was testimony that my mother had given at something called the Winter Soldier hearing. I had no idea what that meant. I read it. She didn�t�it was innocuous. She hoped I was being well treated and that the war would end soon.

And then there was some more to the story. And I read that. It was comments by people claiming to be veterans. And I got really incensed that had somebody had gotten my parents involved in something like this. And we talked some more about that. And after a while, he showed me another storyboard. My recollection is this was typewritten. I do not recall that this was Senate testimony. I just remember that he said, This is a Navy officer, John Kerry. I recall that it said, Lieutenant JG John Kerry, but I remember the name John Kerry. And I was told that he helped to organize this hearing, along with Jane Fonda.

And I read this, and it was a recitation. And this, too, must have been�or edited because I thought he was saying these are things that he saw. And it struck me that this showed very, very poor judgment to say this because he had to have known that his words were going to be used against us. And he had...

MATTHEWS: Help us explain, who were never in your situation. What do you mean by �used against us�?

WARNER: All along, the communists told us, Before the war is over, or when the war is over, you will not all go home. We�re going to keep some of you. We�re going to put on trial, and we�re going to execute you if you�re found guilty because you committed war crimes. Now, we spend�after he showed me this, he started�he kept pounding on the table and pointing at this saying, This officer, your own Naval officer, proves that you deserve to be punished.

MEMO

AMERICAN POW'S

"When these people came back from the war and were vilified, spit upon and so forth, that was largely due to the efforts of this man [Kerry]," said former POW, Col. George "Bud" Day, who was on hand to promote the documentary detailing how Kerry's claims of daily war atrocities affected POWs. Day, who was held in captivity by North Vietnam for over five-and-a-half years, said Kerry came back from Vietnam masquerading as a war hero "and told the country that we were a bunch of atrocity committing monsters and that these monsters were coming home."

If the powerful documentary featuring highly decorated Vietnam POWs recounting how Lt.(jg) John Kerry's antiwar activity affected them was seen by the huge audience it deserves, Massachusetts's junior senator wouldn't get elected to a sanitation commission.

JOHN KERRY --

And I love this. The NY Times steals a source from the blogosphere -- without attribution. Compare how the NY Times has covered Ra^thergate -- assiduously avoiding any mention of the blogosphere -- with the coverage of the Chicago Sun-Times -- which as InstaPundit notes, " treats Power Line and other blogs as just another news source."

WHITEWASHING

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER:

The Democrats chose a candidate known for political calculation, a talent for nuance and an unswerving dedication to swerving constantly to avoid political risk. In other words, they chose a cipher ..

How did the Democrats spend the four days at their convention? Saluting the Swift boats. Why? Because John Kerry has taken so many positions on Iraq and the war on terrorism that he has nothing believable or useful left to say. All he can say is "Vietnam."

KERRY TO APOLOGIZE?

(via The Corner).

JOHN KERRY --

UPDATE: The AP smokes out John Kerry for an interview (see the AP story above) and what do they talk about -- health care.

MORE

Kerry stated during the Dick Cavett debate with John O�Neill in 1971:

"The fact of the matter remains that after I received my third wound and was told that I could return to the United States, I deliberated for about two weeks because there was a very difficult decision in whether or not you leave your friends because you have an opportunity to go. But I finally made the decision to go back and did leave of my own volition because I felt that I could do more against the war back here." (link.)

Kerry chose to take advantage of a regulation that allows military with three Purple Hearts to leave the combat theater. He states that this was not an easy decision that he made. Yet facts are a stubborn thing. Kerry received his wound for which he was awarded (improperly) his third Purple Heart on 13 March 1969. From documents available on his web site, his request for reassignment was in Washington, D.C. four days later, after having been typed up in An Thoi and signed by the commander there on 17 March, 1969. (link.)

There were no two weeks of deliberation. Kerry had to have made the request (which is not on Kerry�s web site, and is one of the many missing pieces of documentation contradicting the Kerry claim of releasing all records) within a day or two of his last injury. He intentionally abandoned his crew as soon as he could.

"KERRY'S RECORD

MORE CLIPS

JOHN KERRY

This rally may be bigger than its organizers anticipate. Because what they're protesting is not some vague moral principle .. It's personal to men like Tony Snesko, Larry Bailey, Mike Bradley, Denny Baum, and Pete Webster. They were the men serving on the Swift boats, in the infantry. They were the ones who risked their lives, shot and were shot at, and were often wounded. They were the ones who saw their friends killed. What resonates so loudly in their minds is likely to reach many of the other Vietnam vets who don't remember Lt. (j.g.) John Kerry, and don't think much of Senator John Kerry � but who all remember John Kerry, leader of the radical Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

MICHAEL NOVAK --

Only when they read the accounts published in the campaign biographies by Douglas Brinkley and a team from the Boston Globe did Kerry's superiors and peers, including Captain Elliott, come to see how widely Kerry's perception and self-serving descriptions differed from reality. Beginning then, they started to reevaluate everything they had heard from him back then. The man presented in those books was not the man they knew, and the events were not the events they knew. In wartime, one must trust one's mates. After they saw those books, they saw what Kerry reported to them then in a new light.

I infer that Captain Elliott and others in 1969 took on trust some reports from Kerry, reports they can no longer consider as truthful as they thought them before. In later years, Kerry said in Senate debate that he often sent up action reports whose exact words he later read in Stars & Stripes, except that some of the numbers he had given of enemy casualties had been inflated by higher-ups. He admitted to somewhat inflating his reports himself, but said his superiors inflated them further. To my ears, this sounds like a man without honor later projecting his own weaknesses on others.

Today it is not the Swift Boat Veterans' story that is crumbling, but Kerry's. Two of its five pillars have already collapsed. The story that he said publicly for years had been "seared � seared" into his memory never happened: that so-called "Christmas in Cambodia 1968," when "President Nixon" was in the White House (in 1968, it was actually President Johnson).

Kerry's campaign has also admitted that his first Purple Heart � from December 2, 1968 � was probably not from action under hostile fire, but was from a self-inflicted wound caused by a small shred of shrapnel from a grenade Kerry himself launched at an unseen target. Both the attending doctor and Kerry's commanding officer, separately, refused to recommend a Purple Heart for so minor a wound. To this point, it is not known how Kerry ended up finding someone to award it.

There is no real need to argue over the other disputed points. All could be resolved if Kerry released his entire Navy file. He swears publicly these days that he is telling the absolute honest truth. The records would therefore bear him out. He should release them. Why is the Kerry press afraid to insist on that?

It would be good for all of us if we could simply honor Kerry for his service to his country, as President Bush has already said he does. But it would be far better still to have evidence that Kerry's word of honor is reliable. That evidence could be provided by the records.

38 DAYS.

BRINKLEY'S KNOWING OMISSION.

[John] Kerry's [Cambodia] story is clearly meant as a "conversion moment." A significant divergent detail in the above is that Kerry's revelation was negative. Saul heard a voice speaking truth. Kerry, appropriately, heard a voice speaking lies. Of course, Kerry was not in Cambodia on that Christmas. He has admitted that. The then current President made no such speech. The story was a falsehood in itself. But it was made to illustrate Kerry's own conversion from supporting the war to opposing it. He felt need to dramatize the event and to make it into a moment when he had a sudden flash of enlightenment.

With that as context, Brinkley's book [Tour of Duty] is interesting. Brinkley never mentions the story, which suggests that he knew that it was not true. But it would have made an interesting inclusion. It is dramatic, and it could have been retold in such a way to make plain that Brinkley knew that it was Kerry's fabrication. There was no way to retell it without making plain that it was a stretcher, however, because the story runs directly counter to documented events and also to statements made by Kerry and others in the book. Brinkley did not choose the "flash of enlightenment" path, he chose instead to employ careful billboards of foreshadowing to demonstrate Kerry's shift from accepting at least as reasonable the U.S. involvement in Vietnam to vigorously and harshly attacking it ..

KERRY-KENNEDY.

BUSH SIGNED FORM 180.

A READER

RAMIREZ --

LYING ABOUT VIETNAM

[Steve] Pitkin appears several times in the [VVAW] documentary film "Winter Soldier," where he comes across as vague and somewhat stunned, especially while being questioned by John Kerry in a preliminary interview .. But Steve Pitkin says today that what the film actually shows are his efforts to avoid answering Kerry�s questions at all. During the formal hearings, Pitkin started to slam the press for misrepresenting what GIs really did in Vietnam, but a woman he believes was Jane Fonda shot him an astonished look and started to stand up. Steve could see other members of the group getting ready to cut him off, so he changed course and made up a few things he thought they would be willing to accept. "Everything I said about atrocities and racism was a lie. My unit never went out with the intention of doing anything but its job. And I never saw black soldiers treated differently, get picked out for the worst or most dangerous jobs, or anything like that. There were some guys, shirkers, who would intentionally injure themselves to get sent home, so I talked about that for a while. But the fact is I lied my ass off, and I'm not proud of it."

In a sworn affidavit on August 31, 2004, Pitkin said that he rode in a van with John Kerry, a national leader of the VVAW, Scott Camil, and others from Washington, DC to attend the conference. The event was intended to publicize alleged American war crimes in Vietnam, but Pitkin maintains that he did not intend to speak at the inquiry since he had no knowledge of such war crimes.

Pitkin now claims that Kerry and other anti-war leaders pressured him to testify about American war crimes, despite his protestations that he could not honestly do so. He says that one of the event leaders threatened to leave him stranded in Detroit if he refused to participate.

Pitkin's affidavit says, "Kerry and other leaders of the event instructed me to publicly state that I had witnessed incidents of rape, brutality, atrocities and racism, knowing that such statements would necessarily be untrue." ..

Pitkin says that on the second day of the conference, he was surrounded by a group of the event's leaders who wanted him to speak. He reiterated that he had no personal knowledge of any of the alleged misconduct. He claims that Kerry said to him, "Surely you had to have seen some of the atrocities."

It was at this point that Pitkin says the group's leaders threatened him. Under pressure from the group that he describes as "menacing." He finally agreed to testify. Pitkin says that group coached him to tell stories about rape, brutality, shooting prisoners, and racism.

TRILLIONS IN WELFARE FOR BABY BOOMERS --

SWIFT VET JOHN O'NEILL

John Hawkins: Let�s look at some of these specific issues. Now at the RNC, Terry McAuliffe said -- and this is the latest Cambodia story, and I know that it has changed more than a few times -- that "John Kerry went to Cambodia twice. He was over in Viet Nam and at one point he took some CIA operatives into Cambodia." However, to the best of my knowledge, John Kerry has provided absolutely no evidence that he was ever in Cambodia beyond his word. But let me ask you, in the time that John Kerry was in Vietnam, were the Swift Boats ferrying CIA operatives into Cambodia? And if they did so, was it a single boat or would there have been multiple boats involved?

John O'Neill: John Kerry�s story was that he was in Cambodia Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. That is a demonstrable lie.

John Hawkins: Absolutely. You can prove it�s a lie from where he was from everybody that was there. His boat was never in Cambodia in December or January. What he is clearly doing now is trying to devise a story ambiguous enough as to time and location that can�t actually be checked out and he doesn�t even have the courage to do it himself. Instead he uses surrogates like McAuliffe who I suggest has never been in Vietnam and certainly has never been on a swift boat. There�s no way to respond in the abstract; that�s why they have kept it abstract. What is clear is that the time he said was a turning point in his entire life, which he identified as Christmas Eve and Christmas Day; that was a total lie and it was made up. How many people make up the turning point of their life? Now, to be fair, do I know of any swift boat ever going into Cambodia? Absolutely not, nor would anybody use one because you can hear it a mile and a half away.

John Hawkins: Let me ask you one other question. Did they ever send swift boats on missions like that, not necessarily into Cambodia, but alone or did you always go in packs?

John O'Neill: Always in groups of several boats and if a mission like that had ever occurred it would have been with several boats.

John Hawkins: So if the latest Kerry story is true, there should be the people on his boat, people on other boats, there should be tons of people to confirm his story.

John O'Neill: There also should be a record of it and it�s missing and none of his commanding officers all the way up the chain of command have ever heard about anything like this. So it was a very secret mission. It was secret from the people on his boat at least through January and secret from all the people that were there with him to the best of my knowledge and secret from all the officers that commanded with him. It was an extremely secret mission.

John Hawkins: It sounds like it.

John O'Neill: Maybe it was with Santa Claus (laughs).

KERRY & THE SWIFT VETS --

AWOL CHARGES

A PREVIEW

Vladimir Bukovsky, the great anti-Soviet dissident, once reproved me for quoting the old joke about the two main official Soviet newspapers: "There's no truth in Pravda [Truth] and no news in Izvestia [News.]" He pointed out that you could learn a great deal of truthful news from both papers if you read them with proper care.

In particular, they often denounced "anti-Soviet lies." These lies had never previously been reported by them. Nor were they lies. And their exposure as such was the first that readers had been told of them. By reading the denunciation carefully, however, intelligent readers could decipher what the original story must have been. It was a roundabout way of getting information � but it worked.

That is exactly how intelligent readers now have to read the New York Times and most of the establishment media � at least when they are reporting on the "anti-Kerry lies" of the Swift-boat veterans.

"KERRY DECIDED

Via PoliPundit, who also links to "Bush Guard Service, The True Story". And here's a hint. It's not a link to the NY Times.

MARK STEYN --

SEN. KERRY'S

Purple Heart No. 1, December 2, 1968

The fact is Sen. Kerry was denied a Purple Heart in the issuing hours of the incident and this speaks volumes on this issue. You have someone who was supposedly wounded who visits his commanding officer -- who has no axe to grind at the time -- who was briefed within hours of the incident and determines no Purple Heart was warranted. Furthermore, Sen. Kerry seeks medical assistance for such an obviously minor wound for the sole purpose to document his insignificant wound so he may further pursue his Purple Heart from his next transfer designation ..

There is no documented evidence of any enemy enounter at the time of Sen. Kerry's minor wound and the fact Sen. Kerry himself has cast reasonable doubt for any hostile enemy action being encountered. What was presumed to be potential enemy turned out to be non-combatant civilians. The only chance Sen. Kerry has in making a Purple Heart case is if he had been wounded in the heat of battle. But since there was no heated battle with enemy combatants he would lose this line of argument. Sen. Kerry has released no "after action" report, as one would have been required if there was combat engagement involved. A Purple Heart normally is not requested but is awarded de facto for a wound inflicted by the enemy - a wound serious enough to require medical attention. The Naval Historical Center keeps all documents connected to such awards to U.S. Navy and Marine personnel. Typewritten "casualty cards" list the date, location and prognosis of the wound for which the Purple Heart is given, and they are produced by the medical facility that provides medical treatment. There are two such cards for Kerry - for his slight wounds on Feb. 20 and March 13, 1969, but none for his December 1968 claim.

Thus,it can be concluded that Sen. Kerry's Purple Heart for this incident was awarded in error due to material misrepresentation on the part of Sen. Kerry to the U.S. Navy by declaring his wound was the result of enemy action. Sen. Kerry's Purple Heart should be rescinded by the Department of Defense.

It has been demonstrated that Sen. Kerry was never wounded in his buttocks by a enemy mine. It has also been demonstrated that Sen. Kerry knowingly filed a false casualty report for himself. Sen. Kerry's Purple Heart for the March 13, 1969 incident was not caused by enemy action, but from a careless act of destroying rice for which one eyewitness thought was more funny than serious. Sen. Kerry has been shown in one account of the mine incident to have described his boat as directly hitting a mine and being lifted out of the water several feet knowing very well this wasn't possible. The PCF-94 damage report supports the conclusion that Sen. Kerry had run over an under water obstacle as he kept going at full speed after the PCF-3 had struck a mine, and it was this impact that caused the screws to be curled, chipped and what appeared to the crew to have been the result of a mine explosion. It would appear that Sen. Kerry wanted to use the illusion of a enemy mine explosion to account for shrapnel to his buttocks instead of being self-inflicted.

The entire events as described by Sen. Kerry in his spot reports and by his supporters who was on his boat for the March 13, 1969 incident is exaggerated and riddled with inconsistencies and factually incorrect events. The Department of Defense should rescind the awarding of both Kerry's Purple Heart and the Bronze Star for the March 13th incident due to the above and knowingly making material false statements to the U.S. Navy.

All of these matters are open for discussion at the "Exploring Sen. Kerry's Military Record" forum.

(Via Captain Ed.)

TODAY'S MUST READ --

"KERRY IN CAMBODIA" --

Or maybe they aren't. Bovino adds, "when there's anything reliable to say [on "Kerry in Cambodia"], as opposed to rumors and suspicions, [the staff] intend to report it fully."

Let's take a look at what the NY Times has chosen not to tell their readers about Kerry in Cambodia. First, the fact that the Kerry campaign has said that Kerry never was in Cambodia. Second, the fact all of the Swift vets who served with Kerry say they were never in Cambodia. And third, the fact that everyone who was in Vietnam at the time says that it is essentiall impossible to imagine that John Kerry's Swift boat ever entered into Cambodia.

Three solid facts, three solid instances of the NY Times sellings way its journalistic reputation for the political benefit of John Kerry.

"Just move on past folks, nothing to see here. Move along now. Everthing is being taken care of. Don't worry your little heads. The NY Times has everthing taken care of .. hurry along now .. ."

ASYMMETRICAL WARFARE

The Swifties got the nation's attention with a television ad that aired just 739 times in seven media markets between July 30 and Aug. 23, markets that cover just 2.1 percent of the nation's population, according to the University of Wisconsin Advertising Project and Nielsen Monitor-Plus.

That's 739 in competition with the total of 501,259 ads aired since March 3 by George W. Bush and by a host of John Kerry supporters, including the Democratic National Committee, Media Fund, MoveOn.org, Sierra Club and the AFL-CIO in 100 of the nation's 210 media markets.

The swift-boat story first surfaced, according to the conservative Media Research Center, with a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington and an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal by John O'Neill, the Texan who co-authored "Unfit for Command" and who began challenging Kerry's tale of atrocities three decades ago.

"The event received scant notice by traditional media," according to MRC. "CBS News mentioned it briefly and tried to tie the group to Bush. The Washington Post and New York Times had short items about it, as did the Boston Globe. The most in-depth coverage came from Fox News Channel."

When the swift-boat veterans released their first TV ad on Aug. 4, the story began to attract attention. But throughout the month, their allegations that Kerry had misstated events and his Christmas in Cambodia rarely were treated as credible.

Surprising, since members of the swift-boat group and others coming forward, such as retired Rear Adm. William L. Schachte Jr. of Charleston, S.C., were substantial men who had led responsible lives.

Schachte, for example, said that as operations officer and Kerry's superior, he and an enlisted man were on the boat and participated in the event for which Kerry claimed his first Purple Heart. The minor wound was accidentally self-inflicted, he said. Their boat was not drawing fire and, therefore, his request for a Purple Heart was disapproved until after those familiar with the incident rotated out.

The Kerry campaign says Schachte wasn't on the boat. No after-action report exists. It accused Schachte, too, of profiting from a federal contract, something he and the president of the company that got the contract deny.

"I wouldn't know him if he drove his swift-boat into my office," the president of the Philadelphia company, FastShip Inc., told the Philadelphia Inquirer. "I never heard of him."

The Kerry campaign's approach to all who raise questions is to call them liars or pawns of the Bush campaign. The original claims, like Schachte's, are rarely aired or examined [by big media].

The result is that veterans make their case through targeted television commercials, the Internet, cable and the book, which was so popular that the original printing of 85,000 copies has been expanded by 550,000.

KERRY'S SWIFT VET MEDIA STRATEGY

So far, the Kerry campaign has been forced to back down from at least three components of its Viet Nam narrative:

* Kerry's 25-year-old Cambodian Christmas fable, which has morphed and split into multiple near-Cambodian experiences with Special Forces/CIA entanglements

* Kerry's stealing of Tedd Peck's engagement on 29 January 1969, which he included in his website timeline

* Kerry's and David Alston's stories about Alston serving with Kerry on the 29 January and 28 February engagements, which Captain's Quarters determined was impossible -- and Alston no longer makes appearances with Kerry in telling those stories

Also, as a result of the scrutiny applied to Kerry's narrative, the following medals that Kerry thrust to the forefront of his campaign are now under question:

* His explanation for his first Purple Heart for the "action" of 2 December conflicts with his own journals, which states on 11 Dec that he had not yet been shot at -- and the application for that award was processed long after the event and through a different chain of command than that under which Kerry served on 2 Dec.

* The Navy has launched an investigation of how Kerry had three separate commendations for one Silver Star, including one signed and supposedly written by John Lehman in the 1980s, while Lehman insists he never saw, wrote, or signed it. The Navy is also investigating how Kerry claimed a combat "V" for the Silver Star, a device that does not apply to that award.

The only factual refutations that have occurred so far apply to John Kerry's narrative, not that of the 250-plus Swiftvets with whom he served. So who's lied to the electorate so far? It doesn't appear to be the Swiftvets, which makes the only "egregious" liar in this campaign John Kerry.

BELDARBLOG

Betsy Newmark is also rolling.

SEN. DODD & SEN. BAYH --

DOUBLE STANDARDS

THE NEWS HOUNDS

CONGRESS

"WITH ONE STROKE

JILL STEWART

And Dan Weintraub considers the possibility -- President Schwarzenegger?

CLINTON TO KERRY:

Meanwhile Kerry remains obsessed with Vietnam and the Swift Vets.

IS IT A SMART THING

UPDATE: The Kerry campaign has removed it's attack on John McCain from its web site -- but you can still read it via a link at Just One Minute, who takes a closer look at just what McCain's lies may be.

Here's the original Kerry press release, a Captain Ed cache.

BETSY NEWMARK

My school, a small charter school in Raleigh, NC, periodically has special days when the kids don't go to the regular classes, but we have special programs that they cycle through. My responsibility Friday was to present a short history of political advertising. I used this great site, The Living Room Candidate, to show the kids ads going back to the first ones for Eisenhower and Stevenson. I thought that my readers might be interested in the reactions of 10th and 11th graders to some famous ads ..

Fast-forwarding to today, I showed them the second Swift Boat ad and the ad that Kerry made to answer the SBVT ads using James Rassmann talking about how Kerry saved him in Vietnam. The ad closes with Kerry saying that he still carries shrapnel in his leg. I was amazed when the kids burst in laughter at that point. They explained that it just seemed so random for him to be talking about shrapnel in his leg and then to end the ad. As one girl explained, she didn't see that he could have been hurt that badly in his leg since she always sees pictures of him biking, skiing, and windsurfing. They thought the ad was ineffective since it was just one guy saying that Kerry was brave compared to all the guys in the Swifties' ad. They thought Kerry should address the specific allegations. I asked them if they were undecided on whom to vote for, would this set of ads make them more or less likely to vote for Kerry, and they almost all agreed that they'd be less likely to vote for Kerry. And most of these kids are [on the left].

Once we look at the details, no matter how Kerry partisans want to spin them, there simply isn�t anything there to distinguish Kerry from any of the other veterans who saw combat in Vietnam.

There is no doubt that the revelations about his fantasies of Cambodia, CIA insertions and moldy hats, the movie re-enactments, et al have also helped damage Kerry in the minds of the voters.

36 DAYS

I'VE NEVER

UPDATE: Betsy Newmark has some questions for Douglas Brinkley.

BeldarBlog has much more on Kerry's "Combat 'V'", as well as yet more questions for Brinkley. I'm with Bill on the "Combat 'V'" story:

in a target-rich environment for Kerry mistakes and exaggerations, this one doesn't particularly thrill me.

FROM THE WASHINGTON TIMES:

Tad Devine, Sen. John Kerry�s senior advisor, told the Washington Times that he does not think that the Swift Boat veterans� ads, which attacked Kerry's Vietnam War record, have hurt the campaign. �Fundamentally, I don�t think they reshaped the race at all,� Devine said. �If they did, the president would be 10 points ahead, not in a dead-heat horse race.�

Time: Bush 52, Kerry 41
Newsweek: Bush 54, Kerry 43

Doh!

BELDARBLOG

No hits for "ouchie," "boo-boo," "kiss it and make it better," "Ghengis Khan," "Hanoi Hilton," "Jane Fonda," "cabana boy," "diddler," "Boston Strangler," or "do you know who I am," either. Twenty-six hits for "Purple Heart," though, which would be approximately 26 more than the stitches Kerry's severe wounds required; zero hits for "stitches" or "stitch." But "Vietnam" pulls 236 hits � hey, did you know Kerry served in Vietnam?

MARK STEYN

One of the most revealing aspects of the campaign this last week were the interviews given by his various surrogates. Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic National Committee chairman, went on Hugh Hewitt's radio show and was asked about the swift boat veterans' ads, and he laughed and blustered and stalled and floundered. That sounded weird. This thing's been going on a month now, and the Kerry campaign still hasn't come up with a form of words to deflect questions about it. If they had an agreed spin, McAuliffe and Co. would be out using it. But the seared senator feels it's lese majeste even to question him. He can talk about Vietnam 24/7, but nobody else is allowed to bring it up.

Sorry, man, that's not the way it works. And if he thinks it does, he's even further removed from the realities of democratic politics than he was from the interior of Cambodia. Instead of those military records the swift boat vets are calling for, I'd be more interested in seeing his medical ones.

IT TURNS OUT JOHN KERRY

Via Betsy'sPage.

NOT SINCE JOHN ADAMS

N.Z. Bear has the lowdown on the Campaign Finance Reform 60-day window black- out curtain. The idea that we have in this country a 60 day black-out on free speech is an incomprehensible shocker -- the more so when that event is actually up us. I feel sick. I hope others do as well.

A reader writes:

.. that rhetoric makes good copy but it isn't true. I'm sure you've heard the cliche about yelling fire in a crowded theater. That derives from an early 20th Century case in which the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a conviction of a commie who got busted not for criticizing the draft, but for criticizing the very fact that other people were imprisoned for criticizing the draft in the midst of a war. That's right - criticizing the draft was "yelling fire," and the existence of a war was the "crowded theater."

Not that this makes today's CFR a good thing, or even acceptable, but it does put things into perspective.

THE BOSTON HERALD:

It's time John Kerry chooses between being a whiner and being a leader. His midnight performance Thursday and remarks at events Friday showed he's yet to get the difference in this campaign.

Americans do not want to hear Kerry's whining about being ``attacked'' and ``insulted'' at the Republican National Convention. Americans do not want to hear his childish claims that he was attacked first and therefore he now must attack back. Americans do not want to hear the Democratic nominee call the commander in chief during a war where American lives are on the line ``unfit for office and unfit for duty.''

They want to hear that he is as committed as President Bush to stopping fanatics from taking over American schools and slaughtering children. And if he has better ideas about how to go about doing it than Bush does, Americans want to hear those, too. For this is what we are facing. Anyone thinking the Russian school massacre couldn't happen here underestimates the lack of moral conscience which exists in the likes of al-Qaeda, Hamas and other extremists.

Partisan Democrats, with an air of intellectual superiority, sniff that terror is a tactic, not a cause. They do so to imply that President Bush and his supporters don't even understand the nature of the world's dangers, never mind the correct means to protect against them. President Bush left no doubt that he understands completely in his acceptance speech Thursday night. ``If America shows uncertainty or weakness in this decade, the world will drift toward tragedy. This will not happen on my watch.''

We bet John Kerry would like to have his Thursday microphone-clutching performance for the cameras back given the Russian horror. His complaints about attacks on his patriotism (as opposed to the voting record critique we heard) would be merely annoying if played only against the backdrop of a political contest.

But the larger contest - between liberty and tyranny, between good and evil - is the challenge against which Kerry's and Bush's leadership will be measured. And on that score, Kerry's thin-skin and oft-used tactic of claiming he's forced to attack because of unfair smears is not only unimpressive, it's offensive. And it's about time someone called him on it.

Defining differences is what campaigns are all about. George W. Bush told the country in no uncertain terms what he will do in a second term. And he told the country how his beliefs and record differ from Kerry's. That's just what Zell Miller did. That's just what Dick Cheney did. That's just what Rudy Giuliani did. Stop whining, Senator, and start telling voters why you believe you're right and these men are wrong.

Wow,

Via Michelle Malkin, who has lots more.

"WHAT

He's also got this:

The American news market seems to be heading the way of the British news market - with outfits such as CNN and the Times bearing an increasing resemblance to loony left shops such as the Guardian. The more the CNN's and New York Times of the American market have been countered by the likes of Fox News, the shriller and more tendentious the CNN's and New York Times become.

JOHN KERRY GETS

And my suggestion? Just keep scrolling and you'll find some great reads on John Kerry and Doug Brinkley's book.

ANDREW SULLIVAN

conservatism as we have known it is now over. People like me who became conservatives because of the appeal of smaller government and more domestic freedom are now marginalized in a big-government party, bent on using the power of the state to direct people's lives .. Just remember all that Bush promised last night: an astonishingly expensive bid to spend much more money to help people in ways that conservatives once abjured. He pledged to provide record levels of education funding, colleges and healthcare centers in poor towns, more Pell grants, seven million more affordable homes, expensive new HSAs, and a phenomenally expensive bid to reform the social security system. I look forward to someone adding it all up, but it's easily in the trillions. And Bush's astonishing achievement is to make the case for all this new spending, at a time of chronic debt ..

The whole package was, I think, best summed up as a mixture of Bismarck and Wilson. Germany's Bismarck fused a profound social conservatism with a nascent welfare state. It was a political philosophy based on a strong alliance with military and corporate interests, and bound itself in a paternalist Protestant ethic. Bush Republicanism is not as authoritarian, but its impulses are similar - and the dynastic father-figure is a critical element in the picture .. But unlike Bismarck, Bush's foreign policy is deeply liberal and internationalist: promoting a revolutionary doctrine of democratization abroad in the least hospitable of places. His faith in this respect, if not his ease with using military force, is reminiscent of Woodrow Wilson.

MORE REACTIONS

Pejmanesque

John Kerry has embarked on the loathsome tactic of accusing anyone who differs with his record of sullying his patriotism .. This is desperate and pitiful. Go through Cheney's speech and find me one instance where Kerry's patriotism was challenged or attacked. As for his fitness to serve as Commander-in-Chief--that is a fair and legitimate subject for debate in a Presidential election .. The test of our media will be whether they call Kerry on this reprehensible line of argument. He has no justification whatsoever for making the statements he makes. And the press -- along with the public at large -- should recognize and denounce this kind of BS.

Will undecideds respond to the sight of a guy shouting about a 35 year old war wound as his qualification for the Presidency?

after whining so bitterly about nonexistent attacks on his service record and his patriotism, Kerry proceeded to trash both Bush and Cheney for their service records, invoked the dark name of Halliburton to appeal to the Michael Moore moonbats, and entered my personal history as the wretched purveyor of one of the most pathetic, most lethargically vicious political speeches I�ve ever witnessed.

HOLY CRAP: He just went Michael Moore.. Accusing Bush (or I guess Cheney) of being on the Haliburton payroll!

Of course, not one single Republican accused Kerry of being unpatriotic. Far from it. Speaker after speaker at the Republican Convention went out of their way to praise Kerry for his service to his country .. This is not a difficult concept: Questioning the votes of a United States Senator is not the same thing as saying he is "unpatriotic." But, just as with Max Cleland two years ago, they must now start hammering at the Big Lie that criticism of his voting record is tantamount to accusing him of being unpatriotic. Proof they know they can't defend his voting record.

WHAT LOOKS

Reporter Matt Kelley is on the board of the journalist group UNITY, the folks who madly cheered a speech by Sen. Kerry to the organization. Is Matt Kelley a fully objective reporter without special sympathies for John Kerry and Democrat candidates? I have no idea. But his "band of brothers" in journalism do have those sympathies, and it would be rare indeed if Kelley were to far different from his fellows, nothing more than sociology 101, folks.

The blogosphere continues to document political bias at the AP. If you know anything more about Kelley, send me a note via my email address, there on the right.

"DOUGLAS BRINKLEY

JOHN KERRY'S 'WAR CRIMES' CHARGES

Candidate in this year�s American presidential elections, John Kerry, who fought in the war, went further in his criticism. In a statement to the US� Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in 1971, he said the war crimes committed by US soldiers in Southeast Asia "were not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command."

"REPORTERS

(via Patterico)

THOMAS SOWELL:

Some media pundits say that Senator Kerry's poor showing in the polls is due to his having followed the wrong political strategy in this campaign. They say he put too much emphasis on his Vietnam war record. But what else did he have to put emphasis on?

Can you run for office during a war on terrorism by citing a voting record that includes being anti-military for decades? .. What was left for Senator Kerry, except trying to resurrect Vietnam, with his own spin on it, and making big promises for the future? Moreover, with the media on his side -- 12 to 1 inside the Beltway -- he had little to fear from that quarter.

How could Kerry know that the Swiftboat men who served with him in Vietnam would suddenly emerge to challenge his version of what happened there? .. The media have made such a bugaboo about "negative" statements or "attacks" that you might think political campaigns are supposed to be nothing but happy talk. But which is worse, that some unpleasant facts come out during a campaign or that someone is allowed to lie his way into the White House, with all our lives in his hands, on the basis of image and spin?

"UNFIT FOR DUTY"

"Let me tell you what I think makes someone unfit for duty. Misleading our nation into war in Iraq makes you unfit to lead this nation."

Sen. Kerry set up his bare-knuckles attack on the President with this statement: "The Vice President called me unfit for office last night." I defy anyone to find anything close to such a statement in the Vice President's speech. Mr. Cheney did say this, "The President's opponent is an experienced senator. He speaks often of his service in Vietnam, and we honor him for it."

But this is what Mr. Kerry says about President Bush and VP Cheney: "For the past week, [my opponents] attacked my patriotism and my fitness to serve as Commander- in- chief. We�ll, here�s my answer. I will not have my commitment to defend this country questioned by those who refused to serve when they could have and by those who have misled the nation into Iraq. The Vice President called me unfit for office last night. Well, I'll leave it up to the voters to decide whether five deferments makes someone more qualified to defend this nation than two tours of duty."

Let's see. Kerry sought deferments just like Cheney (they were denied). Kerry entered the reserves, just like Bush. And neither Bush nor Kerry could know how LBJ and the military would choose to use them for national service. Kerry had no reason to expect dangerous combat duty. Flying the plane Bush flew was itself hazardous duty -- men died doing it. And in other wars, air reservists were sent to fight. (Read my "John Kerry" postings for links and details.)

The bottom line of all this is that John Kerry has chosen to take us once again back to the agony of the Vietnam era -- he does want to run on this deeply divisive issue, folks, as he's shown again and again, with his repeated attacks on George Bush's service record during the Vietnam era. That's why he hasn't acknowledged his deceptions about "Christmas in Cambodia" nor apologized to the Swift Boat vets. He doesn't want to put this topic behind him. He wants to use it for partisan political purposes.

Don't be mistaken. Kerry hasn't been shy about using incendiary talking points borrowed from the Michael Moore's of the world. Look at his speech last night -- peppered with references to the Saudi Royal family, Halliburton, lies about Iraq, failures to see combat in Vietnam. It's like the stump speech version of the "Fahrenheit 9/11" crocumentary. As has been said before, the blame for the focus of so much of the campaign on still raw wartime controversies from thirty years ago lies squarely with one man -- John Kerry.

UPDATE: Veteran Dale Franks reacts:

This is outrageous. I reject utterly any contention that Kerry's military service immunizes him against criticism from those who did not serve. One of the key elements of our system of government is the inflexible and inviolable principle that the military is permanently subject to civilian audit.

No one questioned Mr. Kerry's patriotism. They questioned his judgement, and rightly so. For Mr. Kerry to proclaim the valid criticisms he's received over the last four days as a slur on his patriotism is, quite simply, a lie. What makes this even more insulting is that the military service of which Mr. Kerry claims to be so proud now, is the same military service he denigrated as an exercise in atrocity 30 years ago ..

Mr. Kerry's service in Vietnam tells us precisely nothing about his ability or fitness to serve as president, and more than the lack of service was a bar to FDRs fitness to be a wartime president. It is specious and pejorative to assert otherwise.

Was this really Kerry's problem? Not enough "heat"? Not enough attacks on Bush? Not enough focus by Kerry on the Vietnam years?

Kerry has � if you'll pardon the expression � gotten stuck in a quagmire. He, and a good chunk of the Democratic party, honestly and totally believed that the best way to prove that he has the best policies to fight the War on Terror is to remind people he fought in Vietnam. To many ears, that sounds like a non sequitur. Military service can be a plus in a presidential candidate, but Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan had little or no military experience and they all did pretty well leading the U.S. during a war.

But Kerry has focused on his Vietnam years almost exclusively, and waved his thrown and apparently re-collected medals around like a magic talisman to ward off all criticisms.

Now the Swift Boat Vets appear, and do a number on Kerry's Vietnam record. It jabs Kerry on a key element of his self-image, and he's responding clumsily and angrily. But getting down and dirty himself with the Swifties and attacking Dick Cheney for taking too many deferments in the 1960s and 1970s will do nothing to help him win over undecided voters and independents ..

John Kerry on Geoge Bush: "All hat, no cattle."

Slings and Arrows on John Kerry: "All hat, no Cambodia."

BACK TO VIETNAM. AGAIN.

QUACK, QUACK, QUACK.

UPDATE: Ralph Peters lets loose on John Kerry:

YESTERDAY, in front of the American Legion's National Convention, John Kerry made his most disgraceful speech since he lied about atrocities to Congress three decades ago. By making promises he doesn't mean and can't keep, he tried to buy the votes of American veterans.

Had he offered each vet a $5 bill and a shot of whisky for their support, his performance could not have been shabbier.

Before getting to a few examples of his breathtaking cynicism, let's put two crucial questions to the junior senator from Massachusetts:

First question: Sen. Kerry, will you admit that you lied to Congress and the American people when you stated that our troops routinely committed atrocities, and that rape, torture and murder were sanctioned by our military chain of command?

Second question: Will you apologize to our Vietnam-era veterans for the lies you told?

This means a direct, no-waffling, public apology. Will you tell our vets, the living and the dead, that you're sorry?

Of course not. John Kerry wants to have it both ways. But he isn't going to get the military vote. Perhaps the best line making its way around veterans' Web sites these days is: "A Kerry defeat would be the welcome-home parade we never had."

The guy is an eel in a vat of olive oil.

A FULL PAGE AD IN THE MARINE CORP TIMES:

In 1971, I awoke after three days of unconsciousness aboard a hospital ship off the coast of Vietnam. I could not see, my jaws were wired shut and my left cheekbone was missing, a gaping hole in its place. Later, while still at St. Albans Naval Hospital, one of my earliest recollections is of hearing about Kerry's testimony before Congress. I remember lying there, in disbelief, as I learned how Kerry told the world that the Army that I served in was reminiscent of Genghis Khan's; that officers like me routinely let their men plunder villages and rape villagers; that ''war crimes'' committed in Vietnam by my fellow soldiers ``were not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.''

Then Kerry went to Paris, meeting with North Vietnamese enemy officials, while our soldiers still fought in the field. The pain and disbelief I felt listening to his words went deeper than the pain I felt from the enemy fire that wounded my face. I was discharged from the hospital 18 months later. The wounds inflicted by the enemy had fully healed. More than 30 years later, the wounds inflicted by Kerry continue to bring pain to scores of Vietnam veterans. Those wounds -- the bearing of false witness against me and a generation of courageous young Americans who fought and died in Vietnam -- are more serious than any warranting a Purple Heart. They never go away.

Today, new generations of heroes are serving our country, defending our freedoms from an insidious enemy. One of them is my son, a Marine Corps weapons officer who flies the F/A 18 Hornet. He belongs to the same Marine Corps that Kerry ridiculed with his 1971 book cover showing protesters simulating the Iwo Jima Memorial, raising an upside down American flag. He flies the same F-18 fighter jet that Kerry voted against in the Senate. Yet Kerry shamelessly drapes himself in the imagery of Vietnam, military service and the support of veterans, devoid of any media scrutiny. Veterans' criticism falls on deaf ears, and legitimate criticism of Kerry's post-war record is discredited as a personal attack or an attack against his service.

Kerry surrounds himself with a handful of veterans and claims overwhelming support from the veteran community. Yet he won't answer or apologize for the wounds he inflicted on them, insisting that his Vietnam experience gives him credibility on defense issues. If Kerry wants to exploit his service, he should at least have the courage to look veterans like me in the eye and give an honest answer on his actions then, his votes since and his plans for the future.

GEORGE WILL --

But the domination of the Republican Party by cultural conservatives did make some conservatives -- libertarians and religious skeptics, among others -- feel uneasy, even unwelcome. Being derided as RINOs -- Republicans in name only -- did not help. And the dominance of the cultural conservatives gave force to the Democrats' and the media's caricatures of the Republican Party as a brackish lagoon of intolerance, a caricature that, like all caricatures, contained a trace of truth.

The reemergence into Republican respectability of conservatism with a socially libertarian cast -- Goldwaterism -- is a development with a large potential to discomfort the Democratic Party. The reemergence can make the Republican Party more appealing to many young and suburban voters, two cohorts in which Democrats have recently made substantial gains.

KERRY vs. KERRY.

Q: Would you send more troops to Iraq?

Kerry : We should not send more American troops. That would be the worst thing. We do not want to have more Americanization. We do not want a greater sense of American occupation. We need to minimize that.

We guarantee every man and woman in our armed forces that you will always be the best-led, best-equipped, and most respected fighting force in the world. You will be armed with the right weapons, trained in the right skills, and fully prepared to win on the battlefield. You will never again be sent into harm's way without enough troops ..

-- (On The Issues.)

TRANSCRIPT.

Zell: Get out of my face! If you�re going to ask me a question, then step back, and let me answer! I wish we lived in a day where you can challenge a person to a duel. Now that would be pretty good. Don�t pull that stuff on me like you did that young lady when you had her brow beaten to death. I�m not her! I�m not her! You get in my face I�m going to get back in your face.

Matthews: Senator can I speak softly to you?

Zell: No, no. You won�t give me a chance to answer. You ask these questions and then you just talk over while I�m trying to answer just like you did that woman the other day. Why don�t why I even came on this program.

Matthews: Well, I�m glad you did. Well let me ask you this�

Zell: No, Are you going to shut up after you ask me! Are going to give me a chance to answer it?

A SWIFT BOAT VET

ANN COULTER

VIDEO -- DNC CHAIRMAN

UPDATE: This blogger clip is making news nationally.

HUGH HEWITT

"SWIFT BOATS AND DOUBLE STANDARDS."

If the media can scrutinize my legal work, which doesn't even fall under the anti-coordination rules, why can't they scrutinize these Democrats with equal diligence? Think you're getting unbiased, balanced coverage of politics? Or is there a double standard in the way the media treat Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives? My recent visit to the center of a media storm suggests there is. A $500,000 ad buy made by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth brings searing media scrutiny and "proof" of illegal coordination based on a lawyer (me) representing both the Bush-Cheney campaign and the Swift Boat Veterans; on an accountant working for Tom DeLay's political action committee; and on a $200,000 contributor to the group who is not a major donor to Bush-Cheney 2004 but who does know Karl Rove.

Meanwhile, the media give practically no scrutiny to a $63 million, five-month, negative-ad buy done by Democratic "527" groups (the Media Fund, MoveOn.org and others) with a revolving door of connections to the Kerry campaign ..

The coordination law prohibits individuals from "using or conveying" information on the private "plans, needs or projects" of a campaign to a 527 or vice versa. If the media can scrutinize my legal work, which doesn't even fall under the anti-coordination rules, why can't they scrutinize these Democrats with equal diligence?

In a 50-50 nation, how do the media square this imbalance with the claim of being objective, fair and nonpartisan? The double standard in reporting on 527s suggests that some of the withering scrutiny visited on the Swift boat veterans should be directed inward.

"A TOTAL LIE".

Yes it is, isn't it.

BUSH

GLENN REYNOLDS --

It's been apparent for quite a while that Mr. Kerry's Vietnam record would be a centerpiece of his campaign, and it's also been apparent that he has stretched the truth more than a little where parts of it were concerned. In a Boston Herald piece inspired by "Apocalypse Now," Mr. Kerry wrote: "On more than one occasion, I, like Martin Sheen in 'Apocalypse Now,' took my patrol boat into Cambodia.

"In fact, I remember spending Christmas Day of 1968 five miles across the Cambodian border being shot at by our South Vietnamese Allies who were drunk and celebrating Christmas. The absurdity of almost being killed by our own allies in a country in which President Nixon claimed there were no American troops was very real." Mr. Kerry made similar claims on the Senate floor in 1986, adding that the memory was "seared -- seared -- in me." He also peddled variations on this story during press interviews over the years.

But the story isn't true. And the Kerry campaign eventually admitted that, but only after prodding from the media. Not from the newspapers and TV networks -- which studiously ignored the story for nearly two weeks -- but from blogs and talk radio. Bloggers researched the story on Google, on Factiva and Lexis, and in libraries. Talk-radio hosts, including some like Neal Boortz and Hugh Hewitt who are bloggers themselves, retailed the findings to the wider world. Eventually the Kerry campaign was forced to respond, which then forced the New York Times and the LA Times, grudgingly, to admit that the story existed and to start their own coverage.

WILL HE APOLOGIZE?

UPDATE: John Kerry's "Houston Moment". Quotable:

Forty-four years ago, Kerry's idol, John Kennedy, traveled to Houston to convince a gathering of Southern ministers that a Massachusetts Catholic could be President. Today, the new JFK has to convince skeptical Legionnaires that a Massachusetts liberal is fit for the job ..

Since the VFW convention, Kerry has absorbed two weeks of brutal personal attacks by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Their newest ad recalls how Kerry once tossed away his military decorations.

The campaign by the Swifties has made a shambles of the war-hero strategy launched at the Democratic convention. Kerry's Swift boat was supposed to speed through the political waters at full steam. Instead, it is foundering. He has been forced to retract his legendary Christmas-in-Cambodia epiphany, and he's under pressure to release his official military records and Vietnam diaries. Most Vietnam vets don't believe that he lied about his military service, exactly, but they are no longer sure he was telling the whole truth, either.

What they are sure of is that Kerry once attacked their war as a criminal enterprise and threw away his decorations. "How can the man who renounced his country's symbols now be trusted?" asks the ad.

Here are Kerry's remarks.

DOUGLAS BRINKLEY'S REPUTATION

"UNFIT TO COMMAND" --

A LETTER TO SEN. JOHN KERRY

As you prepare for your address before the American Legion in Nashville, Tennessee, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth encourages you to use this opportunity to clarify your actions in Vietnam and your statements about your fellow Veterans and shipmates when you returned home. Since you have made your four-month tour in Vietnam the centerpiece of your campaign, we respectfully insist that you be truthful. The public is owed a full and honest accounting of your actions. Veterans are owed an apology from you and an acknowledgement that there was no basis in fact for the accusations you made against them.

We urge you to:

1. Apologize for your conduct once you returned from Vietnam. Your exaggerated testimony before the US Senate; the blanket indictment of your fellow veterans; throwing away medals and ribbons; all of these actions dishonored America and the armed forces. Your rhetoric and actions were not only wrong, they aided the enemy and brought great pain to POW's, veterans and their families.

2. Clarify the conflicting accounts involving the Bay Hap River incident of March 13, 1969 (Bronze Star and 3rd Purple Heart). You have now described three different versions of this incident. In the first version of this incident presented during the Democrat National Convention, you stated: "No man left behind," suggesting to the American people that you alone stayed on the river to rescue Mr. Rassmann. Later, when forced to acknowledge conflicting eyewitness testimony from fellow swift boat veterans, you said that your boat left the scene to return moments later to retrieve Jim Rassmann from the water. Yet, in another version of the same incident discovered in the Congressional Record, you reported that your boat struck a mine and Rassmann fell off the boat. Mr. Kerry, please explain to your fellow veterans and the American people which version is the truth.

3. Affirm that the injuries for which you received your purple hearts never required any medical treatment beyond perhaps a bandage and that, in all instances, these injuries were self-inflicted and came from your own weapon. Further, that if any of these purple hearts were falsely awarded, that you would not have been eligible to leave Vietnam after serving only four months.

4. Acknowledge what your own biographer is now saying, that the Christmas in Cambodia claim is "obviously wrong,� that you were never in Cambodia over Christmas or any other time during your brief, four-month tour in Vietnam and that your statements before the United States Senate in 1986 were false.

If you undertake these steps we will be satisfied that the American public has been sufficiently apprised as to these aspects of your career, and we will discontinue the media advertisements you have sought so fervently to silence.

Please know that Swift Boat Veterans for Truth are eager to close our own personal chapters on Vietnam and instead focus on the war we're currently fighting�the ongoing war on terrorism. In the absence of full public disclosure and a public apology, we will continue efforts to carry our message to an ever-expanding base of grassroots supporters.

Senator Kerry, we want to get Vietnam behind us. But, we can only do so if the truth is told.

We respectfully await your reply.

Sincerely,

Swift Boat Veterans for Truth

'WE MIGHT

John Kerry with Al Hubbard, executive director of Vietnam Veterans against the War, who claimed he was a former decorated Air Force captain with two years of service in Vietnam (and had been wounded there), but who in fact never served in Vietman and was never injured there. This is the man that John Kerry worked arm-and-arm with denouncing American soldiers and their war-time service. Is John Kerry a good judge of character? The question at the least should be out there.

John Kerry based his 1971 Senate testimony on the interviews conducted by Hubbard at the Detroit "Winter Soldier Investigation." A number of the stories told and the men who told them turned to to be -- like Hubbard -- completely frauds. Much more on Kerry and the "Winter Soldier" meetings here.

And file this under "things never change". The left-leaning reporter who broke the story wasn't allowed air-time to tell in on CBS News, and couldn't find a publisher to print the story, until the conservative bi-weekly National Review agreed to print it.

Here in part is what John Kerry said on Meet the Press:

There are all kinds of atrocities, and I would have to say that, yes, yes, I committed the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers have committed in that I took part in shootings in free fire zones. I conducted harassment and interdiction fire. I used 50 calibre machine guns, which we were granted and ordered to use, which were our only weapon against people. I took part in search and destroy missions, in the burning of villages ..

I believe that the men who designed these, the men who designed the free fire zone, the men who ordered us, the men who signed off the air raid strike areas, I think these men, by the letter of the law, the same letter of the law that tried Lieutenant Calley, are war criminals.

MR. RUSSERT: Thirty years later, you stand by that?

SEN. KERRY: I don't stand by the genocide. I think those were the words of an angry young man. We did not try to do that. But I do stand by the description--I don't even believe there is a purpose served in the word "war criminal." I really don't. But I stand by the rest of what happened over there, Tim.

MR. RUSSERT: You committed atrocities.

SEN. KERRY: Where did all that dark hair go, Tim? That's a big question for me. You know, I thought a lot, for a long time, about that period of time, the things we said, and I think the word is a bad word. I think it's an inappropriate word. I mean, if you wanted to ask me have you ever made mistakes in your life, sure. I think some of the language that I used was a language that reflected an anger. It was honest, but it was in anger, it was a little bit excessive.

MR. RUSSERT: You used the word "war criminals."

SEN. KERRY: Well, let me just finish. Let me must finish. It was, I think, a reflection of the kind of times we found ourselves in and I don't like it when I hear it today. I don't like it, but I want you to notice that at the end, I wasn't talking about the soldiers and the soldiers' blame, and my great regret is, I hope no soldier--I mean, I think some soldiers were angry at me for that, and I understand that and I regret that, because I love them. But the words were honest but on the other hand, they were a little bit over the top. And I think that there were breaches of the Geneva Conventions. There were policies in place that were not acceptable according to the laws of warfare, and everybody knows that. I mean, books have chronicled that, so I'm not going to walk away from that. But I wish I had found a way to say it in a less abrasive way.

MR. RUSSERT: But, Senator, when you testified before the Senate, you talked about some of the hearings you had observed at the winter soldiers meeting and you said that people had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and on and on. A lot of those stories have been discredited, and in hindsight was your testimony...

SEN. KERRY: Actually, a lot of them have been documented.

MR. RUSSERT: So you stand by that?

SEN. KERRY: A lot of those stories have been documented. Have some been discredited? Sure, they have, Tim. The problem is that's not where the focus should have been. And, you know, when you're angry about something and you're young, you know, you're perfectly capable of not--I mean, if I had the kind of experience and time behind me that I have today, I'd have framed some of that differently. Needless to say, I'm proud that I stood up. I don't want anybody to think twice about it. I'm proud that I took the position that I took to oppose it. I think we saved lives, and I'm proud that I stood up at a time when it was important to stand up, but I'm not going to quibble, you know, 35 years later that I might not have phrased things more artfully at times.

ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER --

"THE SWIFT BOAT VETS

The title of their book is to be taken seriously: �Unfit for Command.� Kerry�s testimony before the Senate called the Swift boat veterans and hundreds of thousands of others � and the whole structure of command, indeed the whole country � hypocritical, self-interested, even criminal. To this day, John Kerry has not said publicly that his friends among the Swift Boat vets were not war criminals. He has not apologized.

If Kerry had been more modest and truthful about the other most dramatic episodes he recounted to his biographers, it would be unseemly to question his right to his three Purple Hearts, Silver Star, and Bronze Star. But eyewitnesses saw these events very differently, and normal processes in awarding medals seem not to have been followed. Anyone who wishes to understand our era is going to have to read this book."

-- Michael Novak.

THE BRONZE STAR --

THE NATIONAL PRESS

THE JOHN KERRY "PURPLE BOO-BOO"

JOHN KERRY

MORE

I saw Brinkley on the Chris Matthews show, and it looked to me like the stress of being fact-checked outside the safe coccoon of lefty journalism and Demo academics is starting to get to him. As always, Brinkley comes across as a very nice guy -- just don't ask Steve Gardner.

SWIFT VET AD #4 --

UPDATE: Sean Hackbarth comments, "It's no where near as powerful as when the vets speak for themselves. It will keep them and their attacks on Kerry in the news."

"I KNOW JOHN KERRY PART II."

UNDECIDED VOTERS

ARE REPUBLICANS

The GOP Congress .. has seemed only too comfortable acting as the party of the incumbent status quo, dolloping out pork to any interest group that might help it remain in power. The result has been the largest farm bill in history, as well as the largest new entitlement .. since the 1960s .. If Republicans want to see the perils of this strategy, they might look at the blue patches of the electoral map that are Illinois, New Jersey and Long Island. Once GOP strongholds, those areas all turned [Democratic] after Republican machines grew corrupt and became little different from tax-and-spend Democrats.

The vocabulary of the two-party argument just a generation ago now seems as anachronistic as the 1890s argument about the free coinage of silver. Liberals have next to nothing to say about poverty or .. inner-city schools .. Conservatives .. no longer invest even rhetorical energy in the cause of "small" or "limited" government. And now their presidential nominee wants an even bigger government role in policing speech ..

POODLE LOVERS

But do the lap-dog lovers know about "VC" the dog?

"I KNOW JOHN KERRY."

The 72-year-old Miller .. plans to hit Kerry over his political career � one that Miller claims has been spent pushing and voting for far-left issues. "John Kerry's record in the Senate is a miserable one � it is a disgraceful one," Miller charged. "His record is far from the mainstream on nearly every issue. He is where 15 or 20 percent of people are." Miller said many Americans are still in the dark about Kerry's voting patterns � primarily because the candidate himself has avoided discussing it. "Watching the Democratic convention, the bio of John Kerry seemed to be 'I was born. I served in Vietnam. I am running for president,' " Miller said.

"They overlooked 20 years in the Senate. That's where you'll see the real John Kerry."

TODAY'S BIG MEDIA DINOSAURS --

while the media's willingness to side with Kerry has been striking, it's also like the proverbial thirteenth chime of the clock -- not only wrong itself, but calling into question everything that came before. The loss of credibility that has come with that, coupled with the press's poor performance on all sorts of topics .. will be a long-lasting blow. The media barons should be worried ..

as we speak, a 2004 election plotline is developing among those who wish to see George W. Bush defeated. The plotline is this: The efforts by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth to cast doubt on John Kerry's war record may be the tipping point of this campaign in Bush's favor. And if indeed that is so, the rage that liberals and Democrats will direct toward Bush will be something terrible to see.

At a panel discussion yesterday on the press and the election at the Harvard Club, two media doyens � Joe Klein of Time and David Gergen of U.S. News � pronounced themselves frightened by this prospect and the damage it might do to our democracy. Others on the panel � Al Hunt of the Wall Street Journal and Jill Abramson of The New York Times � fretted about the capacity of the mainstream media to play the role of fact-finding truth-teller in an age dominated by cable news and the Internet.

I was on the panel too, and I feel like I was the only one who didn't arrive at the Harvard Club riding on my pet dinosaur ..

THE BIG QUESTION

CONVENTIONAL WISDOM

A new tide of optimism inside the Bush-Cheney campaign .. began roughly a week to ten days ago when it became obvious to even early doubters that the �Swift Boat� ad attack against Senator Kerry was damaging him � badly, at least in the short run ..

Among Democrats, high and low, there is considerable grumbling about how and why all this was, in the words of one Kerry consultant, �allowed to get this far� ..

�Kerry and his staff significantly underestimated the �Swift Boat� negative campaign assault. Then they fumbled the response. It was too slow and not very effective even after it got started.�

the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll shows clear deflation for Kerry across a range of measures: Strong enthusiasm for his candidacy has dropped by 16 points [since Boston] .. and his personal favorability rating has lost eight points to hit a new low.

RAMIREZ --

FACT CHECKING

NBC's LISA MYERS --

A SLAP OF REALITY

Implicit in Bush's stance is the assumption that the election-period dialogue is the exclusive property of the parties and their candidates. But that is not -- and never has been -- the law, and it hardly fits the realities of America's pluralistic society. The institutions and individuals with a stake in the presidential election are far more numerous than two parties and two candidates. All sorts of other groups .. have much riding on the outcome. By what logic are they to be prohibited from running their ads?

THE SILVER STAR MYSTERY

Former Navy Secretary John Lehman has no idea where a Silver Star citation displayed on Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry's campaign Web site came from, he said Friday. The citation appears over Lehman's signature.

"It is a total mystery to me. I never saw it. I never signed it. I never approved it. And the additional language it contains was not written by me," he said.

POWERLINE

MARK STEYN:

Today Sen. Kerry says he's proud of his anti-war activism, but that's not what it was. Every war has pacifists and conscientious objectors and even disenchanted veterans, but there's simply no precedent for what John Kerry did: a man who put his combat credentials to the service of smearing his country's entire armed forces as rapists, decapitators and baby killers. That's the ''wound,'' Sen. McCain. That's why a crummy little war on the other side of the world still festers. That's why the band didn't play ''Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'Be'' and move on to the next item of business. Because Kerry didn't just call for U.S. withdrawal, he impugned the honor of every man he served with ..

In his testimony to Congress in 1971, Kerry asserted a scale of routine war crimes unparalleled in American history -- his ''band of brothers'' .. ''personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads . . . razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan.'' Almost all these claims were unsupported. Indeed, the only specific example of a U.S. war criminal that Kerry gave was himself.

As he said on ''Meet The Press'' in April 1971, ''Yes, I committed the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers .. .'' So Kerry is now the first self-confessed war criminal in the history of the Republic to be nominated for president.

Kerry is in seclusion, unable to expose himself to any but the most sycophantic interviewers, and getting whumped by hundreds upon hundreds of fellow Swift boat veterans, plus former POWs, plus retired admirals, over every aspect of his brief stay in the Mekong Delta.

EVER SEE

UPDATE: Betsy Newmark asks: "How long before the New York Times reproduces the Kerry chart in its paper?"

Wouldn't that be COORDINATION between a political candidate and an organization funded by the obscenely wealthy? I thought we'd made that illegal in this country .. It's not? You mean folks like the filthy-rich Mr. Arthur Sulzberger Jr. can coordinate his campaign activities with any political candidate he wants? Do George Bush and John McCain know about that? Why, there ought to be a law .. You mean there is? What? The First Amendment? I thought the Constitution was only for those who weren't so massively wealthy as to own giant media companies like The New York Times. That's what George Bush, John McCain and Arthur Sulzberger believe isn't it? Who can argue with them? They are officially sanctioned by law to speak freely for the rest of us, aren't they?

More on free speech, big media and campaign censorship here. Quotable:

We have entered an era of constitutional censorship. Hardly anyone wants to admit this -- the legalized demolition of the First Amendment would seem shocking -- and so hardly anyone does.

ANOTHER EYEWITNESS

My own take? Jim Rassmann -- the man Kerry pulled out of the water -- mistook cover fire by the Swifties for hostile fire from VC. Kerry's Swift boat, by all acounts, wasn't on the scene until the rescue. What Kerry went with in his after-action report was the account given to him by Rassmann.

So there you have it. In the fog of war -- and through the happenstance of military record keeping -- John Kerry got credit for more than actually happened on one day, on one river, on one unenviable assignment, in one damnable war.

Let John Kerry keep his medal -- or throw it over a fence -- or whatever he wants to do with it. I know many in the military will feel differently, but certainly most Americans would have little problem with giving a Bronze Star to every sailor who put himself at risk is such dangerous circumstances, whether or not they came under fire in any particular heroic instance. Does this devalue the Bronze Star? Or does it tell perhaps how Americans feel about those who served?

Give Kerry a pass on this one folks.

DOUGLAS BRINKLEY'S STORY --

His cell phone is too full to receive any more messages. Reporters, sometimes four from one newspaper, call him hourly, demanding help in sorting fact from fabrication. The vets against Kerry go on cable TV and mischaracterize his work, he says ..

The effort to discredit Kerry's war heroism is "an outrage," said Brinkley. "There is just no evidence that John Kerry did not win his medals properly. It's a smear campaign, just as Democrats smeared Bush back in the spring" regarding his service in the Texas Air National Guard. "I treasure facts. When you have facts being distorted for a political agenda, I mind."

The Kerry campaign has refused to release Kerry's personal Vietnam archive, including his journals and letters, saying that the senator is contractually bound to grant Brinkley exclusive access to the material. But Brinkley said this week the papers are the property of the senator and in his full control.

"I don't mind if John Kerry shows anybody anything," he said. "If he wants to let anybody in, that's his business. Go bug John Kerry, and leave me alone." The exclusivity agreement, he said, simply requires "that anybody quoting any of the material needs to cite my book." ..

Kerry repeatedly said in the past that he was ordered illegally into Cambodia during Christmas 1968. His detractors claim he never entered that country at all. In "Tour of Duty," Brinkley does not place Kerry in Cambodia but, quoting from Kerry's journal, notes that Kerry's Swift boat was "patrolling near the Cambodian line." Later in the book, Brinkley writes that Kerry and his fellow Swift boat operators "went on dropping Navy SEALS off along the Cambodian border."

"I'm under the impression that they were near the Cambodian border," said Brinkley, in the interview. So Kerry's statement about being in Cambodia at Christmas "is obviously wrong," he said. "It's a mongrel phrase he should never have uttered. I stick to my story."

.. with this book, Brinkley has become a political historian as well, having authored a book that burnishes just the part of Kerry's biography that the candidate chose to highlight to defeat a wartime president who never has seen battle himself. "These days, Brinkley is acting a lot less like a historian and a lot more like a PR flack for John Kerry," wrote Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam. In its review, the New York Times referred to "the odor of salesmanship that lingers around 'Tour of Duty.' "

"Any contemporary history is going to be politicized in some way," said Brinkley, whose Republican parents are much prouder of his television commentary during the Reagan funeral than they are of his bestseller. "I'm in the [political] center. I honestly have to tell you that's my framework."

As someone "too young to have an emotional investment in Vietnam," he believes now he underestimated how Kerry's war and anti-war activities would re-ignite the '60s' cultural wars. He had hoped, he said, his book would be about "healing the wounds. This August will be seen as picking the scabs apart."

"I'm not worried about it being seen as a campaign vehicle for Kerry," Brinkley said of the book. "I'm sympathetic to Kerry in his 20's, and it's no secret I think he would make a first-rate president. But my book has caused Kerry pain, too. The fact it's out may not have helped him. I mean, 'Unfit for Command' might not exist without it." ..

"It's true Kerry has brought on this fight," Brinkley said. "But I was looking for a story about Vietnam, and I think I struck the right story. What's made me angry is false accusations made against Kerry's military record, which, because I know the record, I feel I must respond to even if I risk appearing like Kerry's surrogate in the process." ..

But Brinkley's open admiration and support for Kerry have raised questions about his objectivity as an academic historian. The American Historical Association warns its members to be wary when venturing into politics, saying those who do so "may face a choice of priorities between professionalism and partisanship." Professors at UNO are not permitted to take blatantly partisan positions while wearing their school robes, said Rick Barton, the university's vice chancellor of academic affairs ..

[Brinkley] did not dispute being one of several hosts for a Kerry fund-raiser in February 2003, he said his speech at a Kerry rally in New Orleans in March has been misinterpreted. In fact, Brinkley was pushed onstage because Kerry was late ..

Brinkley, 43, noted that he wasn't old enough to absorb what was happening in Vietnam during the war and that as a result he doesn't bring as much emotional baggage to the table. On the other hand, much of Brinkley's academic career has focused on that era, and his sympathies are clear. He said Kerry would be a "first-class president" but denied that such an appraisal taints his history writing. He thought it was "an outrage" when Democratic Party leader Terry McCauliffe raised the prospect that President Bush had been AWOL during his National Guard service, and he thinks the same of the accusations slung by the Swift Boat Veterans.

"There was no documentary evidence to support the charge then against Bush, and there's no documentary evidence to support the charges now against Kerry," Brinkley said. "Whether the charge is against Aaron Burr or John Kerry, I have to see the documentary evidence."

As further proof of his scholarly detachment, Brinkley declined to sign a Kerry endorsement that circulated among prominent historians. He has no interest in working as a formal adviser to the campaign and has not made any financial contribution to the Kerry presidential run, Brinkley said.

"I'm not a partisan," he said. "I don't have some ax to grind against President Bush. I try to be judicial."

UPDATE II: Bill Dyer's take:

Clearly University of New Orleans Prof. Brinkley wants to be helpful to Sen. Kerry. The whole point of his book, after all, was to argue that Kerry's tour of duty in Vietnam and his subsequent antiwar activism have shaped and defined his moral and political character to make him a fit President.

THE NATIONAL PRESS

There are many reasons why the mainstream media don't like the Swift boat story, but chief among them is that they've been strong-armed into covering it by the "new" media: talk-radio, cable television, and Internet blogs ..

But the big news on August 6 was that Regnery allowed people to download the "Christmas in Cambodia" section of O'Neill's book. While Olbermann and others were worrying about mystical jazz, the new media swung into action. Hugh Hewitt, Glenn Reynolds, Powerline, and other bloggers immediately began investigating the book's allegations. The blog JustOneMinute was the first to find the 1986 "seared--seared" speech in which Kerry described his memory of being in Cambodia in December 1968. On August 8, Reynolds took his digital camera to the University of Tennessee law library and photographed the section of the Congressional Record with the Kerry speech, further verifying the chapter's central claim. That same weekend, Al Hunt talked about the Swift boat ad on CNN's Capital Gang, calling it "some of the sleaziest lies I've ever seen in politics."

Over the next 11 days, an interesting dynamic took hold: Talk-radio and the blog world covered the Cambodia story obsessively. They reported on border crossings during Vietnam and the differences between Swift boats and PBRs. They also found two other instances of Kerry's talking about his Christmas in Cambodia. Spurred on by the blogs, Fox led the August 9 Special Report with a Carl Cameron story on Kerry's Cambodia discrepancy.

All the while, traditional print and broadcast media tried hard to ignore the story -- even as Kerry officially changed his position on his presence in Cambodia [See ]. Then on August 19, Kerry went public with his counter assault against Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, and suddenly the story was news.

THE COMMUNIST-FREE ZONE

SOME PERSPECTIVE

A STUNNER

"I believe that discussions or attacks on [John Kerry's] service undermine the peace of mind not only of Vietnam veterans but of those now fighting for their country."

WHAT JOHN KERRY'S 1971 SENATE TESTIMONY

JOHN KERRY

This is also worth noting. Although John McCain went over the top in his condemnation of the first Swift vet ad, he very pointedly does not condemn the second Swift vet ad -- the one that holds John Kerry accountable for his 1971 blanket smear of Vietnam vets as "war criminals".

And I didn't know this. It seems McCain got crazy angry at George Bush over a lot of nothing taking place during the South Carolina primary in 2000. It turns out the "Bush smear of McCain" is another Michael Moore / national press myth you won't ever stop hearing about.

THE 'KERRY IN CAMBODIA" STORY --

AT LAST --

DID DOUGLAS BRINKLEY

Retired since 1978 as a two-star rear admiral, [Roy] Hoffmann comes under particular criticism in the Kerry biography. Brinkley wrote that Kerry saw him as approving cowboy tactics and holding a cavalier attitude toward civilian casualties. Hoffmann said was stunned to find what he termed "gross exaggerations" and "distortions of fact" attributed to Kerry in the Brinkley book. That motivated him to contact other veterans and ask if they'd seen the book. Before long, he said, he had "80 to 100 people solidly lined up" to cooperate in the production of a new book - "Unfit for Command" by John E. O'Neill and Jerome R. Corsi - that outlines their challenge to Kerry.

[Steve Gardner's] first public statement came unintentionally, he said, when Douglas Brinkley, author of the authorized Kerry war biography "Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War" talked to him in a phone conversation he thought was off the record.

Brinkley put Gardner's thoughts in a March 9 article for Time magazine online, "The Tenth Brother" in which he got a story "sharply different from what the other nine crew members have had to say." Gardner said he thought Brinkley, who spoke with him for two hours, simply was checking facts he had gathered in compiling his book, which relied heavily on Kerry's personal war journals.

Brinkley claims he had tried hard to track down Gardner during his research for the book, but Gardner is skeptical, noting the Globe's Kranish was able to reach him easily. In the Time story, Brinkley writes: "A disappointed Wasser gave me Gardner's telephone numbers, reminding me that PCF-44 gunner's mate was nicknamed 'The Wild Man' by his crewmates for his hair-trigger penchant for firing M-60s into the mangrove thicket. 'Let me know what you find out,' Wasser told me. 'I'm having trouble understanding where he's coming from."

After that article, Gardner said he felt "trashed" and vulnerable, until he got a call from Adm. Roy Hoffman, the organizer of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ..

Now Gardner appears in the new swiftboat vets' television ad, accusing Kerry of falsely claiming to have spent Christmas in Cambodia in 1968. "If I had been by my lonesome, I would have been history six months ago," he said. "Nobody would have listened to me as a gunner's mates, until officers stepped forward and said, 'This has got to stop.'"

- - - - - -

>>BREAKING<< Doug Brinkley tells his story to the Washington Post and the N.O. Times-Picayune.

- - - - - -

UPDATE: Here's some good advice for John Kerry:

First, admit the fallibility of wartime memory: He was not in Cambodia in 1968 when he said he remembers "President Nixon" (who did not take office until Jan. 20, 1969) lying to the American people.

Second, clarify that he never saw any war crimes committed by Swift Boat units he served with or in. Apologize to vets offended by the aspersions in his postwar remarks ..

Such modesty and magnanimity would be great qualities to reveal in a man who would be commander in chief ..

Arrogantly, righteously, duplicitously superior or humbly, honestly, openly conciliatory. What shall it be?

We'll know soon enough.

UPDATE II: FOX reporter Major Garrett on John Kerry's last ditch phone call to Adm. Hoffman, March 15 of this year:

The day before John Kerry wrapped up the Democratic nomination for the presidency, he tried to talk the leader of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, retired Navy Adm. Roy Hoffman, out of his now politically potent activism. It didn't work. Hoffman told FOX News that the call came on March 15.

"I was somewhat flattered when he called me, but his mission was to get me to write down and submit what I thought was wrong in the [book] "Tour of Duty," his biography, where I thought there were mistakes," Hoffman said. Hoffman commanded all swift boats in Vietnam in 1968 and 1969. He began organizing the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in January, which was after the Kerry authorized biography, "Tour of Duty," hit the shelves.

"I felt obligated [to form the organization] even though I had retired from the Navy in 1978 after 35 years active duty," Hoffman said. "I thought maybe duty called again. And strictly on my own I started calling people I haven't seen for 34 years or so and I found that the troops were still behind me. So I'd been sending out a number of e-mails and making numerous telephone calls and obviously Mr. Kerry heard about it and he called me."He knew that it would be a problem and that was the reason he was calling." .. Hoffman and other swift boat veterans say "Tour of Duty" exaggerates Kerry's heroism, charges other swift boat crews with military recklessness and celebrates Kerry's anti-war Senate testimony in 1971. Hoffman said Kerry asked him if he was willing to end his swift boat activism if Kerry allowed him to help correct the record in "Tour of Duty." "I told him that I wasn't going to cooperate � that I felt very bitter about his qualifications and particularly with how he betrayed us in 1971," Hoffman told FOX News. By Hoffman's account, Kerry placed the call the day before winning the Illinois primary. That victory secured the Democratic presidential nomination for Kerry.

"He knew that it would be a problem and that was the reason he was calling," Hoffman said, referring to his swift boat activism. "No question. I don't mean to imply he was shouting, it was a civil conversation."

Hoffman said Kerry was so concerned about the admiral's opposition that he offered Hoffman an open line to his personal staff and "Tour of Duty" author Douglas Brinkley.

"He gave me the phone number of his private secretary and said I could contact her at any time and said I could call Brinkley, who had already called," Hoffman said. "I declined, and said there was no need to discuss it any further. It was about a 45-minute conversation."

The account could be the first to show that Kerry long ago feared the potential impact of opposition from fellow swift boat veterans. It also may suggest Kerry was privately willing to concede errors in his authorized war biography. "Over the course of the past months, John Kerry has talked to many of the vets he served with in Vietnam," senior Kerry adviser Michael Meehan told FOX News. "He did speak with Hoffman about that time ... . But the charge that somehow he could change Mr. Brinkley's book is an outright exaggeration."

UPDATE III: Hugh Hewitt weighs in:

John Kerry's candidacy could have tried to avoid rekindling the old debate .. but the only way to have managed such a campaign successfully would have required both an apology for the things he said and a disciplined refusal to trade on his time in Vietnam, time marked both by bravery but also by very unusual circumstances and stories.

Kerry obviously chose a different course, one that has slowly but inevitably required everyone to refight not the Vietnam War but the domestic political battles of those years.

MARK STEYN:

JOHN KERRY

Senator SYMINGTON: Mr. Kerry, from your experience in Vietnam do you think it is possible for the President or Congress to get accurate and undistorted information through official military channels ..

Mr. KERRY: .. I had direct experience with that. Senator, I had direct experience with that and I can recall often sending in the spot reports which we made after each mission; and including the GDA, gunfire damage assessments, in which we would say, maybe 15 sampans sunk or whatever it was. And I often read about my own missions in the Stars and Stripes and the very mission we had been on had been doubled in figures and tripled in figures .. I also think men in the military, sir, as do men in many other things, have a tendency to report what they want to report and see what they want to see.

So there we have it from the Senator himself. John Kerry was the author of many of the Swift Boat afteraction reports.

UPDATE: Captain Ed sounds off.

"I WAS IN THE SKIMMER"

"I was absolutely in the skimmer" in the early morning on Dec. 2, 1968, when Lt. (j.g.) John Kerry was involved in an incident which led to his first Purple Heart. "Kerry nicked himself with a M-79 (grenade launcher)," Schachte said in a telephone interview from his home in Charleston, S.C. He said, "Kerry requested a Purple Heart.",p. Schachte, who also was then a lieutenant junior grade, said he was in command of the small Boston whaler or skimmer, with Kerry aboard in his first combat mission in the Vietnam War ..

Schachte described the use of the skimmer operating very close to shore as a technique that he personally designed to flush enemy forces on the banks of Mekong River so that the larger Swift boats could move in. At about 3 a.m. on Dec. 2, Schachte said, the skimmer -- code-named "Batman" -- fired a hand-held flare. He said that after Kerry's M-16 rifle jammed, the new officer picked up the M-79 and "I heard a 'thunk.' There was no fire from the enemy," he said.

Patrick Runyon and William Zaladonis are the two enlisted men who said they were aboard the skimmer and did not know Schachte. However, two other former officers interviewed Thursday confirmed that Schachte was the originator of the technique and always was aboard the Boston whaler for these missions.

Grant Hibbard, who as a lieutenant commander was Schachte's superior officer, confirmed that Schachte always went on these skimmer missions and "I don't think he (Kerry) was alone" on his first assignment. Hibbard said he had told Kerry to "forget it" when he asked for a Purple Heart.

Ted Peck, another Swift boat commander, said, "I remember Bill (Schachte) telling me it didn't happen" -- that is, Kerry getting an enemy-inflicted wound. He said it would be "impossible" for Kerry to have been in the skimmer without Schachte.

"I was astonished by Kerry's version" (in his book, "Tour of Duty") of what happened Dec. 2, Schachte said Thursday. When asked to support the Kerry critics in the Swift boat controversy, Schachte said, "I didn't want to get involved." But he said he gradually began to change his mind when he saw his own involvement and credibility challenged, starting with Lanny Davis on CNN's "Crossfire" Aug. 12.

The next time he saw Kerry after the first Purple Heart incident, Schachte said, was "about 20 years" later on the U.S. Senate subway in the basement of the Russell Senate Office Building. "I called, 'Hey, John.' He replied, 'Batman.' I was absolutely amazed by his memory."

UPDATE II: A Statement on the Purple Heart matter from Rear Adm. William Schachte, Jr.

U.S. VETERANS FAVOR BUSH OVER KERRY

Also this: "And what we saw was the level of support declining among 27 percent of the individuals, who before seeing the [Swift Boat] ad indicated that they were leaning towards Kerry."

WHO IS

UPDATE: O'Neill does q and a with WaPo.com readers.

UPDATE II: The NY Times does an O'Neill profile.

UPDATE III: It's the LA Times' turn.

GEORGE BUSH --

"I think Senator Kerry should be proud of his [Vietnam] record .. No, I don't think he lied [about his Vietnam record].''

John Kerry and company -- of course -- continue to claim that George Bush lied about his National Guard record, lied about his reasons for going to war in Iraq, and lied about his report card in second grade. Oh, sorry, I made that last one up.

UPDATE: And lied not just about George Bush ..

A WIFE

DANIEL HENNINGER --

Why didn't John Kerry .. find some gracious way to make peace with the John O'Neills of the world? .. This is an election, not a Shakespearean tragedy. How come John Kerry never worked out, before the final leg of his long odyssey, a let-bygones statement, admitting the hyperbole (at the least) of his accusations of atrocity before Congress in 1971, honoring the service of colleagues who never felt obliged to apologize for Vietnam, but reserving his right to oppose that troubled war?

The reason for not doing so lies in something often asserted but little respected in our politics now -- principle. Alongside support for the civil-rights movement in the 1960s, opposition to Vietnam forms the moral bedrock of the modern Democratic Party. John Kerry .. is obliged to stand by his 1971 testimony as a matter of principle. Abandon that, and the party abandons him. Now this principle has drawn the Democrats into a game of high-stakes political poker over the Swift-boat story. Early on, it was merely John Kerry's presidential dream that the Swiftees threatened. We've moved way beyond that. Now the whole stack of moral capital the party banked from the Vietnam period has been pushed to the center of the table.

[Leftists] for years have argued that the ideas, policies and beliefs of their opposition were, whatever else, morally wanting. The basis for this claim was their domestic achievements inside government during the 1960s and--the twin pillar--their opposition in the streets to the Vietnam war. Both live on, and are used today, as the triumph of simple public morality over the soulless details of public policy. No challenge is ever permitted to either claim. Tax policy, for instance, is now argued almost wholly in terms of moral fairness. Judicial nominees are opposed as threats to some presumed moral consensus on rights and justice. If John Kerry loses this election over Vietnam, and he just may, one of the pillars that has propped up the Democratic church for more than 30 years will crack ..

.. the Democratic primaries have delivered to us a candidate who embodies nearly all the [Vietnam] period's social and political division. Choosing to place Vietnam at the center of his candidacy, Mr. Kerry -- an odd man from an odd time -- has loosed the dogs of politics and war again. Surprise, the old dogs of Vietnam still bark and bite. No one's playing the old morality card this time. They are simply telling the Vietnam veterans to shut up. Shouting them into silence worked back then, but we live in different times ..

JOHN O'NEILL:

We formed Swift Boat Veterans For Truth for one purpose: to present to the American public our conclusion that John Kerry is not fit to be commander in chief .. Our membership is transparent and shown on our Web site, www.swiftvets.com, currently including more than 250 Swiftees. We have 17 of the 23 officers who served with Mr. Kerry, most of his chain of command, and most sailors. We have more than 60 winners of real Purple Hearts. No one has a better right than we do to speak to the matters involving our unit ..

Why have we come forward? As explained in "Unfit For Command," Mr. Kerry grossly exaggerated and lied about his abbreviated four-month tour in Vietnam. He disgraced all legitimate Vietnam War heroes when he falsely testified to Congress that we were war criminals, daily engaged in atrocities that had the full approval of all levels in the chain of command. So, once Mr. Kerry decided to apply for the commander in chief's job with a war-hero r�sum�, we felt compelled to come forward to explain why he is "unfit for command." ..

Why, Mr. Kerry, are our charges as a 527 group unacceptable to you, while the pronouncements from 527 groups favorable to you are considered acceptable, regardless of stridency and veracity? .. we do not have a George Soros, willing to drop millions into our modest group. We control our message. To date, we have received $2 million from 30,000 Americans who have donated an average of around $64.

Mr. Kerry, we ask you not to repeat the same mistake you made when you returned from war: Please stop maligning your fellow veterans. Dealing with us should be easy. Just answer our charges. Produce your Vietnam journal and notes, and execute Standard Form 180 so the American people can see your complete military record -- not just the few forms you put on your website or show to campaign biographers.

POWs

TRANSCRIPT -- JOHN O'NEILL

BELDARBLOG READS

And does an in-your-face bit of score-keeping in the war between bogosity and truth, big media and the blogosphere:

Blogosphere to Newsweek: If the Navy citations were conclusive, we wouldn't be having any of this discussion, 'cause nobody doubts that Kerry did get the Bronze Star. You guys are so missing the point, it's almost as pathetic as the LAT, who's still stuck on the "all Kerry's crewmen support him" canard. And way-to-go blogosphere: 15 Technorati hits at the moment for the link from the Mail Tribune, all bloggers; no relevant hits on Google News for "Lambert 'Eagle Pass.'"

JOHN KERRY:

"All the guys who were with me on my boat, all the guys who were with me in the specific action where they could see it and do it, absolutely document what I said." (Link).

Everyone except them.

More from John Kerry today in Minnesota:

"The United States Navy, 35 years ago, when it was fresh, did its own documentation," he said. "Those documents stand. And I am absolutely telling you the God's honest truth about what happened and what took place over there. As are the other people who laid it out correctly over the last days."

Can the man for just one moment tell the truth and stop dissembling?

It's the drumbeat of lies today which do most to suggest that Kerry was in fact lying 35 years ago, and 25 years ago, and ten years ago, and five years ago -- and even as late as last year.

SWIFT VET

TRANSCRIPT -- BOB DOLE

John Kerry�s a friend of mine. I sent a signal about two or three months ago on television, �John, back off. You know, cool it. Don�t make the Vietnam War the centerpiece of your campaign.� But he�s got a problem, because he spent 20 years in the Senate and doesn�t have much to show for it.

GEORGE BUSH

Let's see. InstaPundit and Captains Quarters take donations and use their "independent expenditures" to make a case for Pres. Bush and against John Kerry. Are Bush and McCain going to do their best to shut down these voices through legislation and court action, as they intend with the Swift Vets? They will if there is any consistency or principle behind what they are doing.

UPDATE: A reader writes:

"It is not correct to imply that bush and mccain are against free speech - they are against free unregulated speech .. ."

Rich Lowry writes this: "He has gone from signing campaign-finance reform and hoping (and expecting) it would be struck down as unconstituional, to affirmatively seeking yet more restrictions on the First Amendment. Such is the fruit of betaying your principles. What a mess."

And this from Jonah Goldberg: "What is so thoroughly absurd and tragic is how we've come to accept as the "enlightened" position in America that political speech needs to be regulated as much as the instructions on prescription drugs."

NATIONAL REVIEW --

THE ECONOMIST --

VIETNAM COMBAT SURGEON MARTIN FLACKLER:

Dr. Louis Letson was entirely correct in turning down Lt. Kerry's first Purple Heart � even if the wound had been the result of enemy action. Can there be any doubt that the tiny metal sliver could have been removed easily, and safely, by a Navy corpsman? It certainly did not "require" treatment by a medical officer (an MD).

SWIFT VET LARRY LEE --

[Lee] said his biggest concern is that Kerry accused some servicemen of raping women, torching villages and killing children after he returned to the United States. "I was over there 19 months, and he was there for four months," Lee said. "How could he have seen all of those things I never saw? ... They didn't happen."

"IMPORTANT NOTE FROM AMAZON.COM:

LA TIMES POLL --

The country divides mostly along predictable partisan lines on the exchanges between Kerry and the group that has attacked his Vietnam record over the past month, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. But by several measures, the struggle appears to be drawing some blood from Kerry.

The Swift boat group .. has made only relatively small purchases of television time in a few battleground states for its two ads, the first charging that Kerry did not deserve some of the five medals he won in Vietnam and the second criticizing his antiwar testimony before the Senate in 1971. But with the controversy attracting intense media attention, especially on talk radio and cable television, the ads have achieved extraordinary visibility among voters. Fully 48% of those polled said they had seen the ad accusing Kerry of lying to win his medals; an additional 20% said they had heard about it. Similarly, 44% said they had seen the ad criticizing Kerry's Senate testimony; another 17% said they had heard about it.

At the same time, just 18% of those surveyed said they "believe that Kerry misrepresented his war record and does not deserve his war medals," while 58% said Kerry "fought honorably and does deserve" the medals.

Attitudes on that question divided along party lines. As many Republicans said they believed Kerry was lying as believed he fought honorably. By nearly 10 to 1, Democrats said Kerry served honorably. Independents sided with Kerry in the dispute by more than 5 to 1. Among them was Monika Schiel, a retiree in Gardena, Calif. "You have all the people that were on Kerry's boat�not somewhere downstream or upstream�confirming what he said," said Schiel. "This is some typical smear stuff; it seems mostly done by Republicans."

When voters were asked whether Kerry's protest against the war when he returned from Vietnam would influence their vote, 20% said it made them more likely to support him, while 26% said it reduced the chance they would back him, and 52% said it made no difference. But if Kerry showed relatively few bruises on these questions directly measuring reactions to the veterans' charges against him, indirect measures suggested he had suffered more damage.

Asked how Kerry's overall military experience would affect their vote, just 23% said it made them more likely to vote for him, while 21% said it made them less likely; the remaining 53% said it would make no difference. That has to be a disappointment for the Kerry camp after a Democratic convention last month that placed Kerry's Vietnam service at the top of the marquee.

Two other key questions produced even more troubling results for Kerry. In the July Times poll, 53% of voters said Kerry had demonstrated in his Vietnam combat missions the "qualities America needs in a president," while just 32% said that by "protesting the war in Vietnam, John Kerry demonstrated a judgment and belief that is inappropriate in a president." In the August survey, that balance nudged away from Kerry, with 48% saying he had demonstrated the right qualities and 37% saying he had exhibited poor judgment. Likewise, the share of voters saying they lacked confidence in Kerry as a potential commander in chief edged up from 39% in July to 43% now; the percentage that said they were confident in him slipped from 57% to 55%. Both changes were within the poll's margin of error, yet both tracked with the poll's general pattern of slight Kerry slippage.

Similar trends were evident on voters' assessments of the two men's personal qualities. Compared with July, Bush slightly widened his advantage over Kerry when voters were asked which was a strong leader and which had the honesty and integrity to serve as president. Following the poll's general trend, the percentage of voters who said they viewed Kerry favorably slipped from 58% in July to 53% in August, while the percentage who viewed him unfavorably ticked up from 36% to 41%. Bush's ratings were virtually unchanged from last month in this poll, with 53% viewing him favorably and 46% unfavorably.

The poll spotlighted another challenge for Kerry. After a Democratic convention that focused much more on Kerry's biography than his agenda, just 58% said they knew even a fair amount about the policies he would pursue as president; nearly 4 in 10 said they knew not much or nothing at all.

STOLEN VALOR --

(From Stolen Valor : How the Vietnam Generation Was Robbed of Its Heroes and Its History -- currently #552 at Amazon.)

CHAPTER 6 --

CHAPTER 5 --

HOW DOUGLAS BRINKLEY

And don't miss this letter from a Mekong Delta vet writing about Doug Brinkley's "Tour of Duty".

POLLS SHOW VETS TURNING

UPDATE: Bob Dole: "if you added up the value of all �The New York Times� propaganda [for John Kerry], it would probably be $3 or $4 million."

INSTAPUNDIT --

HOW JOHN KERRY

Mr. Kerry now exalts that half of the truce--not humbly as befits a genuine war hero, but constantly and immodestly waving the bloody shirt of his Vietnam service in the faces of his critics whenever any connection, no matter how illogical, can be drawn between their criticism and Mr. Kerry's Vietnam service.

Thus, when Dick Cheney criticized Mr. Kerry's positions on national security.. Mr. Kerry responded by "saying it is 'inappropriate' for Cheney to criticize his military service when he 'got every deferment in the world and decided he had better things to do.' " The man who not long ago high-mindedly observed that it is wrong to "divide America over who served and how," now tells us:

"I think a lot of veterans are going to be very angry at a president who can't account for his own service in the National Guard, and a vice president who got every deferment in the world and decided he had better things to do, criticizing somebody who fought for their country and served."

TRANSCRIPT --

O'Neill: I don't believe that ... (MATTHEWS INTERRUPTION)

O'Neill: Well, I'm not here to ... (MATTHEWS INTERRUPTION)

O'Neill: I think he is millions of steps behind, because he went over ... (MATTHEWS INTERRUPTION)

O'Neill: His first Purple ... (MATTHEWS INTERRUPTION) O'Neill: Well, the first ... (MATTHEWS INTERRUPTION)

O'Neill: You're right. I'm saying ... (MATTHEWS INTERRUPTION)

O'Neill: Well, wait just a second. What you've done is ... (MATTHEWS INTERRUPTION)

O'Neill: First of all ... (MATTHEWS INTERRUPTION)

John O'Neill: 1,150.

Chris Matthews: 2,290

(and this excludes intro and exit host prattle)

CAN WE TRUST BILL CLINTON?

John Kerry has often implied that he volunteered for the military right after college. But Kerry petitioned his draft board for a student deferment. At Yale, Kerry's antiwar political views were well known. He . . . used his commencement address in 1966 to criticize the foreign policy of President Lyndon Johnson, especially with regard to Vietnam. When he approached his draft board for permission to study for a year in Paris, the draft board refused and Kerry decided to enlist in the Navy. . . . The top choice was the Navy Reserves where the duty commitment was shorter and a larger proportion of the period could be served stateside on inactive duty.

John Kerry's service record indicates that on February 18, 1966, he enlisted in the United States Naval Reserves, status 'inactive,' not in the U.S. Navy. These details are conveniently left out of all pro-Kerry biographies. Douglas Brinkley records that Kerry entered Officer Candidate School in Newport, Rhode Island; however, again he fails to note that Kerry was seeking to be an officer of the U.S. Naval Reserves. John Kerry has often implied that he volunteered for the military right after college. But Kerry petitioned his draft board for a student deferment. At Yale, Kerry's antiwar political views were well known. He . . . used his commencement address in 1966 to criticize the foreign policy of President Lyndon Johnson, especially with regard to Vietnam. When he approached his draft board for permission to study for a year in Paris, the draft board refused and Kerry decided to enlist in the Navy. . . . The top choice was the Navy Reserves where the duty commitment was shorter and a larger proportion of the period could be served stateside on inactive duty. John Kerry's service record indicates that on February 18, 1966, he enlisted in the United States Naval Reserves, status 'inactive,' not in the U.S. Navy. These details are conveniently left out of all pro-Kerry biographies. Douglas Brinkley records that Kerry entered Officer Candidate School in Newport, Rhode Island; however, again he fails to note that Kerry was seeking to be an officer of the U.S. Naval Reserves.

One more reason Vietnam veterans are hopping mad about the phoney baloney re-write of history coming from Kerry and the Democrat campaign.

Posted by Greg Ransom / Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

THOMAS SOWELL --

Their best known confrontation was on the Dick Cavett show back in 1971. If you get a chance to see re-runs of that debate, it is well worth watching. At the heart of the issues between the two men were Kerry's widely publicized charges that Americans fighting in Vietnam committed atrocities not only wholesale and on a daily basis, but that those atrocities were both condoned and directed by those at the highest levels of command.

O'Neill repeatedly attempted to get Kerry to cite any evidence for these sweeping and damning charges -- and Kerry repeatedly sidestepped those questions and went off to discuss what he chose to define as the "real" issues. Kerry had that suave, smug, and condescending air that too often passes for intelligence and knowledge.

Much the same air was apparent in Dick Cavett's question to both men as to whether they believed the "cliche" that there would be a "blood bath" if and when the Communists took over in Vietnam. Kerry downplayed that possibility.

However chic it was among the intelligentsia to dismiss the prospect of a Communist bloodbath as a mere "cliche" in 1971, more than a million Vietnamese fled for their lives when the Communists took over. In their desperation, these refugees put themselves and their children on boats that were never meant for the high seas and about one-fourth of them died, either from drowning or from pirates who terrorized, robbed, raped, and slaughtered them.

Meanwhile, back in Vietnam, the Communists created precisely the kind of bloodbath that anyone outside of the intelligentsia could have predicted. In Cambodia, the Communists killed at least one-fifth of the entire population. Against the background of that carnage, the smug condescension of Cavett and Kerry now look obscene.

the relevance to presidential politics of Kerry's passionate 1971 [Senate] performance is, precisely, that he appears to have had good reason to know it was false and slanderous. If that is the case, it was not a demonstration of "forthright fire" and Kerry cannot have had real "beliefs" and "conviction" about it.

Pace [David] Brooks, the testimony then becomes the very antithesis of "authentic," because Kerry was either knowingly lying about American military activity in Southeast Asia or recklessly insouciant about the validity of his breathtaking war-crimes charges. In either event, his passion, having nothing to do with truth, would be explainable only by zealotry in the antiwar cause or by crass self-promotion.

JOHN MCCAIN

SWIFT VET BOB SHIRLEY

.. we can cut to the chase without all this silliness: The bottom line is that the people that "were on Kerry's Boat" .. have all flatly said that Kerry NEVER went into Cambodia during his short four month tour in Vietnam. Not on PCF 44 or on PCF 94. This from "band of brothers" Sandusky, Hatch and Wasser plus Gardner. And EVERY one of Kerry's commanders have testified that no Swift Boats were authorized to enter Cambodia before 1970.

Kerry's campaign spokesmen (eg John Hurley) also admit that there is NO documentation indicating that Kerry was EVER in Cambodia.

Speculation does not count. Eyewitnesses and documentation do.

And there ain't no way into Cambodia via floating vessel from the Giang Thanh or the Vinh Te canal. And the Bassac, the Co Chien and the Mekong, ain't either one of those.

The Kerryites are really stretching to cover-up this significant lie that Kerry has perpetuated for 30 years.

HOW BIASED IS THE PRESS?

JOHN KERRY'S

"STOLEN HONOR" --

TRANSCRIPT --

"VC" THE DOG

IS THIS "VC" THE DOG?

UPDATE: "VC" the dog goes national on the Hugh Hewitt show:

Hugh Hewitt: "Steve, was there a dog named VC on your boat?"

Steve Gardner : ""Buddy, to the best of my knowledge (laughing), I never saw any dog at any time on the 44 boat."

.. HH: "In the time that you were on the swift boats --totally-- did any of the swift boats have a dog?"

SG: "Never saw one, ever."

HH: "Would it have been a good idea to have a dog on the swift boats?" SG: "Not likely."

HH: "Why not?"

SG: "Because there was just too much action going on. We had hot brass rolling around there any time we were in a firefight. He would have got beat up."

SURPRISE!

If they base their opinions on what little they've read in their own papers on the matter, these editors can't claim to have much to go on in the way of knowledge of what the Swift Vets have said and the evidence they have brought forward. Overwhelmingly, this information simply hasn't ever appeared in their papers.

THE KERRY CAMPAIGN FLIP

f

ANOTHER BLOGOSPHERE SCOOP

A DEMOCRAT HIT TEAM

JOHN KERRY --

THOMAS SOWELL --

Pat Buchanan -- "Kerry and the Sampan incident".

Tony Blankley -- "Big media's big mistakes".

Brent Bozell -- "John Kerry's Soldier Smearing".

KERRY'S MAGINOT LINE --

Related remarks here and here.

KERRY STONEWALLS QUESTION ABOUT CAMBODIA.

As Kerry launched into one of his lengthy monologues about why President Bush avoids talking about issues like the economy, jobs and the environment, the comedian interrupted.

"I'm sorry," Stewart said. "Were you or were you not in Cambodia?"

Stewart and Kerry then lean in and stare each other down over the comedian's desk before Stewart asks about some of the other things Kerry's opponents are saying about him.

10 NOBEL PRIZE WINNERS IN ECONOMICS

Which says much more about the current state of economics profession than it does about John Kerry ..

The endorsers are:

George Akerlof and Daniel McFadden of the University of California at Berkeley, Kenneth Arrow and William Sharpe of Stanford University, Daniel Kahneman of Princeton University, Lawrence Klein of the University of Pennsylvania, Douglass North of Washington University, Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow of MIT and Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia University.

The only surprise here? Doug North.

HUGH HEWITT --

Also "The collapse of America's media elite".

Army Green Beret Jim Rassman

The weirdness factor grows.

GLENN REYNOLDS --

Let's assume that a certain amount of hype is standard procedure in military write-ups, especially when medals are involved. The problem is that Kerry is running for president on this official hype of a more-than-honorable record (one reason he's constantly referring reporters to his official medal citations). He's not only running on the hype but pushing it to the limit, milking it for all it's worth. That's dangerous in, yes, the Internet era! Obsessive fact-checkers can smoke out the exaggerations and get them past the ex-gatekeepers. Unfortunately, it's more or less all Kerry's got. It wouldn't be so important if Kerry had a) a discernable ideology; b) a political message; c) a record of achievement; or d) an appealing personality! ..

As The Belmont Club observes:

"Before the Gutenberg printing press men knew the contents of the Bible solely through the prism of the professional clergy, who could alone afford the expensively hand copied books and who exclusively interpreted it. But when technology made books widely available, men could read the sacred texts for themselves and form their own opinions. And the world was never the same again."

Yes, and now another professional interpretive class is finding itself eclipsed by technology. I think that's a good thing, and that its importance, in fact, dwarfs that of the current election.

TWO PARTIES --

ANOTHER KERRY MYTH

PRESS RELEASE -- SWIFT VETS

MICKEY KAUS --

BETSY NEWMARK:

A few guys at home alone with a computer have done more research than nine our of ten journalists. And the journalists still haven't caught up. They are reporting now on things that were discussed days ago in the blogosphere. Some journalists could do well to read the blogs and then do some research to flesh out the stories. That would be almost as easy as recycling campaign press releases. (Link.)

TRANSCRIPT -- DOUGLAS BRINKLEY

An hour with Brinkley and not a question about Cambodia. And note well. Chris Matthews uses a self-invented falsehood to land another libelous hit on Michelle Malkin -- and Doug Brinkley uses Matthews' carnard as a setup to slander both the blogosphere and talk radio based on Matthews' libelously false inventions:

MATTHEWS: Let me go to Doug Brinkley on a hot point on this program. Doug, there was a woman on the show the other night, Michelle Malkin or something, who was discussing in rather loose terms the idea that maybe John Kerry had purposely wounded himself to win a Purple Heart. Where would she get such an idea?

BRINKLEY: Well, from the Internet, from talk radio. This is a right-wing August takedown on John Kerry, and rumors, accusations, innuendoes flying. And that�s just how gutter politics is played sometimes in America. I feel it is a completely irresponsible comment and she needs to apologize for making it. There�s no evidence that says John Kerry ever shot himself.

Read a more complete account of the rice incident here. And don't miss this.

THE SWIFTY STORY --

HISTORY PROF. WILFRED MCCLAY:

I�m .. struck by the vehement, uncontained rage of media figures like Chris Matthews and Tom Oliphant, and the sweeping, completely unearned condescension of the New York Times and Washington Post, directed at the Swift Boat Vets and their gallant campaign against John Kerry�s candidacy. Why such an angry, petulant---but also, be it noted, completely self-righteous---reaction? Why the shift in tone, the loss of control? .. First, it seems we are experiencing one of those moments when history shifts its gears, and the accredited elites cannot seem to grasp what is happening, and cling desperately to the pieces of their fraying reputation. It�s a shift that the army of talented bloggers out there, part of one of the most genuinely populist movements ever to arise in modern American politics, has been announcing for a long time --- perhaps a little prematurely and self-interestedly, but what they have been predicting is now clearly upon us. The baby-boomer generation�s journalistic and academic elites sought, and gained, control over the nation�s chief organs of knowledge production, accreditation, and communication, with all the enormous power and influence that has entailed. But now the Gramscian monopoly is crumbling, and they cannot see how they are themselves largely to blame for their own discrediting.

DRUDGE --

More Drudge:

FLASH: 'SWIFT BOAT VETERANS FOR TRUTH' RAISED $1,764,000 IN DONATIONS ON WEBSITE IN PAST 2 WEEKS, SOURCES TELL DRUDGE...

Kerry's campaign now says is possible first Purple Heart was awarded for unintentional self-inflicted wound...

KERRY CLAIMS

MICHAEL NOVAK --

John O'Sullivan -- "Why those swift boaters want Kerry to sink".

AT ABC NEWS' "THE NOTE" --

Did Kerry alone write the after-action reports for his medal citations?

How close was he to Cambodia on Christmas, 1968?

What will Doug Brinkley's article in the New York conclude?

Is Kerry reluctant to acknowledge performing a top-secret mission for the CIA because he doesn't want to be accused of revealing classified information?

Why doesn't Senator Kerry recall attending the Vietnam Veterans Against the War conference in Kansas City in November of 1971?

How much will his post Vietnam political activities be scrutinized by the media?

BIG MEDIA --

WASHINGTON POST --

"EACH EPISODE

"DEAR STATION MANAGER" --

THE STORY OF JOHN KERRY'S

Citation 2 raises two important and intriguing questions. First, why would Kerry bother to have a second citation issued? The obvious answer is that he wanted to expunge from the record that he had shot a fleeing enemy soldier in the back .. The other important and intriguing question is how a lieutenant (junior grade), far down on the totem pole and then separated from service, could have induced an active duty four-star admiral, not only to reissue a citation for the Nation�s third-highest award, but to rewrite it by sanitizing Kerry�s killing of a fleeing enemy soldier.

AN INTERVIEW WITH SWIFT VET

A TALE OF TWO CITATIONS --

Kerry's Silver Star citation makes no mention of Underwater Demolition Team THIRTEEN, and the friendly foreign forces aren't credited with any role in the battle .. Admiral Roy Hoffman, who keeps being cited as a formerly pro-Kerry vet who has "changed his story," says he was told Kerry had "almost single-handedly" routed the Viet Cong. The description makes it sound like Kerry and his crew saved the day .. It makes one wonder if Kerry's reports to his superiors after battles were more than a little self-serving."

KERRY'S BRONZE STAR --

"The clearest analysis I've seen on what probably happened during this incident is here. The author's conclusions match what I've been thinking, even down to the fact that Kerry's swift boat ran into something submerged instead of getting hit by another mine .. That author thinks a single mine detonated, badly damaging PCF-3 and throwing two crewmen in the water. The boats immediately laid down suppressing fire on the banks in anticipation of an ambush. He doesn't say so, but frankly there may have been a couple VC taking shots at them at first, the same ones who would've detonated the mine, but they should've been quickly silenced. It seems Kerry had his driver speed away, with Rassmann still on board. Kerry's boat then hit something in the river, a log, or maybe rock, knocking Rassmann overboard and injuring Kerry's arm.

Rassmann spent significant time in the water, staying submerged while probably mistaking the sound of .50 caliber outgoing fire for incoming fire, since they're deafeningly loud and things sound strange underwater. Some time later Kerry turned his boat around and returned to pick up Rassmann, but another boat was already on the way to fish him out. The boats were likely never under any fire, and certainly not fire that continued for several minutes, up until the point that people were being pulled from the water, or one of the boats would've taken bullet damage.

Rassmann, in charge of writing awards for his Green Beret unit and thinking he had been under fire, wrote Kerry up for the Silver Star for pulling him out of the water. The commanders of three boats have said they weren't under fire, although the official report says they were. The question would be who reported that they were, since all the damage cited is from a mine or something else, in the case of Kerry's boat ..

Obviously the shrapnel wound didn't occur when "the mine" went off, and Rassmann has detailed how that injury occurred earlier in the day when Rassmann and Kerry blew up a large rice cache, with Kerry catching some rice in his butt ..

What's curious is that the official report again mentions the dubious story of a mine, which no one else supports, even Kerry's own helmsman. If Kerry's boat really did hit a submerged object, which would be consistent with the damage to his boat, then nobody else would've reported a second mine because no such explosion would've been visible. Again, about the only person to claim a second mine is Kerry, and the other officers probably wouldn't have been in a position to notice one anyway, nor care to report a mine that completely missed. It's surprising that PCF-94 got almost as many mentions in the official report (three) as PCF-3 (four), when it was the only boat to leave the scene. Four people had to be fished out of the water, but only PCF-94 got mentioned as having done this. The surviving commanders during this incident all say they didn't write up what became the official report, and that Kerry did. Given that the official reports seems focused on the actions of Kerry's boat, and includes the other mines that only Kerry mentions, I'd say they're right. Kerry's casualty report also prominently mentions a mine, and goes so far as to say that the mine's shrapnel was found in his buttocks.

So if Kerry wrote the official report, and the charge is that Kerry was claiming they were under fire when no fire existed, the fact that the report supports Kerry doesn't actually build his case, since it would be an echo of Kerry's version, which is the account in question. Kerry's Bronze Star was written up by Rassmann, who would've been told "it was a mine!" by Kerry, and who thought he was being shot at anyway. And to turn his earlier accident with the rice into a "combat injury" worthy of a Purple Heart, Kerry needs a second mine close aboard PCF-94 ..

.. Rassmann says it was several minutes in which he was hiding near the bottom. Four swift boats can lay down over 6000 rounds of .50 caliber machine gun fire in one minute, not to mention what their M-60's and the infantry they were carrying would add. If there really was somebody near the bank using aimed "sniper fire", I don't think they'd have lasted very long ..

.. the [Swift] boats were involved in this action for quite a long time, both the initial events, moving the injured crew of PCF-3 to PCF-43, then hooking up a tow and arranging bailing parties to keep PCF-3 afloat. Did all this enemy fire just stop? If so, when? Thurlow had long been aboard giving aid to PCF-3's crew .. for quite some time before Kerry picked up Rassmann, since even Kerry recounts that Thurlow hopped aboard PCF-3 before he discusses turning his boat around to go back. Thurlow even fell in the water when PCF-3 bumped into a sandbar and had to have a boat come over and fish him out, too. Yet if Rassmann hadn't been picked up, and was still taking fire, wouldn't Thurlow have been under fire the whole time? Yet he claims he wasn't.

And the whole story requires you to buy into the notion that the VC on the banks would be shooting at poor Rassmann, who was completely invisible underwater for most of the time, somewhat apart from the other boats which were laying down heavy suppressive fire, fire which could amount well over 12,000 rounds in two minutes if they had that much ammunition linked up and ready to go. Yet the VC are ignoring the five boats, the people like Thurlow walking around on PCF-3 giving aid, all those rear gunners standing bolt upright, and the infantry on board who were sitting ducks. For some reason they're supposedly shooting at Rassmann, and then of course sitting their waiting for John Kerry to make his appearance on the bow. Strange VC indeed, you might think, but no worries, because obviously they can't hit the side of a barn. Not one bullet hole in Kerry's boat, or any other, aside from three in Thurlow's boat which he said happened the previous day. How can five boats sit still in a narrow canal with heavy automatic weapons and small arms fire coming from both banks and none of them get hit with anything?."

"EVERYONE IS ABOVE AVERAGE."

LCDR Elliot had rated 15 officers of the same grade and amazingly almost 50%, 7 out of 15 (including Kerry) were "One of the Top Few." The remaining 8 all were rated "Excellent" and not a single officer was rated in any of the lesser three categories. Not a single officer was "Fine" or even just "Satisfactory."

MARK STEYN:

Switch on the TV these days and you'll see John O'Neill, principal spokesman for the hundreds of Swift boat veterans who oppose their old comrade Kerry, talking calmly and patiently about the facts, citing chapter and verse and relevant footnotes, while some deranged interviewer is going berserk.

LA TIMES DROPS THE M-BOMB:

The technique President Bush is using against John F. Kerry was perfected by his father against Michael Dukakis in 1988, though its roots go back at least to Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

And Patterico exposes editor Michael Kinsley and his Timesmen for the vacuous weasles they are. Quotable:

Speaking of the charges raised by the Swift Boat Vets, the editors at the Los Angeles Dog Trainer sanctimoniously proclaim: "These Charges Are False ... " Very impressive. Only: which charges are they talking about, anyway? The ones about John Kerry claiming he was in Cambodia in Christmas 1968? The claim that John Kerry initially sought a deferment to avoid the Vietnam war? The claim that he joined the Naval Reserves, rather than the Navy, at a time when men his age who believed they would be drafted anyway often chose the Naval Reserves as a safer route? The claim that, when Kerry initially volunteered for Swift boat service, it was considered relatively safe? ..

You have got to read the paper's editorial this morning. Not only does it officially bestow "victim" status on John Kerry --which is the highest honor the Times' ever bestows-- it also creates its own factual world and its own legal reality, stating of Kerry and MoveOn and Bush and the Swift Boat Vets for Truth that "either man could shut down the groups working on his behalf if he wanted to," an objectively and manifestly absurd claim. But because the editors at the Times, upset at the rapid dissolution of the Kerry campaign, want to believe it, they choose to believe it. No wonder this paper has fallen on the hardest of times: It isn't bound by even elementary facts.

Then there's this stunner of a paragraph:

"No informed person can seriously believe that Kerry fabricated evidence to win his military medals in Vietnam. His main accuser has been exposed as having said the opposite at the time, 35 years ago. Kerry is backed by almost all those who witnessed the events in question, as well as by documentation. His accusers have no evidence except their own dubious word."

Put aside that the editorial does not include the word Cambodia, about which Kerry has been fabricating evidence for years, does not mention Kerry's refusal to release his records, or that Kerry won't meet with the press. Even with those exclusions, this is an amazing level of ignorance on display. Or deceit. But either way the Los Angeles Times should acquaint itself with the work of the Washington Post's Michael Dobbs, whose Sunday account, while it does not side either with Kerry or his accusers, contains enough in its third paragraph to embarrass the editorial writers at Los Angeles Times, if indeed these ideologues are capable of embarrassment:

"For the Massachusetts senator's critics, who include three of the five Swift boat skippers who were present that day, the incident demonstrates why Kerry does not deserve to be commander in chief. They accuse him of cowardice, hogging the limelight and lying. Far from displaying coolness under fire, they say, Kerry was never fired upon and fled the scene at the moment of maximum danger."

Note the Los Angeles Times asserted that "Kerry is backed by almost all those who witnessed the events in question," but the reporting in the Post easily shows that statement to be false: "three of five" commanders blasting Kerry cannot be squared with the Los Angeles Times' assertion that "Kerry is backed by almost all those who witnessed the events in question." Is it stupidity or deceit? Whichever, it sure isn't journalism.

TRANSCRIPTS --

Also Swift Vet boat commanding officer Larry Thrulow, who served in coordinated group operations with John Kerry.

WALL STREET JOURNAL --

A good rule in politics is that anyone who picks a fight ought to be prepared to finish it. But having first questioned Mr. Bush's war service, and then made Vietnam the core of his own campaign for President, Mr. Kerry now cries No mas! because other Vietnam vets are assailing his behavior before and after that war. And, by the way, Mr. Bush is supposedly honor bound to repudiate them.

We've tried to avoid the medals-and-ribbons fight ourselves, except to warn Mr. Kerry that he was courting precisely such scrutiny ("Kerry's Medals Strategy," February 9). But now that the Senator is demanding that the Federal Election Commission stifle his opponents' free speech, this one is too rich to ignore.

What did Mr. Kerry expect, anyway? That claiming to be a hero himself while accusing other veterans of "war crimes"--as he did back in 1971 and has refused to take back ever since--would somehow go unanswered?

MORE SWIFT VETS COME FORWARD

THOMAS SOWELL ON KERRY IN VIETNAM:

The Kerry version of events begins with his volunteering to serve in the Vietnam war. The O'Neill version has Kerry's draft board rejecting his application for a deferment and Kerry then enlisting in the Naval Reserve -- not the Navy, as in Brinkley's book.

Enlisting in the Naval Reserves is not very different from enlisting in the National Guard. The big difference is that John Kerry happened to get sent to Vietnam and George Bush did not. But those decisions were made by people far above them in the military chain of command.

Yet some in the media and elsewhere have acted as if it was heroic for John Kerry to have enlisted in the Naval Reserve and cowardly for George Bush to have enlisted in the National Guard. But none has bothered to show what essential difference -- if any -- there is between these two back-up branches of service ..

The ferocity of Kerry's media defenders was exemplified in Chris Matthews' browbeating of columnist Michelle Malkin on his "Hardball" program when she questioned Kerry's Purple Hearts. Matthews repeatedly demanded to know if she was saying that Kerry had deliberately shot himself.

That was never the charge made by the Vietnam Veterans for Truth. Those who were there say that there was no enemy fire, that Kerry on two occasions accidentally injured himself when shrapnel from his own grenades nicked him, and later an enemy mine also got him. The doctor who treated Kerry said that he removed a tiny fragment with tweezers, put a Band-Aid on the spot -- and refused to certify it as a wound that merited a Purple Heart.

Kerry's commanding officer at the time likewise rejected Kerry's application for a Purple Heart, according to O'Neill. Later, Kerry got a Purple Heart through another commanding officer who knew nothing about the incident and took Kerry's word for it.

Maybe the media could put some of the energy that they spend trying to discredit Kerry's critics into finding out what the facts are. Or don't they dare risk finding out?

-- LINK.

Posted by Greg Ransom / Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

KERRY'S ODD BEHAVIOR IN VIETNAM

".. there is the matter of Sen. Kerry�s reported use of his Swift Boat and crew as props for filming the reenactment of his military exploits. Such self-absorbed and narcissistic behavior fits the profile of a man who, even then, made no secret of his ambition to be President of the United States. It seems ominously consistent, moreover, with the sort of person who just might have done what it has been alleged Kerry did in order to secure undeserved medals in Vietnam and a trip home after only four-and-a-half months of his year-long tour of duty: manufacturing recommendations for decorations and end-running other officers who declined to approve them."

DALLAS MORNING NEWS --

Trouble is, Mr. Kerry was almost certainly not in Cambodia that Christmas (neither, by the way, was Mr. Nixon in the White House). Even Douglas Brinkley, Mr. Kerry's friendly biographer, says that the candidate wasn't in Cambodia at the time. And the Kerry campaign has backed away from the story.

Why does this matter? Because it speaks more clearly to the real issue: Has Mr. Kerry puffed his wartime experience for political gain? If so, that should inform voters' judgment."

-- link.

JOHN LEO --

When the Los Angeles Times finally decided to notice the story, it had an obvious problem: How should it report news it had ignored for 11 days? Simple: Lump it in with Kerry�s other Vietnam controversies in a long, boring, and indecisive report (�what actually happened about 35 years ago along the remote southern coast of Vietnam remains murky�). And high up in the story, let readers know that the Times thinks the issue is old, irrelevant, and narrowly partisan (�the [anti-Kerry] ad, the book and the people behind them have become staples of conservative talk shows and Internet sites�). Of course, one reason it was a �staple� of conservative media is that the major news media ignored it.

THE SWIFT BOAT VETS

JF KERRY --

JOHN KERRY IN VIETNAM --

THE BLOGOSPHERE

But why should this be? Powerline weighs in:

As the election campaign heats up, and mainstream media outlets run interference for John Kerry, the blogosphere has suddenly come of age and is starting to fulfill the predictions of the last year or two. Suddenly, the blogosphere is front and center, driving the news cycle, along with other "new media" outlets--talk radio and, to a lesser extent, cable news. The traditional media's monopoly has been broken, and they have lost their ability to control the news cycle and dictate the information that Americans receive--and don't receive ..

We're just getting started, but it isn't hard to see where all of this is heading. What powers the blogosphere is what powers talk radio -- the bloggers, sure, but far more important, a core of readers and listeners that is engaged, passionate, and above all, well-informed. It's the dialogue, the quick response, the almost instantaneous supplementation of information and the quick correction of errors, and the freewheeling search for information and truth that puts the blogosphere head and shoulders above conventional journalism.

You couldn't do this with, say, neurosurgery. A bunch of amateurs, no matter how smart and enthusiastic, could never outperform professional neurosurgeons, because they lack the specialized training and experience necessary for that field. But what qualifications, exactly, does it take to be a journalist? What can they do that we can't? Nothing. Generally speaking, they don't know any more about primary data and raw sources of information than we do--often less. Their general knowledge is often inadequate. Their superior resources should allow them to carry out investigations far beyond what we amateurs can do. But the reality is that the mainstream media rarely use those resources. Too many journalists are bored, biased and lazy. And we bloggers are not dependent on our own resources or those of a few amateurs. We can get information from tens of thousands of individuals, many of whom have exactly the knowledge that journalists could (but usually don't) expend great effort to track down -- to take just one recent example, the passability of the Mekong River at the Vietnam/Cambodian border during the late 1960s ..

It's an exciting time to inhabit the blogosphere. Buckle your seat belts; it will be a wild ride from now to November ..

Captain Ed

VETS FOR KERRY JOHN HURLEY

Chris Wallace (CW): Let me pursue that. What proof do you have that John Kerry was ever five miles inside Cambodia?

John Hurley (JH): John Kerry's word.

CW: Do you have a single record?

JH: No. I do not.

KERRY'S MILITARY RECORDS --

Among other things? His medical records -- the one's related to all those Purple Hearts.

MICHAEL BARONE --

-- MORE.

KERRY'S VIETNAM RECORD

KERRY PRINT ALERT TEAM

ITS KERRY AND BUSH

JOHN HAWKINS --

ON IT'S WEB SITE

POWERLINE --

Betsy'sPage -- "I think this story will be a test as to whether the Clinton attack machine coupled with the media will work to defend another Democrat, even one as unlikable as Kerry .. the Democratic attack machine shifted into gear and somehow their guy's foibles aren't the story and the story is about how terrible Republicans are. I'm not sure why this storyline works over and over. It's clear that there is a playbook whenever one of their guys gets criticized - blame it on Republicans and ignore the underlying questions. I hope that it won't work again for Kerry .. "

THE KERRY CAMPAIGN --

"NEW" MEDIA & THE SWIFT BOAT VET STORY --

The mission was not a partisan one or even an ideological one. John Kerry has not been defeated. The election is still months away, after all, and his defeat was not even the mission. The mission was to let the SBVT be heard and to force the mainstream media to report the story. It is obvious now that has been accomplished.

BACK FROM VACATION.

DEBORAH ORIN,

Not one of Kerry's Swift boat crewmates, even the ones backing his candidacy, recalls being in Cambodia in Christmas 1968 � and anti-Kerry Swift boat veterans cite a host of evidence that he was 50 miles away in Vietnam .. Unlike the conflicts over Kerry's medals, this isn't a he said/he said dispute � Kerry either was or wasn't in Cambodia. Eventually a reporter will ask him point-blank if he still claims he was in Cambodia that Christmas � yes or no ..

The other fascinating part of this story is the key role that bloggers on the Internet have played in pointing out the holes in Kerry's story � even as much of the press tries to ignore them. For instance, when Team Kerry held a press conference featuring his crewmates this week, one was conspicuously missing � David Alston � after the Internet-fueled revelation that he may have only served on Kerry's boat for one week. A Web blogger, captainsquartersblog, began questioning whether Alston (who has spoken emotionally about how they "bled together") ever served with Kerry. National Review examined the records and concluded maybe � for just one week.

This whole story could be a test of the Internet's impact in this campaign. While most papers have been ignoring the story � until Kerry went ballistic at the Swift vets yesterday � bloggers have been examining it in detail. On Web sites like Instapundit.com, captainsquartersblog.com, hugh- hewitt.com and rogerlsimon.com, skeptical veterans are trading details on Kerry's service and raising intricate questions about his veracity based on their own experience.

Their online dialogue is punctuated with questions about why the "mainstream media" have been mostly ignoring this story � and why the 13 pro-Kerry vets are automatically assumed to have more credibility than 264 anti-Kerry vets. Just imagine the coverage if 264 vets who served with Bush in the Texas Air National Guard made similar charges. For those bloggers, this story has become a test of the mainstream media's credibility � and its liberal anti-Bush bias.

"UNFIT FOR COMMAND" EXCERPTS --

"'Sampan incident' belies heroic image."

"An angry dispute over a rescue in the river."

NY TIMES DOES "KERRY IN CAMBODIA".

COASTAL DIVISION ELEVEN --

(via Captain Ed).

DOUGLAS BRINKLEY --

MAPS: It took place here. Look for the Song Bai Hop, Rach Dong Cung and the village of Cai Nuoc -- just East of the 105� 00' longitude line.

"IT JUST DIDN'T HAPPEN."

The new version of Sen. John Kerry's Cambodia experience is also not true.

Sen. Kerry patrolled from An Thoi on the 94 boat and also from Cat Lo on the 44 boat. There was no way to enter Cambodia from the An Thoi patrol area. That patrol area started at the coastal fishing village of Ha Tien and ran parallel to the Cambodian border, but there was no way into Cambodia. Any good map will show this to be true.

From the Cat Lo patrol area around Sa Dec, it would have been possible for a boat to enter Cambodia, except there were concrete barriers, river-assault group boats and PBRs guarding the entrance. Anyone entering Cambodia at that location would have known with complete certainty what they were doing.

It just never happened. Sen. Kerry is not being truthful, and it can be easily proven by interviewing his own selected band-of-brothers. The claim that there were so many rivers and canals, and that no one knew where they were, is ludicrous. We had detailed maps and overlays that showed everything right down to movements in fishing stakes.

I drove a swift boat for a year in 1969, and I still remember all the patrol areas. Also, a single swift boat never went anywhere alone. It would have been way too dangerous. A second cover boat would have gone along. That means the crew of that boat would have also known they were going into Cambodia. Where are the crew members and officer of the cover boat?

Again, it just didn't happen.

Why has the old media let this slide? Sen. Kerry will say anything if it suits his personal political agenda. His Cambodia lie is just like his atrocity lie when he came back. They served his political purpose when he said them, but neither is true. I'm not a member of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which can be verified. I also will not vote for either Bush or Kerry because I'm anti-war. I don't think we should be in Iraq. However, I am for the truth.

(via Powerline.)

SLIMEBALL.

PoliPundit is also on the story:

I thought Chris Matthews went off the deep end with John O'Neill, but tonight he entered Cuckoo's Nest territory. I was so disgusted by the disgraceful performance of Matthews tonight with Swift Boat Vet Thurlow that I thought he had hit rock bottom. I was wrong. I next caught his softball lovefest with Max Cleland and noted that Cleland got not one hard question and was actually allowed to finish some sentences. Then Matthews did the most incredibly rude, irresponsible, disgraceful attack on Michelle Malkin that you can imagine. Of course, Malkin is tough and held her ground, although she was not allowed to finish even a single sentence uninterrupted. Then David Gergen said Kerry was winning on this issue and of course these guys are all Republican front men. Did Matthews ask for proof of that? Of course not. For those who did not see the show (don't even ask me why I was watching -- it is kinda like a rubbernecker watching an auto accident) I cannot adequately convey the vitriol and blatant bias in the questioning.

Here's the transcript. Read Malkin and then read the lies of Chris Matthews. Quotable:

One of my jobs on 'Hardball' is to cut through to the truth. Tonight on 'Hardball,' one of our guests pushed the idea that John Kerry had won his Purple Heart by deliberately shooting himself. The charge was without merit and baseless, as our guest under close questioning herself admitted.

USA TODAY

And the Dallas Morning News (also reprinted in the Philadelphia Inquirer).

And the Washington Post.

THE NEW YORK TIMES DOES SWIFT VETS & 'KERRY IN CAMBODIA'.

DRUDGE --"EMPIRE STRIKES BACK AGAINST ANTI-KERRY VETS".

Hugh Hewitt: "Tomorrow's New York Times will carry a hit piece on the Swift Boat Vets against Kerry. I am betting that it will not mention Kerry's recanting of his Christmas- Eve- in- Cambodia lie, or press for details on all the other tales Kerry has been telling about his cross border derring-do for the past three decades. The fact of conflicting stories that cannot be reconciled is out there. Let's see if the "paper of record" deals with the most obvious hole in the Kerry Vietnam legend (after the Christmas-Eve-in-Cambodia whopper, that is.)

UPDATE: And here it is -- the NEW LEFT TIMES, "Friendly Fire: The Birth of an Anti-Kerry Ad." And here is their coverage of "Kerry in Cambodia":

This week, as its leaders spoke with reporters, they have focused primarily on the one allegation in the book that Mr. Kerry's campaign has not been able to put to rest: that he was not in Cambodia at Christmas in 1968, as he declared in a statement to the Senate in 1986. Even Mr. Brinkley, who has emerged as a defender of Mr. Kerry, said in an interview that it was unlikely that Mr. Kerry's Swift boat ventured into Cambodia on Christmas, though he said he believed that Mr. Kerry was probably there shortly afterward.

A new CBS News polls shows that Mr. Kerry's support among veterans has slipped since the Democratic convention. Shortly after he accepted the nomination, he was tied with Mr. Bush among veterans at 46 percent, but the poll shows Mr. Bush well ahead, 55 percent to 37 percent.

UPDATE II. THE BLOGOSPHERE REACTS.

Betsy'sPage:

Well, here is the New York Times hit piece on the SBVT. Basically, they spend a lot of time looking at who contributed to the group and how they were organized. Oh, what a surprise, Republicans are funding the ads. Why is that a big deal? Aren't Democrats funding the ads against Bush? Do you think it would be vice versa? .. You have to wait almost to the end to get to the Cambodia story and they don't give the full background on how Kerry has talked about Cambodia over and over and said it was "seared" into his memory. As Drudge said, "The Empire Strikes Back." Can the other major media outlets be much behind?

Who can be shocked anymore by the oddly defensive partisanship of The New York Times? When the accusations by the Swift Boat Veterans were first made several weeks ago, one issue above all stood out, not just with the blogosphere, but with large numbers of concerned citizens from both parties, that is John Kerry's statment before the US Senate -- "seared" in his memory, as he said -- that he had spent Christmas Eve of 1968 under fire in Cambodia. He made this assertion during an important policy debate on War in Nicaragua -- a serious matter indeed. It wasn't a question of mere medals (who cares?). It was national security, life and death. (He also made similar statements in print, as we know.) But The New York Times, writing for the first time on this scandal they have so assiduously avoided, buries what surely deserves to be the lede in the fourth to last paragraph of a 3500 word article!

The expected broadside to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth came this evening, as the New York Times advances the campaign strategy John Kerry launched this afternoon -- ad hominem attacks and screeching about funding sources while paying little factual attention to the well-documented allegations from the Swiftvets.

The same day Kerry holds a press conference in which he finally acknowledges the SwiftVets controversy out of his own mouth, the New York Times discovers there's a story there!

Tomorrow, the New York Times will publish its expected hit piece on the Swift Boat Vets. The article accomplishes something that I would have thought impossible just two days ago. It makes the L.A. Times's coverage of the Swift Boat Vets look (almost) like responsible journalism. To be sure, the New York Times takes a page from the L.A. Times playbook: prejudice the reader against the Vets before breathing a word of their actual accusations. But the New York paper takes this strategy to a new level. I don't think I have ever seen such a partisan hit piece in my life.

UPDATE: And here is how the networks covered the Swift Boat story:

None of the broadcast evening networks stories, nor CNN's NewsNight mentioned, as did FNC's Carl Cameron on Special Report with Brit Hume, that as a result of John O'Neill and his Unfit for Command book, the Kerry campaign has had to back off Kerry's claim to have been in Cambodia on Christmas Eve 1968.

Three weeks after Peter Jennings acknowledged that "there are a few who served with him who dispute his record and question his leadership" and promised that "we'll hear from them in the weeks ahead," World News Tonight on Thursday finally got around to the Kerry detractors, though like Jennings ("a few"), reporter Brian Rooney minimized their number as he described Swift Boat Veterans for Truth as "a small organization with members still angry over Kerry's anti-war protests after he left the Navy." In fact, compared to the mere dozen or so Kerry colleagues from Vietnam who are part of his "band of brothers," the anti-Kerry group of veterans of the swift boat service, at over 250 members, is far larger. ABC devoted the most time Thursday night to the controversy with Jake Tapper (who also contributed a long piece to Nightline later) outlining one of the specific charges. But anchor Vargas couldn't resist pleading: "But even Republican Senator John McCain has called on the President to condemn this ad. Why hasn't he done so?"

Picking up on a Washington Post story, NBC's Carl Quintanilla stressed how "today a new report said military records contradict one of Kerry's most vocal critics." But ABC's Jake Tapper provided that critic time for a retort: "This comes from John Kerry's report that day, which said we were under this extreme fire. We were not." Even though Kerry was the one who hurled an unsubstantiated charge about how Swift Boat Veterans for Truth is "a front for the Bush campaign" which is doing Bush's "dirty work," CBS and NBC treated Kerry as the aggrieved party. NBC's Quintanilla saw "a political push back planned just last night. Kerry, arriving home in Boston, was said to be frustrated by the attacks and had his staff up until 3am, cutting this political ad debuting today:" Narrator from Kerry ad: "The people attacking John Kerry's war record are funded by Bush's big-money supporters."

CBS's Byron Pitts similarly framed the issue: "Kerry, who's made his tour of duty in Vietnam the centerpiece of his campaign, realized today he could no longer let the ad go unanswered and took aim at President Bush for not condemning it." Pitts didn't hesitate to try to discredit a Kerry detractor by bringing up Nixon: "The men behind the Swift Boat Veterans ad refused to back off. Their leader, John O'Neill, was also Richard Nixon's point man in attacks on John Kerry's protest of the Vietnam War 30 years ago." Pitts launched the same attack on May 4, the night of the group's press conference which CBS, unlike ABC and NBC, covered, sort of. Pitts went back to 1971 as he recalled how John O'Neill, who debated Kerry about Vietnam on ABC's Dick Cavett Show, "was handpicked by the Nixon administration to discredit Kerry." Pitts added, without any explanation, that "the press conference was set up by the same people who," in 2000, "tried to discredit John McCain's reputation in Vietnam service." Then Pitts connected the anti-Kerry veterans to a presumed nefarious "strategy" they had nothing to do with implementing: "It's the same strategy used to go after Georgia Senator Max Cleland, who lost three limbs in Vietnam."

DO WE really need

JOHN KERRY

More here. Quotable:

Sen. John Kerry accused President Bush on Thursday of relying on front groups to challenge his record of valor in Vietnam, asserting, "He wants them to do his dirty work." Defending his record, the Democratic presidential candidate said, "Thirty years ago, official Navy reports documented my service in Vietnam and awarded me the Silver Star, the Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts. Thirty years ago, this was the plain truth. It still is. And I still carry the shrapnel in my leg from a wound in Vietnam."

In his speech, Kerry employed a wartime metaphor. "More than 30 years ago I learned an important lesson. When you're under attack the best thing to do is turn your boat into the attack. That's what I intend to do today." Speaking of the organization airing the ads that challenge his war record, Kerry said, "Of course, this group isn't interested in the truth and they're not telling the truth. ... "But here's what you really need to know about them. They're funded by hundreds of thousands of dollars from a Republican contributor out of Texas. They're a front for the Bush campaign. And the fact that the President won't denounce what they're up to tells you everything you need to know. He wants them to do his dirty work."

Bush spokesman Steve Schmidt said, "That charge leveled by Senator Kerry is absolutely and completely false." "The Bush campaign has never and will never question John Kerry's service in Vietnam. The president has referred to John Kerry's service as noble service," the Bush spokesman said. Kerry said, "Of course, the president keeps telling people he would never question my service to our country. Instead, he watches as a Republican-funded attack group does just that. Well, if he wants to have a debate about our service in Vietnam, here is my answer: 'Bring it on.'"

UPDATE II: And here is another AP story on Kerry's remarks.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Statement By Swift Boat Veterans for Truth Member Larry Thurlow:

I am convinced that the language used in my citation for a Bronze Star was language taken directly from John Kerry's report which falsely described the action on the Bay Hap River as action that saw small arms fire and automatic weapons fire from both banks of the river.

To this day, I can say without a doubt in my mind, along with other accounts from my shipmates -- there was no hostile enemy fire directed at my boat or at any of the five boats operating on the river that day.

I submitted no paperwork for a medal nor did I file an after action report describing the incident. To my knowledge, John Kerry was the only officer who filed a report describing his version of the incidents that occurred on the river that day.

It was not until I had left the Navy -- approximately three months after I left the service -- that I was notified that I was to receive a citation for my actions on that day.

I believed then as I believe now that I received my Bronze Star for my efforts to rescue the injured crewmen from swift boat number three and to conduct damage control to prevent that boat from sinking. My boat and several other swift boats went to the aid of our fellow swift boat sailors whose craft was adrift and taking on water. We provided immediate rescue and damage control to prevent boat three from sinking and to offer immediate protection and comfort to the injured crew.

After the mine exploded, leaving swift boat three dead in the water, John Kerry's boat, which was on the opposite side of the river, fled the scene. US Army Special Forces officer Jim Rassmann, who was on Kerry's boat at the time, fell off the boat and into the water. Kerry's boat returned several minutes later -- under no hail of enemy gunfire -- to retrieve Rassmann from the river only seconds before another boat was going to pick him up.

Kerry campaign spokespersons have conflicting accounts of this incident -- the latest one being that Kerry's boat did leave but only briefly and returned under withering enemy fire to rescue Mr. Rassmann. However, none of the other boats on the river that day reported enemy fire nor was anyone wounded by small arms action. The only damage on that day was done to boat three -- a result of the underwater mine. None of the other swift boats received damage from enemy gunfire.

And in a new development, Kerry campaign officials are now finally acknowledging that while Kerry's boat left the scene, none of the other boats on the river ever left the damaged swift boat. This is a direct contradiction to previous accounts made by Jim Rassmann in the Oregonian newspaper and a direct contradiction to the "No Man Left Behind" theme during the Democratic National Convention.

These ever changing accounts of the Bay Hap River incident by Kerry campaign officials leave me asking one question. If no one ever left the scene of the Bay Hap River incident, how could anyone be left behind?

[END]

UPDATE: Ouside the Beltway comments: "One part of Thurlow's story is confirmed by looking at the docs: He, Kerry, and an RD1 R.E. Lambert were all put in for the Bronze Star simultaneously, under authority of LTCDR Elliot, using the same citation. It would indeed be surprising if Thurlow's award, therefore, said something different than Kerry's."

He's got lots more on the Bronze Star and its history. Stuff you likely didn't know.

CAPTAIN ED

GLENN REYNOLDS --

ANN COULTER --

THE USA TODAY --

HUGH HEWITT --

NEW RECORDS EMERGE.

Kerry's speech in Cincinnati drew about 6,000 people, fewer than half the 15,000 attending the VFW's national convention. The audience offered polite applause. But many veterans did not clap at some standard stump-speech lines that usually draw applause, suggesting that numerous former warriors were skeptical if not hostile. At least two men heckled Kerry. One word explained the tough crowd: Vietnam. Kerry's public protests against the Vietnam War as a young veteran newly home from Southeast Asia were a sore point for many veterans. As a leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Kerry, a highly decorated naval officer during the war, testified before Congress, repeating allegations by other soldiers of war crimes by U.S. servicemen.

"I can remember when we came back from service in what we all know was a controversial period of time," said Kerry, a longtime VFW member. "I didn't make it controversial; the war and the times were. And as too many of us know, it was a time when the war and the warriors became confused," he continued. "I say to you with my experience: Never again in America should the warriors ever be confused with the war, and our nation should always be prepared to stand and say thank you." Kerry campaign officials said they were pleasantly surprised by what they saw as a relatively warm response from an audience Democratic candidates sometimes have avoided.

Also Wednesday, the Kerry campaign disputed an allegation made by a group of veterans opposed to the senator's presidential candidacy that he never operated inside Cambodia during the Vietnam War. The Boston Globe reported that in a new book, "Unfit for Command," the veterans said "Kerry was never in Cambodia during Christmas 1968, or at all during the Vietnam War," and he "would have been court-martialed had he gone there." But the Kerry campaign said the group, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, is wrong and that Kerry was inside Cambodia to drop off commandos on one mission and was at the border on other occasions.

Also, The Washington Post reported that military records for a member of the Swift boat group, Larry Thurlow, contradict his version of events when Kerry won a Bronze Star. Thurlow has strongly disputed Kerry's claim that his boat came under fire during a mission on March 13, 1969. Thurlow's records, portions of which were released Wednesday under the Freedom of Information Act, contain references to "enemy small arms and automatic weapons fire" directed at "all units" of the five-boat flotilla. Thurlow also earned a Bronze Star that day.

KerrySpot is spot-on: "This front page post story about the Swift Boat Vets blows it, or at least the headline writer does. The Post declares, "Records Counter A Critic Of Kerry; Fellow Skipper's Citation Refers To Enemy Fire." But a central point of "Unfit for Command" is their contention that Kerry lied about what happened on his missions, thus putting false information into the military records. Citing records that the Swifties charge Kerry wrote himself does not prove that the Swifties are lying." UPDATE II: Patterico on the WaPo/records story. UPDATE III: Hugh Hewitt has analysis of the Chicago Tribune story here.

UPDATE IV: Here is the transcript of Kerry's VFW speech.

JOHN KERRY'S LAST HOPE --

The Cambodia story is crumbling completely now. Kerry couldn't have been in Cambodia on the PCF-44 because at least three of his crewmembers are on the record as saying it never happened. Crucially, two of them are Kerry supporters: Bill Zaladonis and Stephen Hatch. Stephen Gardner, also on board the PCF-44 denies it as well, but he's a Swift Boat Veteran for Truth, which means that the reporters will ignore his account. Now the Kranish story adds the detail that Michael Medeiros (another Kerry supporter) also denies ever being in Cambodia, which would appear to foreclose the possibility that Kerry could have been in Cambodia with PCF-94. This cuts off another one of the ropes that Kerry has been struggling to climb up on this story, and leaves him with one last, slender thread: The Mystery Boat!

VIDEO --

HUGH HEWITT

Meanwhile, James Robbins provides some historical background on Cambodia during the Vietnam war.

And InstaPundit posts this Day by Day panel. Heh.

UPDATE: Patterico has a follow up piece on the Swift Boat vet story and the Los Angeles Times and Brent Bozell takes a look a coverage in Newsweek.

THE 'PURPLE HEART'

VIRGINIA POSTREL

VIKING PUNDIT

I can�t stop chuckling at this line from a Kerry interview with GQ magazine:

The fictional character Kerry most identifies with: "There's a little Huck Finn in me; there's a little Tom Sawyer in me ...�

So which characterization is most apt?

1.) Huck aimless and adrift on a river, with no apparent direction
2.) Tom tricks others into doing work for him
3.) Their proclivity to tell outlandish lies
4.) Huck gets a rich widow to take care of him

'KERRY IN CAMBODIA'

Does this make them old media now?

And speaking of old media, the Boston Globe is now reporting that John Kerry denies that he merely invented the stories he'd told of conducting missions into Cambodia during the Vietnam War. That's right -- the Boston Globe -- bringing you Friday's news today. There's Internet Time and then there's Lumbering Democrat-Supporting Big City Newspaper Time. Quotable:

Kerry said in a 2003 interview that after the Christmas Eve 1968 engagement, he asked his crew to write a caustic telegram to the chief of naval forces in Vietnam, Elmo Zumwalt Jr., to wish him "Merry Christmas from the troops that weren't in Cambodia, which was us. We were."

Meehan, in his statement issued last week, described the incident this way:

"On December 24, 1968, Lieutenant John Kerry and his crew were on patrol in the watery borders between Vietnam and Cambodia deep in enemy territory. In the early afternoon, Kerry's boat, PCF-44, was at Sa Dec and then headed north to the Cambodian border. There, Kerry and his crew along with two other boats were ambushed, taking fire from both sides of the river, and after the firefight were fired upon again. Later that evening during their night patrol they came under friendly fire."

James Wasser, who accompanied Kerry on that mission aboard patrol boat No. 44 and who supports Kerry's candidacy, said that while he believes they were "very, very close" to Cambodia, he did not think they entered Cambodia on that mission. Yet he added: "It is very hard to tell. There are no signs."

Another crewmate who said he was with Kerry on Christmas Eve, Steven Gardner -- who is a member of the veterans group opposing Kerry's candidacy -- said Kerry was 50 miles from Cambodia at the time. He accused Kerry of lying about being in Cambodia or by the border. "Never happened," Gardner said.

Separately, according to Meehan's statement, Kerry crossed into Cambodia on a covert mission to drop off special operations forces. In an interview, Meehan said there was no paperwork for such missions and he could not supply a date. That makes it hard to ascertain or confirm what happened. Kerry served on two swift boats, the No. 44 in December 1968 and January 1969, and the No. 94, from February to March 1969.

Michael Medeiros, who served aboard the No. 94 with Kerry and appeared with him at the Democratic National Convention, vividly recalled an occasion on which Kerry and the crew chased an enemy to the Cambodian border but did not go beyond the border. Yet Medeiros said he could not recall dropping off special forces in Cambodia or going inside Cambodia with Kerry.

UPDATE: Here's something new and interesting. An interview with WinterSoldier writer and SwiftVets.com webmaster Scott Swett.

AMERICA'S 'CAMBODIA MAN'

I did chair, on behalf of the American ambassador, a group known as the "Cambodia Committee," composed of Army, Navy intelligence, CIA and Special Forces representatives. The function of this committee was to supervise authorized cross-border operations � principally insertion of U.S. and Vietnamese Special Forces into the northeastern part of Cambodia and the panhandle of Laos to monitor the Ho Chi Minh Trail ..

Line crossers were not generally used in the populated portions of Cambodia that stretched along the borders of Vietnam's III and IV Corps to the Gulf of Siam because of the concern for the impact on civilians that could enrage Prince Sihanouk, the fiery head of state of Cambodia. Intelligence operatives had great trouble penetrating base areas. Even Cambodian provincial officials were prevented from traveling in their jurisdictions where there were base areas.

I believe, based on the foregoing, that I would have been aware of Navy operations inserting agents into the southern parts of Cambodia.

SWIFT VET AD IS BELIEVABLE

Vietnam veterans opposing John Kerry have scored a hit with a tough TV ad that claims he lied about his war record � it makes swing voters think twice about backing Kerry, an independent study has found ..

The ad planted doubts in the minds of 27 percent of independent voters who planned to vote for Kerry or leaned pro-Kerry. After seeing it, they were no longer sure they'd back him, the study found. The Swift Vets study used 1,275 participants, including 371 independents, who watched ads and registered their reaction at every second using technology normally used to rate product ads. Half viewed the Swift Vets ad and the other half saw a pro-Kerry ad based on his convention speech, which was rated less persuasive.

HCD is also completing a study of a counter-ad by the liberal group MoveOn.org that questions President Bush's military record � it appears far less effective in raising doubts among pro-Bush swing voters.

THE KERRY CAMPAIGN

"Senator Kerry's entire military service record is posted on JohnKerry.com. His entire record," said Michael Meehan, adviser for communications to the campaign ..

Mr. Meehan, acknowledging that Mr. Kerry has not signed Standard Form 180, said the records have all been laid out nonetheless. "Has he signed the form?" he asked. "No. What he's signed is his release of privacy to the United States Navy to turn over his entire military record and he's posted it up on his Web site, so the whole world can see his entire military record."

[Swift vet John] O'Neill, though, said the campaign has acknowledged in the past it that has withheld some records.

"That's a lie or a carefully calculated set of words," he said yesterday in a telephone interview. "He continues to conceal, for example, his medical records. He's provided virtually none of his medical records, only an interpretation of them by a friendly physician."

Mr. O'Neill said the key is Standard Form 180, which, if Mr. Kerry signed it, would let reporters or anyone else write the Defense Department to ask for all of his military records.

"If he executes Standard Form 180, he would no longer be the gatekeeper, the gatekeeper would be the U.S. military."

TRANSCRIPT -

A SWIFT BOAT .. OR A CLOWN CAR?

"On a boat with a Seal, and a Spoke with a hat, and a Green Beret with some guns for anti-coms."

UPDATE: Hugh Hewitt:

Because that statement isn't a direct quote of Kerry, I contacted the reporter, Kevin Whitelaw, this afternoon. Whitelaw still works at U.S. News & World report where he covers foreign affairs and intelligence matters.

Hugh: "Did John Kerry tell you that he ran guns into Cambodia?"

Kevin Whitelaw: "That's exactly what he told me."

Mr. Whitelaw declined my invitation to appear on my radio program, explaining that he doesn't report on or comment on the presidential campaign.

KERRY SEES COMBAT IN CAMBODIA

"Kerry's claims of fighting in Cambodia come under fire"
Scott Canon, Kansas City Star

August 17, 2004

John Kerry's "reporting for duty" salute at the Democratic National Convention last month emphasized the key biographical boast of his campaign -- decorated combat service in Vietnam. Now his repeated claim that he also weathered combat upriver in Cambodia has drawn harsh skepticism -- driven by anti-Kerry veterans who star in a political commercial and book financed by Texas Republicans. Roy Hoffmann, a retired admiral who was a Navy captain in command of Kerry's unit at the time, said the candidate's statements about spending a Christmas Eve in Cambodia can't be true.

"I think he just outright lied," said Hoffman, now aligned with Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and one of the officers criticizing Kerry in the ad. "He never was there." Over the years, Kerry has referred to spending Christmas or Christmas Eve 1968 in Cambodia and coming under fire. At the time, Cambodia was considered a neutral nation presumably off-limits to U.S. troops.

"I remember Christmas of 1968 sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia," Kerry said in 1986 at a Senate committee hearing during a debate on U.S. policy toward Central America. "I remember what it was like to be shot at by the Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge and Cambodians and have the president of the United States telling the American people that I was not there, the troops were not in Cambodia. I have that memory which is seared -- seared -- in me."

A few years earlier, the Massachusetts senator had talked with the Boston Herald about "the absurdity of almost being killed by our own allies in a country in which President Nixon claimed there were no American troops." The Kerry campaign has since said that the presidential candidate's recollection was imprecise -- that his runs into Cambodia came in the early months of 1969. A June 2003 article in the Washington Post quotes Kerry talking about a mildewy and faded green camouflage hat he carries in his black attache.

"My good luck hat," Kerry told the Post. "Given to me by a CIA guy as we went in for a special mission in Cambodia." The book "Unfit for Command," put out by members of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, contends "all the living commanders in Kerry's chain of command ... indicate that Kerry would have been seriously disciplined or court-martialed had he gone" to Cambodia.

Yet the Kerry campaign said it was far from rare for American forces to pursue Viet Cong over the border. "Swift Boat crews regularly operated along the Cambodian border from Ha Tien on the Gulf of Thailand to the rivers of the Mekong south and west of Saigon," said Michael Meehan, a senior adviser in the Kerry campaign. "Boats often received fire from enemy taking sanctuary across the border. Kerry's was not the only United States riverboat to respond, inadvertently or responsibly, across the border." In 1969, Nixon authorized "Operation Breakfast," the secret bombing of Cambodia in an attempt to destroy North Vietnamese base camps and supply routes in that country. In April 1970, Nixon announced that U.S. troops were invading Cambodia.

Douglas Brinkley drew from Kerry's journal in his flattering biography "Tour of Duty." This account has Kerry's swift boat and two smaller patrol boats moving "up the Co Chien River to its junction with the My Tho only miles from the Cambodian border" and then tooling through idyllic canals north of Sa Dec -- a village roughly 50 miles south of Cambodia. On the border The book describes the day's tranquility destroyed by an ambush that seemed to extend beyond a Christmas truce. Having survived that attack, the book said, Kerry and his comrades later had to back off from a South Vietnamese base to avoid friendly fire.

In Meehan's statement on Friday, the campaign said Kerry spent Christmas Eve 1968 in "the watery borders between Vietnam and Cambodia deep in enemy territory. "In the early afternoon," the statement continues, "Kerry's boat, PCF-44, was at Sa Dec and then headed north to the Cambodian border. There, Kerry and his crew along with two other boats were ambushed, taking fire from both sides of the river, and after the firefight were fired upon again. Later that evening, during their night patrol, they came under friendly fire. "Many times he was on or near the Cambodian border and on one occasion crossed into Cambodia at the request of members of a special operations group operating out of Ha Tien" on the Gulf of Thailand, Meehan said in his statement.

Hoffmann said he was leery of Kerry's claim to have ventured into Cambodia in early 1969 to deliver CIA operatives or special forces soldiers. "I was always properly informed. The whole time I was there, I don't recall" such a mission, Hoffman said. The anti-Kerry group, consisting mostly of men who served on other boats in the Mekong Delta, has accused him of cowardice in a battle where he was decorated for pulling a soldier from the river. These veterans, many angry about his later anti-war activities, have also said his Purple Hearts were awarded for superficial or self-inflicted wounds. Kerry's crewmates have come to his defense. Kerry's defenders have dismissed the discussion of when and whether he fought in Cambodia as a ploy to diminish his military honors -- a Silver Star, a Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts. "We're quibbling over these details when a man volunteered for service and earned these honors protecting his fellow comrades in arms," said Michael Golden, spokesman for Kerry's Missouri campaign.

'BAND OF BROTHERS' -- KERRY'S SHAKESPEAREAN MOMENT:

"While their attacks on Kerry are no help to Bush, in my view, the anger the Swift-Boat Veterans express is genuine. Kerry calls his friendly comrades the �band of brothers,� but the allusion to Shakespeare�s Henry V is ironic. Speaking to his fellow warriors before Agincourt, Prince Hal exclaims that:

�gentlemen in England now abed / Shall think themselves accursed they were not here, / And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks / That fought with us upon Saint Crispin�s day.�

LAST NIGHT THE LA TIMES

And BeldarBlog does a righteous fisking here.

Hugh Hewitt: "I didn't expect much from the Los Angeles Times' coverage of Kerry's Kurtz Chronicles. In fact, I didn't expect any coverage at all, So today's full frontal defense of Kerry is sort of a half-win, even though it could have been drafted by Kerry staff."

InstaPundit has spot on commentary and good clips & links here. Hmmm. Wonder if Glenn might be a PrestoPundit reader?

Well, I certainly read him -- more from Roger Simon via InstaPundit. Quotable:

the LA Times has finally lumbered forth like a dinosaur to report on the Kerry/Veterans controversy. Don't expect much. It's a dull and superficial article, more place holding than reporting, which, as Instapundit points out, doesn't even acknowledge that the Kerry campaign has already backtracked on the Senator's peculiar Cambodia claims. Perhaps the Times' reporters weren't aware of this, but more likely I have the wrong "animal analogy." The Times is not a dinosaur or a mammoth, but a camel... as in a camel is a horse designed by a committee ... because this article, which emphasizes the Swift Veterans ad even though a full foot-noted book is available, reads as if it were rewritten and hacked over by a group of editors until all the life was beaten out of it.

THE LOS ANGELES TIMES

"An ad calls Kerry a liar. His Vietnam crew sees a hero. Memories, and agendas, are in conflict." By Maria L. La Ganga and Stephen Braun, Times Staff Writers.

11:03 PM PDT, August 16, 2004

A television ad that has aired in three key battleground states and a new book have created a political furor over John F. Kerry's Vietnam War record, calling into question his character, credibility and a central tenet of his campaign � that his combat experience helps qualify him to be president. The ad, the book and the people behind them have become staples of conservative talk shows and Internet sites. The claims � that Kerry lied about his war experiences, didn't deserve his medals and betrayed soldiers everywhere by protesting the war after serving in it � also have been recited in the mainstream media, along with denials of the allegations ..

The anti-Kerry ad begins with footage of Sen. John Edwards, Kerry's running mate, saying, "If you have any question about what John Kerry's made of, just spend three minutes with the men who served with him 30 years ago." Then eight words appear on the screen � "Here's what those men think about John Kerry" � and the allegations begin. They include comments such as: "John Kerry betrayed the men and women he served with in Vietnam," and "He lacks the capacity to lead." Many in the Swift boat group seem to be motivated as much by anger about Kerry's protest activities as they are about his actions in combat. In their affidavits, several write about Kerry's testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as a leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. In his April 1971 statement to the Senate panel, Kerry cited Vietnam atrocities that had been alleged by his group of antiwar veterans. And in blunt rhetoric, he questioned government policy that widened the toll among soldiers and civilians: "We learned the meaning of free-fire zones, shooting anything that moves, and we watched while America placed cheapness on the lives of Orientals." In the anti-Kerry ad, former Navy Lt. Cmdr. George Elliott, one of Kerry's immediate commanders, says: "John Kerry has not been honest about what happened in Vietnam."

In his affidavit, Elliott said that when Kerry returned from Vietnam, he was "comparing his other commanders and me to Lt. Calley of My Lai, comparing the American armed forces to the army of Genghis Khan, and making similar misstatements." Joe Ponder, a Swift boat crewman who did not serve on either of Kerry's two boats, says in the ad that Kerry "dishonored his country." In his affidavit, Ponder says he was badly wounded in an ambush in Vietnam. But "the greatest wounds I have ever suffered were from John F. Kerry who dishonored my country, my honor, and my friends by falsely charging the United States Army Forces with war crimes, claiming that all of us, living and dead, were war criminals." While these are powerful statements, they are not entirely accurate. In his Senate testimony, Kerry did liken some American actions to Genghis Khan. But he did not mention Elliott by name, nor did he mention his Navy superiors. And he did not claim that every soldier was a war criminal. Rather, he cited atrocities described by veterans who opposed the war. Kerry has acknowledged that, at times, he used a poor choice of words as a young man protesting the war, but he has continued to insist that atrocities were committed. During the war, Elliott gave Kerry high marks in fitness reports and recommended Kerry both for the Silver Star and the Bronze Star. "John was one of 50 young officers who performed extremely well," Elliott said in an interview in May. "I wrote his fitness report, and I stand by that." But in his affidavit, Elliott backed away from the Silver Star nomination he wrote for Kerry in 1969. Kerry won the award for chasing down and killing a wounded Viet Cong guerrilla who had confronted his boat with a grenade launcher.

In his affidavit, Elliott questioned Kerry's actions, suggesting he might have shot the guerrilla in the back. Elliott was not present during the action, and there have been no credible eyewitness accounts affirming his version. Kerry's Swift boat mates have long insisted that Kerry's action was appropriate and saved their lives. A day after the ad appeared, Elliott said in an interview with the Boston Globe that he regretted signing the affidavit and that he believed Kerry still deserved the Silver Star. Then he issued a second affidavit standing by his first sworn statement, saying he had been misquoted by the Globe. But in his second affidavit, Elliott also admitted, "I do not claim to have personal knowledge as to how Kerry shot the wounded, fleeing Viet Cong."

There are three other allegations raised by the anti-Kerry group � questioning his first Purple Heart, his Bronze Star and a Christmas Eve mission to the Cambodian border.

The awarding of Kerry's first Purple Heart has been challenged by a former surgeon at the Navy base at Cam Ranh Bay. "I know John Kerry is lying about his first Purple Heart because I treated him for that injury," Dr. Louis Letson said in the television ad.

In a Times interview in May, the retired Alabama doctor said he recalled administering treatment to Kerry for a flesh wound incurred Dec. 2, 1968. Kerry had been on a mission in a "skimmer" boat north of Cam Ranh Bay. Noticing Viet Cong on a beach, Kerry fired on the guerrillas. Two crewmates, Bill Zaladonis and Pat Runyon, have confirmed that they also fired on the fleeing guerrillas. That same night, Jim Wasser, who was stationed on a boat near Kerry's and who would later serve on Kerry's Swift boat, heard a radio report from Kerry's boat that "someone had a slight wound." The next morning, according to Letson, Kerry showed up at the Cam Ranh Bay medical unit, asking for treatment. Letson said the wound was slight and that he removed a tiny shard of shrapnel with tweezers. He said Kerry reported being in a firefight with Viet Cong guerrillas.

But later, Letson said, he learned from some medical corpsmen that other crewmen had confided that there was no exchange of fire, and that Kerry had accidentally wounded himself as he fired at the guerrillas. Letson said he didn't know if the crewmen giving this account were in the boat with Kerry, or on other boats. These crewmen "were just talking to my guys," Letson said. "We weren't prying into it. There was not a firefight � that's what the guys related. They didn't remember any firing from shore. It's Kerry who made the issue of him being a war hero. That opens it up for some question." In a June interview, Kerry described taking fire from the guerrillas but was unsure whether he was wounded by others or by himself. "I didn't see where it came from," he said.

The Kerry campaign has questioned Letson's role, noting that a medical account detailing Kerry's treatment is signed by a "J. Carreon" � not Letson. But Letson insists he was the one who treated Kerry. Carreon was a Filipino corpsman, a "Hospitalman First Class," not a doctor, Letson said, and routinely made entries on his behalf.

Kerry won the Purple Heart for the wound, but Letson says he did not deserve it because it was too slight and reportedly self-inflicted. Letson conceded in The Times interview that he made no effort back then to officially question Kerry's account. Navy rules during the Vietnam War governing Purple Hearts did not take into account a wound's severity � and specified only that injuries had to be suffered "in action against an enemy."

Self-inflicted wounds were awarded if incurred "in the heat of battle, and not involving gross negligence." Kerry's critics insist his wound would not have qualified, but former Navy officials who worked in the service's awards branch at the time said such awards were routine.

A Times review of Navy injury reports and awards from that period in Kerry's Swift boat unit shows that many other Swift boat personnel won Purple Hearts for slight wounds of uncertain origin.

When Kerry reported the injury to his commander, Lt. Cmdr. Grant Hibbard, he only asked Hibbard to file an injury report, Kerry told The Times. In a Swift Boat Veterans for Truth affidavit, Hibbard said Kerry came into his office "to apply for a Purple Heart," but that he turned down Kerry's "Purple Heart request." He said he was "shocked to later learn that [Kerry] subsequently received an undeserved Purple Heart for his wound."

But in a conflicting interview earlier this summer, Hibbard said Kerry did not directly ask for the medal, but a medical report. (The report would have been automatically forwarded to Navy administrators in Saigon who oversaw Purple Heart awards.) Hibbard said he believed the wound was too minor to warrant a report but that later he "took some heat" from military superiors for refusing to write it up.

Kerry acknowledged to The Times that he later asked about the Purple Heart. He said he "asked a guy where it was or something," but could not recall whom he pressed for the award.

The decoration was approved by Navy administrators in Saigon before he left Vietnam in March 1969.

The second specific allegation was made by Van Odell, who served as gunner on PCF-23, one of the boats involved in the incident that earned Kerry the Bronze Star. "John Kerry lied to get his Bronze Star. I know. I was there," Odell says in the ad.

Kerry received the Bronze Star for rescuing Army Lt. Jim Rassmann, a Green Beret who had been knocked off of Kerry's Swift boat March 13, 1969, when a mine exploded nearby, disabling another craft. Kerry also received a Purple Heart for being injured in the process. In one of the defining moments of the Democratic primary season, Rassmann, who is a Republican, reunited with the candidate in an emotional meeting. He talked about Kerry's bravery and his gratitude. Since then, he has campaigned for him regularly. Kerry's website gives a brief account of the rescue and then quotes the Bronze Star citation signed by Vice Adm. Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr., then the Navy's top commander in Vietnam: "Lt. Kerry directed his gunners to provide suppressing fire, while from an exposed position on the bow, his arm bleeding and in pain, with disregard for his personal safety, he pulled the man aboard. Lt. Kerry's calmness, professionalism and great personal courage under fire were in keeping with the highest traditions of the U.S. naval service."

Rassmann, in a Times interview, said Kerry and several of his crew were on shore as Rassmann and his unit took small arms fire from Viet Cong guerrillas. The U.S. troops then moved to destroy a cache of contraband rice they suspected was being used to supply the enemy. Kerry and Rassmann hurled grenades at the contraband, and from the resulting explosion, they were hit with shrapnel, including some that lodged in Kerry's buttocks.

Later that day, Rassmann recalled, he was sitting on the side of Kerry's Swift boat eating a chocolate chip cookie just as PCF-94 was heading out of the Bay Hap River toward the Gulf of Siam. One mine went off underwater, and then a second. Rassmann fell overboard, he recounted, "and John got thrown off the bulkhead. I went to the bottom, dumped my gear, and when I came up the boats were gone. The VC are shooting at me."

Then, Rassmann said, he saw a boat coming to the rescue. From the edge of the Swift boat, the wounded Kerry "kneeled down and grabbed my arm and pulled me over. Neither of us said a word. I grabbed an M-16 and fired back. I burned the barrel out. We finally got out of this kill zone."

There are discrepancies in the official stories and documentation about the incident.

The Bronze Star citation describes Kerry's arm as bleeding, as do two biographies, "Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War" by Douglas Brinkley and "John F. Kerry, The Complete Biography By The Boston Globe Reporters Who Know Him Best." But the official March 13 Navy report of Kerry's injuries said that "Lt. Kerry suffered shrapnel wounds in his left buttocks and contusions on his right forearm when a mine detonated close aboard PCF-94."

His wounds also earned him his third Purple Heart and allowed him to leave Vietnam early � in late March 1969 � after four months of a yearlong tour.

Several others, who are now members of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, were on nearby boats on the Bay Hap River during the incident. They say that there was no hostile gunfire when Kerry pulled Rassmann out of the water and that one of their own, Jack Chenoweth, was already speeding to Rassmann's aid. "I'm here to tell you there was no fire from either bank. The only incident was the mine, detonated under the ... boat," Chenoweth said in an interview. The Swift Boat group members critical of Kerry said that he wrote the after-action reports that led to his getting the Bronze Star. They said they saw no blood on his arm as described in the citation for the Bronze Star. And they argue that the buttock wound that that led to the Purple Heart was caused by his own grenade. They also say they did not complain 35 years ago because they did not see the reports until Kerry posted them online. But the anti-Kerry faction not definitively proved that Kerry was the sole source of the Bronze Star battle account. And according to Elliott, Kerry's immediate commander, Swift boat officers involved in battles normally were involved in drafting the after-action report � which in this case described repeated fire from small arms and automatic weapons.

Rassmann, whose life was saved, stands by Kerry. "Their new charges are false; their stories are fabricated, made up by people who did not serve with Kerry in Vietnam," he wrote in a commentary last Wednesday in the Wall Street Journal. "They insult and defame all of us who served in Vietnam." A third and new allegation surfaced last week as part of the publicity campaign for O'Neill's new book.

O'Neill and several members of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth allege that in statements to Congress and in press accounts, Kerry lied in claiming that on Christmas Eve 1968, his Swift boat � PCF-44 � sailed into a Cambodian river. Cambodia was supposed to be off limits to the U.S. military because it was not an official combatant. However, U.S. troops made secret incursions into the country to stem Viet Cong operations and supply lines.

"I remember Christmas of 1968 sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia," Kerry said in a March 1986 Senate speech. "I remember what it was like to be shot at by the Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge and Cambodians."

At other times, Kerry has said he was near � but not in � Cambodia.

In a Times interview last June, Kerry said: "I celebrated Christmas Eve on the border of Cambodia." And he added that on a later mission, "I went into Cambodia with the CIA."

Kerry's critics have seized on his varying recollections to impugn his credibility and suggest he has embellished his war record. Steven Gardner, the only member of Kerry's former crews to join Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and actively campaign against Kerry, has told some reporters that PCF-44 was 50 miles away from Cambodia that Christmas Eve. But two of Kerry's crewmates � Wasser and Zaladonis � both told the Times the boat was in the vicinity of the Cambodian border and even fought an engagement with a Viet Cong sampan on Christmas Eve day.

"We patrolled a river on the border," Zaladonis said last week. "Unless I'm out of my mind or mistaken, that river was part of the border." There are no after-action reports that pinpoint where Kerry's boat was in late December 1968. But a file from Navy archives in Washington obtained by The Times, provides support for both sides.[sic]

An entry in a monthly summary of engagements for December 1968 reports that on Christmas Eve, "PCF-44 fired on junk on beach. Results; 1 sampan destroyed." The entry was made by then-Capt. Roy Hoffmann, the overall commander of Swift boats and now one of Kerry's most vocal critics. There is no written location for the engagement, but it contains a coordinate used by the military to plot locations. The coordinate points to an area about 40 to 50 miles south of the Cambodian border, near an island called Sa Dec.

The entry also notes that the incident took place at around 7 a.m., which would have given Kerry's boat another 12 hours to make it to the Cambodian border by nightfall. At a cruising speed of 23 knots, the boat could have covered the distance in about two hours. This would be consistent with the contention of Kerry spokesman Michael Meehan that Kerry was in Sa Dec, but reached the Cambodian border later the same day.

Since the anti-Kerry ad first surfaced, Kerry's crewmates have fanned out in his defense. Along with Rassmann, crewmates Del Sandusky, leading petty officer with Kerry on PCF-94, and Gene Thorson decried the allegations as politically inspired "garbage." Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a Vietnam veteran who has endorsed Bush, called the ad "dishonest and dishonorable." He said that, "none of these individuals served on the boat [Kerry] commanded," adding that he believes, "John Kerry served honorably in Vietnam." In a lengthy interview between the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth's first news conference in May and the controversy last week, Kerry called the group's allegations pure "politics." "Some of them don't like the fact that I opposed the war, and 35 years later some people still want to argue about that," Kerry said in the June interview. "It's way beyond me, can I tell you? It's so far beyond and past now. I feel sad about it." He said he respects the service all Swift boat crews gave to their country and lauds their courage. "So I'm at peace with myself, and I'm sorry they feel the way they do," Kerry said, "because I respect them. I really do."

UPDATE: The LA Times story is gets unspun here, here, here, and here.

LIMO LEFTIES FOR KERRY

(And I still want to know what lefty got to re-spin the left in America as any other color than RED. The left is RED in France and ever other country on the globe. Must have been the same guy who decided to call lefties "liberals", contrary to American and European political history, standard English and the speech practices of the rest of the world.)

UPDATE: Make that Gulfstream Lefties. Quotable:

Then there's .. the rich environmentalist who flies in a private jet to Sierra Club fund-raisers. A midsize Gulfstream 200 uses from 1,200 to 1,500 gallons of fuel for a cross-country flight, so if it holds four people, giving them the chance to stretch out on the leather sofas, each person would use about 350 gallons of fuel .. It's also nearly the equivalent of driving a Hummer cross country, twice.

[Lefty contributor Ed] Burkle's 767, if it carries eight people across the continent, would each use 1,000 gallons of fuel, enough for eight Hummer trips from southern Brazil to Dearborn, Mich.

"KERRY

LOTS OF TRANSCRIPTS --

UPDATE: Regular correspondent Bill Modahl reports on last night's "Scarborough Country":

It was an absolutely devastating job by O�Neil tonight on MSNBC�s Scarborough Country. Scarborough raised the 3 Purple Hearts, the Silver Star, and the Bronze Star one by one, O�Neil summarized the contradictions to the awards citations, the absence of certain essential documentation, i.e., witness statements re the Silver Star, and contradictory statements by Kerry in Brinkley�s Tour. Hurley was reduced to nasty remarks about the Swift Boat vets, and to simply reading from the official statements supporting the awards, which O�Neil pointed out were based only on Kerry�s own false representations. He didn�t rush ashore against �numerical superiority� on February 28, there were a bunch of Swift Boats with troops aboard and a lone wounded fleeing kid, who Kerry shot in the back � not the stuff of Silver Stars, and completely contrary to the citation. All boats did not flee the scene on March 13, there was not 5000 yards of hostile fire on the banks, there was no return fire, and only Kerry fled. O�Neil cited and named his witnesses to the above. Kerry�s shrapnel wound in the buttocks was from that morning, not from the encounter, as shown by his own words in Tour (pages cited). His arm �wound� was a minor contusion, i.e., bruise, which was treated with�.a cold washcloth. Damage to Kerry�s 94 boat (blown out windows) was actually from the day before, not the 13th March, as shown in Tour (pages cited).

O�Neil finished by saying Kerry was caught, it was over. Stunning.

TRANSCRIPT --

BREAKING

Apparently, the latest version of Kerry's Cambodia Chronicles includes the insertion of Navy SEALs by Swift boat into Cambodia in the early part of 1969. Well, I am a former Navy SEAL that served in the 1990s, my father in law is a former SEAL and he served in the Mekong Delta in Vietnam in 1970. I spoke with him about the likelihood that this story could be correct. My contention was that Swift boats were too large to be routinely used as an insertion platform for SEALs. SEALs typically used the Medium SEAL Support Craft (MSSC) or the LSSC. My dad's platoon, had one of each assigned. These boats were designed by SEALs and specially built for the Teams to use on clandestine riverine insertions at night of usually no more than 8 operators. Swift boats operated in groups as independent entities, and not as insertion/extraction platforms for small units. Jim Rassman's ODA was probably on there because SF A teams don't have organic boat assets and were using the Swifties because they had no other means of getting where they needed to go. Also, it is my understanding that the engagement with Kerry getting the Bronze Star took place during the day, which leads me to believe the insertion mission was either a large infantry force led by the SF guys, or a civic action type mission for which SF is well known. Waterborne infiltrations done illegally into a "neutral" country if performed would be done by small groups of operators (less than 8), at night, in a small tributary, by a boat with a very shallow draft and jacuzzi, not propeller drive. To do otherwise, would be ridiculous. SEALs also did not trust anyone outside of their immediate peer group. They developed their own intel by snatching high ranking VC out of their beds in the middle of the night. They did not share this info outside the platoon, boat guys, and Seawolves helo crews (close fire support assets). They learned early on that passing intel up the chain was a sure way to be compromised on future operations. In order to get permission to conduct an illegal incursion into Cambodia by Swift boat the following must occur: 1. Extremely fresh intel of a high value target (think U.S. POW, or VC chieftain). 2. Take that intel outside the group and up to intel at a higher level (risking compromise) in order to obtain boat support from the Swifties to go into Cambodia. That is extremely unlikely to the point of absurdity. Furthermore, neither myself or my father in law knows anyone who was inserted anywhere by a Swift boat during Vietnam. It just wasn't done. It wasn't something SEALs wanted, and it wasn't something Swifties did. Bottom Line......Kerry is a liar.

UPDATE: Citizen Smash meets Hugh Hewitt in the flesh and gets a rousing round of applause from a crowd of Smash fans. The story is here. Smash to Hugh: "To be honest, I almost hope that some CIA agent pops up and lays claim to the hat."

UNFIT FOR COMMAND

During the panel segment on the August 15 Fox News Sunday, [newsman Britt] Hume asserted:

"The book, Unfit for Command, is a remarkably well-done document. It is full of detail. It is full of specifics. The charges that are being made of Kerry, of irresponsible and indeed in some cases mendacious conduct in his service in Vietnam, are made by people who were there. They're making the charges in their own names. There's not a lot of, this isn't a bunch of anonymous people whispering things. It's all out there in the open. The book is full of footnotes. It has an appendix. It's a pretty serious piece of work.

"It is entitled to at least as much attention -- and the charges are entitled to at least as much attention -- as was given the charge that President Bush went either 'AWOL,' Terry McAuliffe's words, or 'deserted,' those were Michael Moore's words -- that triggered a firestorm and a huge feeding frenzy-"

Host Chris Wallace: "Don't you think it's getting equal attention?"

Hume: "No, it's not. It's getting some -- the author and those with a different viewpoint are getting, although the editor, really, are getting on some talk shows. We at Fox News followed up aggressively one of the accusations -- that's the one regarding Cambodia, which checked out, and Kerry's version has now had to be, has had to be basically retracted. So I think it's entitled to at least as serious attention-"

Hume got cut off at that point and after an ad break Juan Williams argued that the vets have been debunked, a contention disputed by Hume.

MORE JOHN KERRY WAR STORIES --

When I was serving on a swiftboat in Vietnam, my crewmates and I had a dog we called VC. We all took care of him, and he stayed with us and loved riding on the swiftboat deck. I think he provided all of us with a link to home and a few moments of peace and tranquility during a dangerous time. One day as our swiftboat was heading up a river, a mine exploded hard under our boat. After picking ourselves up, we discovered VC was MIA. Several minutes of frantic search followed after which we thought we'd lost him. We were relieved when another boat called asking if we were missing a dog. It turns out VC was catapulted from the deck of our boat and landed confused, but unhurt, on the deck of another boat in our patrol.

(Thanks to reader Bill Modahl for the tip.)

MICHAEL BARONE

Also: Robert Novak, Jim Wooten, and Pat Buchanan. Also Mona Charen.

See as well Thomas Lipscomb in the American Spectator.

UPDATE: Now also Joan Vennochi and David Limbaugh.

STEPHEN KOFF

[Dr. Louis] Letson says he treated Kerry for the wound. However, medical records provided by the Kerry campaign list another officer, not Letson.

Unmentioned in Kerry's Tour Of Duty version are the actual surrounding facts. Kerry, Lieutenant William Schachte, USN, and an enlisted man were on the whaler. Seeing movement from an unknown source, the sailors opened fire on the movement. There was no hostile fire. When Kerry's rifle jammed, he picked up an M-79 grenade launcher and fired a grenade at a nearby object. This sprayed the boat with shrapnel from Kerry's own grenade, a tiny piece of which embedded in Kerry's arm. Kerry managed to keep the tiny fragment embedded until he saw Dr. Louis Letson. Dr. Letson's affidavit is attached as Exhibit 5. When Letson inquired why Kerry was there, Kerry said that he had been wounded by hostile fire. The accompanying crewmen indicated that Kerry was the new "JFK" and that he had actually wounded himself with an M-79. Letson removed the tiny fragment with tweezers and placed a band aid over the tiny scratch. The tiny fragment removed by Letson appeared to be an M-79 fragment, as described by the personnel accompanying Kerry. The next morning Kerry showed up at Division Commander Grant Hibbard's office. Hibbard had already spoken to Schachte and conducted an investigation. Hibbard's affidavit is attached as Exhibit 11. Hibbard's investigation revealed that Kerry's "rose thorn" scratch had been self-inflicted in the absence of hostile fire. Hibbard, therefore, booted Kerry out of his office and denied the Purple Heart. Some three months later, cf. Exhibit 22, after all personnel actually familiar with the events of December 2, 1969 had left Vietnam, Kerry somehow managed to obtain a Purple Heart for the December 2, 1968 event from an officer with no connection to Coastal Division 14 or knowledge of the December 2, 1968 event or of Commander Hibbard's prior turn down of the Purple Heart request. All normal documentation supporting a Purple Heart is missing. There is absolutely no casualty report (i.e., spot report) or hostile fire report or after-action report in the Navy's files to support this "Purple Heart" because there was no casualty, hostile fire, or action on which to report. The sole document relied upon by Kerry is a record showing the band aid and tweezers treatment by Dr. Letson recorded by deceased corpsman, Jess Carreon.

The Fourth Estate -- America's most incompetent branch of government.

UPDATE: See also this.

AN INTERVIEW

ACCORDING TO VIETNAM VET DON BLANKENSHIP

Click on the link and scroll down for a picture.

SWIFT VET JOHN O'NEILL

KERRYHATERS

AMERICA HAS TWO

John Kerry volunteered for service in Vietnam. John Kerry was wounded in Vietnam. And a number of the men with whom John Kerry served testify to acts of courage on his part. This much seems beyond question, and I see no reason to weigh in on the factual disputes surrounding Mr. Kerry's medals ..

But Americans have never accepted that a record of service, however honorable, should forever entitle a man to deference on matters of war and peace. (Ask George McGovern.) And the political uses to which Mr. Kerry would later put his Vietnam experience are certainly fair game for criticism. Which brings up Mr. Kerry's claim -- repeated in at least three different decades, and on the floor of the Senate -- that he spent Christmas Eve of 1968 not in Vietnam but in Cambodia. He obviously considered it a point of some significance, since he used it to impugn the integrity of those who waged the Vietnam War ..

In 1986 Mr. Kerry argued on the Senate floor against U.S. support for the Nicaraguan contras, again citing the 1968 Christmas in Cambodia and "the president of the United States telling the American people I was not there; the troops were not in Cambodia. I have that memory which is seared--seared--in me." .. Trouble is, the person who appears to have been wrong here about Mr. Kerry's location was .. Mr. Kerry himself. His commanding officers all testify to this fact, as do men who were on his boat at the time. And so now, reluctantly, does the Kerry campaign.

Last Wednesday Kerry spokesman Michael Meehan sent me a statement saying that "During John Kerry's service in Vietnam, many times he was on or near the Cambodian border and on one occasion crossed into Cambodia. . . . On December 24, 1968 Lieutenant John Kerry and his crew were on patrol in the watery borders between Vietnam and Cambodia deep in enemy territory." I asked for clarification as to whether the "one occasion" was Christmas Eve 1968. "No," was the reply ..

Mr. Kerry's own journal, as cited in Douglas Brinkley's biography, records him being 50-some miles from the border at Sa Dec on that day contemplating visions of "sugar plums."

Does this matter? Well, if President Bush was found to be using tall tales from his National Guard days to justify his policies in the war on terror it would certainly attract some attention. So the would-be commander in chief can hardly complain of being subject to scrutiny, especially since he's joined in criticism of Mr. Bush's war record and made his own a campaign centerpiece ..

So far the veteran whose testimony is doing John Kerry the most damage is . . . John Kerry.

KERRY CLAIMED

TOMORROW'S NEWS TODAY

Here's another.

HUGH HEWITT

I did not want to end up missing obvious corroborating sources for Kerry's assertions and Brinkley's account, and I figured Atrios was just incompetent --there had to be some independent cover for Kerry's story, right? He wouldn't just make up cross border exploits full of SEALs, Green Berets and hatless CIA-men without some pretty good smoke to cover his exaggerations --like easily available evidence of many such missions being undertaken by other swift boats in early 1969, would he? That would be way too weird to have been missed even by a supine press crowd.

Still, the Stolen Valor syndrome is pretty widespread, and a lot of people have exaggerated their war time exploits, there is certainly a motive for Kerry to have done so, and now we know he already did so with regards to his Christmas Eve narrative. So, what does a few hours of research tell me about swift boats and the "ferrying" of SEALs, Green Berets, and CIA-men (hatless) into Cambodia? Only that there is nothing there to be found.

THE KERRY CAMPAIGN

"In the early afternoon," the statement continues, "Kerry's boat, PCF-44, was at Sa Dec and then headed north to the Cambodian border. There, Kerry and his crew along with two other boats were ambushed, taking fire from both sides of the river, and after the firefight were fired upon again. Later that evening, during their night patrol, they came under friendly fire. Many times he was on or near the Cambodian border and on one occasion crossed into Cambodia at the request of members of a special operations group operating out of Ha Tien" on the Gulf of Thailand, Meehan said in his statement.

[Kerry's commanding officer Roy] Hoffmann said he was leery of Kerry's claim to have ventured into Cambodia in early 1969 to deliver CIA operatives or special forces soldiers.

"I was always properly informed. The whole time I was there, I don't recall" such a mission, Hoffman said.

UPDATE: Here is the Swift Boat base at Ha Tien as it appeared during the Vietnam war. The page includes pictures and a map. This is part of the "SEALORDS" section of the PCF45 site I mentioned the other day. Quotable:

Ha Tien was perhaps the first forward location to be utilized as a base for supporting Swift Boat operations aimed at interdiction in the South Vietnam rivers close to the Cambodian border. It was, however, originally set up as a very temporary stopping point for crew rest by Swifts on Operation Market Time patrols in the Gulf of Siam away from the primary base at An Thoi.

On October 14 1968, shortly after Admiral Zumwalt conceived of SEALORDS, Swift Boat OinC Mike Bernique was informed by local Vietnamese at Ha Tien that the VC had set up a tax collection site a few miles up the Giang Thanh River from Ha Tien.

Even though it was strictly forbidden by the Rules of Engagement for Swift Boats to operate that far up the rivers, Mike proceeded to follow up on this lead and investigated. He discovered the tax collection site and a fire fight ensued. This resulted in five enemy KIA's and the collection of weapons, ammunition, supplies and documents left behind by the fleeing communists.

Mike was called to Saigon to explain his unauthorized conduct and to answer a diplomatic protest by Cambodian Prince Sihanouk that he had fired across the border into that supposed neutral country. Facing possible disiplinary actions, he answered Admiral Zumwalt's questions with an emphatic "Tell Sihanouk he's a lying SOB."

The Admiral declared that Bernique was exactly the kind of aggressive skipper he was looking for and awarded him a Silver Star instead of a general court marshal.

From that point forward, the Giang Thanh became known as "Bernique's Creek" Eventually, patrols were augmented throughout the length of the Giang Thanh River and extended from its northeastern head along the Vinh Te Canal to the east all the way to the western bank of the Bassac river. Interdiction operations included not only Swift Boats, but also PBRs (Patrol Boat River) and units of the Navy's Mobile Riverine Force.

The only people who won't know about this story are those get all their news from the NY Times and the WaPo. But who watches Dan Rather anyway?

UPDATE III: The Boston Herald runs with the Kerry in Cambodia story. Worth noting:

[Swift Boat vet John] O'Neill said all ``the living commanders in Kerry's chain of command'' deny Kerry was ever ordered to Cambodia.

UPDATE V: More on press coverage of "Kerry in Cambodia" at Powerline and Captain's Quarters.

UPDATE VI: Betsy's Page posts this remarkable letter from "the "Reader's Representative" of the Kansas City Star:

Some of you think the paper isn't doing its job of covering Sen. John Kerry and the controversy surrounding his military record.

Last week, readers called and wrote in, saying The Star hasn't covered critics' assertions that:

1) Kerry's claim of being in Cambodia on Christmas of 1968 was a lie; and that

2) One of the swift boat veterans says he was misquoted by the Boston Globe, and is still fully behind the anti-Kerry movement.

True, The Star hadn't published either of these news items as of Friday. By Friday afternoon however, the paper corrected itself and assigned a reporter to write the story. It ran Saturday.

Why the delay? The answer has to do with credibility. The Star had been waiting for credible sources to move stories over the news wire, which is how most of the news about national politics gets in the paper. When these sources were slow to act, editors felt they had to.

Star editors point out that last week they asked national news wires to provide stories about statements from Kerry and the swift boat veterans. �We are sensitive to the need to address this,� said Darryl Levings, national editor at The Star.

The only criticism here might be that editors waited too long to act. How long is too long? It's a difficult question to answer, and the fact that editors recognized the need for the story and assigned the task is laudable. Readers should also be praised for voicing concerns about the lack of a story.

The Star subscribes to several news wire services � the aforementioned credible sources � including Knight Ridder (The Star's parent company), The Associated Press, and the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and The Washington Post wire services.

On Friday, a Google News search turned up dozens of references to the Kerry stories. Many of them were on fringe news and personal Internet pages, sites that The Star and other mainstream media don't recognize as credible by themselves. Such news must be verified, preferably with two independent sources. That doesn't always happen on Internet sites, talk radio and cable TV news shows � even though such electronic media often are far ahead of other traditional news media in reporting controversy.

Sometimes the early reports do get it right. When that happens, traditional news media look like slowpokes. As with other celebrity and political news stories, electronic media frequently move faster than print news does. That's because they don't always have the system of checks and balances newspapers require.

UPDATE VII: Jim Geraghty:

"Between the Brinkley book and the O�Neill book, the American public has been given two completely contradictory portraits of Kerry�s four months in Vietnam. The voters deserve to know which one is right."

KERRY'S LUCKY CIA HAT.

"My good luck hat," Kerry said, happy to see it. "Given to me by a CIA guy as we went in for a special mission in Cambodia."

REAR ADM. ROY HOFFMAN

"[John] Kerry called Hoffman in May and offered to expunge the negative comments about him when "Tour of Duty" [by Douglas Brinkley] came out in paperback form."

JOHN KERRY REVIEWS

THERE WON'T BE

"WHAT IF

DID SILVER STAR "EYEWITNESS" DAVID ALSTON

More in David Alston and inconsistencies in his story here.

There is a more complete Kerry timeline here with a complete cast of characters. (Thanks to reader Bill Modahl.)

Bryron York has much more on Alston and his -- 7 days? -- of service with John Kerry. Quotable:

[John] Hurley [of the Kerry campaign] confirmed that Alston was not on board PCF-94 on February 28, 1969, the day Kerry earned a Silver Star for an engagement in which he beached his Swift Boat and chased down and killed a Viet Cong guerilla armed with a rocket launcher ..

According to Hurley, Alston was on board PCF-94 during the now-famous March 13, 1969 engagement in which Kerry pulled Army Green Beret Jim Rassman from the water after one of the boats in Kerry's group struck a mine. Kerry won a Bronze Star for that action, as well as a third Purple Heart.

Powerline has new analysis here.

UPDATE II: The Bandit, a frequent poster on the Swift Vet discussion board, challenges the newest account Alston have given Byron York of his still to be confirmed service with John Kerry.

KERRY IN CAMBODIA

The NY Times, the LA Times and the WaPo simply refuse to cover it.

MARK STEYN

Here's the real reason Lt. Kerry wasn't spending Dec. 24, 1968, on a secret mission in Cambodia: On the previous day, Dec. 23, the U.S. government finally secured the release, after a five-month diplomatic stand-off, of 11 Americans whose U.S. Army utility landing craft had made a navigational error and strayed into Cambodian waters. Prince Sihanouk had rejected U.S. apologies and threatened to try the men under Cambodian law. It's unlikely, 24 hours after their release, anyone in Washington was thinking, ''Hey, we need to send that hotshot Kerry in there.''

So what are we to make of Sen. Kerry's self-seared 30-year-old false memory of Christmas in Cambodia with its vast accumulation of precise details? Of being shot at by the Khmer Rouge (unlikely in 1968) and of South Vietnamese troops drunkenly celebrating Christmas (as only devout Buddhists know how)?

It's not about dates and places. For Kerry, his Yuletide mission was an epiphany: the moment when he realized his government was lying to the people about what was going on. This is the turning point, the moment that set the young Kerry on the path from brave young war volunteer to fierce anti-war activist.

And it turns out it's total bunk.

Thirty-five years on, having no appealing campaign themes, the senator decides to run for president on his biography. But for the last 20 years he's been a legislative non-entity. Before that, he was accusing his brave band of brothers of mutilation, rape and torture. He spent his early life at Swiss finishing school and his later life living off his wife's inheritance from her first husband. So, biography-wise, that leaves four months in Vietnam, which he talks about non-stop. That 1986 Senate speech is typical: It was supposed to be about Reagan policy in Central America, but like so many Kerry speeches and interviews somehow it winds up with yet another self-aggrandizing trip down memory lane.

A handful of Kerry's ''band of brothers'' are traveling around with his campaign. Most of the rest, including a majority of his fellow swift boat commanders and 254 swiftees from Kerry's Coastal Squadron One, are opposed to his candidacy. That is an amazing ratio and, if snot-nosed American media grandees don't think there's a story there, maybe they ought to consider another line of work.

THE KERRY IN CAMBODIA WORLD TOUR

When presidential candidate John Kerry virtually ignores 20 years in the U.S. Senate to make four months in Vietnam the centerpiece of his campaign, the men who served with him have a right to a fair hearing. The Kerry campaign and much of the mainstream media have been dismissive of the swift-boat veterans who oppose his candidacy. Even before exploring the substance of their charges, the group is dismissed as right-wing financed Bush puppets. The truth is, however, that while swift-boat veterans opposing Kerry undoubtedly have a political agenda -- they think him "Unfit for Command" of the armed forces, the title of a book published last week -- their opposition would have coalesced regardless. In most respects, the 250 men who are part of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (www.swiftvets.com), and the dozen former crew members of Kerry's boat who support him, are the only Americans positioned to comment authoritatively on his actions during those four months. Houston lawyer John O'Neill, one of the authors of the book, followed Kerry as commander of the swift boat PCF 94. Others were in Kerry's chain of command, in administrative positions or on other swift boats. The boats usually operated in groups of two to six. As such, other commanders would have been in a position to judge Kerry's performance. Only one of 21 living commanders in his swift-boat division supports his candidacy. The period is fair game, not only because he and his running mate invited it but also because there are legitimate reasons to examine it. "I ask you to judge me by my record," said Kerry in his acceptance speech. "If you have any questions about what John Kerry is made of, just spend three minutes with the men who served with him," urged John Edwards. Kerry claimed in a March 27, 1986, speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate that he vividly remembered Christmas of 1968 sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia. "I remember what it was like to be shot at by Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge and Cambodians, and have the president of the United States telling the American people that I was not there; the troops were not in Cambodia. I have that memory which is seared -- seared -- in me." It was a story he had told earlier, as well, blaming President Nixon for lying to the country. Kerry's swift-boat superiors deny that he was ever in Cambodia -- the border region was not in his division's area of operation -- and, according to another book about Kerry, "Tour of Duty," he spent Christmas 1968 in Sa Dec, more than 50 miles from the border. And, of course, on Christmas of 1968, Lyndon Johnson was still president. Does it matter? It does to those he accused of committing atrocities. The nation may be done with Vietnam, content to treat the era as a campaign backdrop, with no further interest in whether the atrocities Kerry alleges were commonplace. But the two groups -- the swift-boat veterans and other Vietnam veterans who feel wronged by his characterizations -- have earned the right not to be dismissed as cranks and partisans, at least until they are fully heard. Much of my adult life has been spent in the media and in the military, first in Vietnam and then for more than two decades in the National Guard. I have deep affection for the media and the military. Both are enormously powerful instruments for good. And yet I have never been completely comfortable with either. With both, the capacity to inflict harm can damage lives beyond repair. With guns, pens and cameras, abuse of power is an ever-present danger. They are, therefore, instruments to be used with great care and with adequate training, discipline and a rigid adherence to standards of moral and ethical conduct. Disagree with the veterans if you like. Think them partisans. Accuse them of bitterness. But in the proper arena for public debate, hear them out.

And Denver, The Rocky Mountain News:

Dave Kopel is research director at the Independence Institute.

Posted by Greg Ransom / Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

A SECOND SWIFT BOAT AD SPOT

Roy F. Hoffman, a retired admiral and chairman of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, said the first TV ad, which ran for one week in Ohio, Wisconsin and West Virginia at a cost of $550,000, got so much national news attention that it generated an additional $400,000 from 8,000 donors around the country. "We are putting together the second ad," said Hoffman, 78, of Richmond, Va. As a Navy captain in 1968 and 1969, Hoffman commanded a unit of 1,650 sailors that included Kerry as a lieutenant. Hoffman said the unit, known as Task Force 115, included about 16 swift boats and their crews, which patrolled the delta for Viet Cong and other enemy fighters. "I knew Kerry pretty well," he said. "I did not ride his boat, but we operated very close together. ... I can't say I was a personal friend or buddy-buddy, but I sure knew him ... and I never felt he had the qualifications."

DODGING THE CAMBODIA QUESTION

From the White House transcript: Q Mr. President, Mr. Kerry seems to have a lot of trouble remembering dates -- when and if he was in Cambodia; who was President -- Nixon or Johnson -- when he was assigned to Vietnam; what bills in Congress he worked for and when; cannot remember if he campaigned in Oregon or California for George McGovern. Your last opponent you exposed with fuzzy math. It's time to expose John Kerry with fuzzy memory. (Applause.)

THE PRESIDENT: You got a question?

On the "Kerry in Cambodia" story it's pretty clear that the truth is out there The people know it and they get it, despite a news blackout by the major Democrat news outlets -- CBS, NY Times, WaPo, LA Times, etc. The world has changed -- bandwidth is power -- and this citizen in Beaverton, Ore. is imploring the President to wake up and smell the coffee. He really doesn't have to play the NY Times' game anymore. Neither does he have to accomidate the three Democrat party chieftains at CBS, NBC, and ABC. But the President continues to play as if he had a very weak hand, do to the party politics of the major press outlets. I believe he is mistaken in this judgment.

KERRY SHIPMATE

Wasser said it was nearly impossible to tell exactly where the boat was on the river but that if it wasn't in Cambodia that day, it was "very close."

KERRY AND THE SOG's? or WHERE WAS KERRY?

Did John Kerry conduct "black" operations on the Cambodian border with one or two special ops men like these?

Blogger Steve Gilliard thinks there is a good chance he did. Quotable:

The Swift Boat folks are trying to say that John Kerry is lying about being in Cambodia on Christmas, 1968. The odds are he is telling the truth.

Why?

Because of the history of SOG, the Study and Observations Group, really a small, black ops unit created independently of the Special Operations structure, but drawing people from their units.

Members of the Riverine Force often faced serious danger in combat, often working with Navy SEALS, Special Forces, and MACV-SOG.

I found this from Robert Shirley's PFC5 web site. Quotable:

On October 14 1968, shortly after Admiral Zumwalt conceived of SEALORDS, Swift Boat OinC Mike Bernique was informed by local Vietnamese at Ha Tien that the VC had set up a tax collection site a few miles up the Giang Thanh River from Ha Tien. Even though it was strictly forbidden by the Rules of Engagement for Swift Boats to operate that far up the rivers, Mike proceeded to follow up on this lead and investigated. He discovered the tax collection site and a fire fight ensued. This resulted in five enemy KIA's and the collection of weapons, ammunition, supplies and documents left behind by the fleeing communists. Mike was called to Saigon to explain his unauthorized conduct and to answer a diplomatic protest by Cambodian Prince Sihanouk that he had fired across the border into that supposed neutral country. Facing possible disiplinary actions, he answered Admiral Zumwalt's questions with an emphatic "Tell Sihanouk he's a lying SOB." The Admiral declared that Bernique was exactly the kind of aggressive skipper he was looking for and awarded him a Silver Star instead of a general court marshal.

From that point forward, the Giang Thanh became known as "Bernique's Creek" Eventually, patrols were augmented throughout the length of the Giang Thanh River and extended from its northeastern head along the Vinh Te Canal to the east all the way to the western bank of the Bassac river. Interdiction operations included not only Swift Boats, but also PBRs (Patrol Boat River) and units of the Navy's Mobile Riverine Force.

[From mid-1968] [t]here were continuing firefights along the Vinh Te [spelling corrected] Canal, which is a kilometer inside the Vietnamese border and stretches straight as a shot from the Gulf of Siam to the Bassac River. The canal fronted the southern Communist base areas inside Cambodia and the Navy patrol craft frequently interdicted Communist infiltrators.

In early November 1968, PBRs and Riverine Assault Craft opened two canals between the Gulf of Siam at Rach Gia and the Bassac River at Long Xuyen in an operation labeled Search Turn. Vietnamese paramilitary ground troops helped US Naval patrol units secure the transportation routes in this operational area.

Later in the month, in operation Foul Deck, Swift Boats, PBRs, Riverine Assault Craft, and Vietnamese naval vessels penetrated the Giang Thanh River-Vinh Te Canal system, north of Search Turn and nearer to the Cambodian border, to establish patrols all along that waterway from Ha Tien on the Gulf of Siam to Chau Doc on the upper Bassac.

Then in December, against heavy enemy opposition, U.S. Naval forces pushed up the Vam Co Dong (Vam Co East) and Vam Co Tay (Vam Co West) Rivers west of Saigon to cut infiltration routes on either side and through the "Parrot's Beak" area of Cambodia. This Giant Slingshot operation, so named for the Y-shape of the confluence of the two rivers on a map, severely hampered Communist resupply in the region near the capital and in the Plain of Reeds.

Completing the first phase of the SEALORDS program, in January 1969, PBRs, Assault Support Patrol Boats (ASPB), and other river craft established patrol sectors along canals westward from the Vam Co Tay River over to the Mekong River in operation Barrier Reef.

So by the end of the first four months of SEALORDS, a patrolled waterway interdiction barrier had been established that extended almost uninterrupted from Tay Ninh northwest of Saigon all the way to the Gulf of Siam at Ha Tien and Rach Gia.

Secret Commandos : Behind Enemy Lines with the Elite Warriors of SOG by John L. Plaster. (Published May 4, 2004)

Sog: The Secret Wars of America's Commandos in Vietnam by John L. Plaster. (Publshed 1998)

SOG: A Photo History of the Secret Wars by John L. Plaster. (Publshed 2000)

Any photos of John Kerry in the book?

UPDATE: Reader Bill Modahl writes: "Problem is that all this material relates to operating up creeks and canals from Gulf of Siam near Cambodian border in the South. Kerry was at Sa Dec, North of Mekong. That area is much further from the border and does not access creeks running parallel to the border as does Ha Tien, but rather the Mekong, which crosses the border at a 90 degree angle. Better check the maps on the sites you link."

[UPDATE: Material removed. It looks like I was fished.]

JOHN 'BLACK OPS' KERRY

The biographer of John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate, said yesterday there was no basis for one of the senator's favourite Vietnam War anecdotes - that he spent Christmas 1968 in Cambodia, a neutral nation which US leaders vowed was off limits for American forces. John Kerry catches a baseball at Long Beach Airport "On Christmas Eve he was near Cambodia; he was around 50 miles from the Cambodian border. There's no indictment of Kerry to be made, but he was mistaken about Christmas in Cambodia," said Douglas Brinkley, who has unique access to the candidate's wartime journals. But Mr Brinkley rejected accusations that the senator had never been to Cambodia, insisting he was telling the truth about running undisclosed "black" missions there at the height of the war. He said: "Kerry went into Cambodian waters three or four times in January and February 1969 on clandestine missions. He had a run dropping off US Navy Seals, Green Berets and CIA guys." The missions were not armed attacks on Cambodia, said Mr Brinkley, who did not include the clandestine missions in his wartime biography of Mr Kerry, Tour of Duty. "He was a ferry master, a drop-off guy, but it was dangerous as hell. Kerry carries a hat he was given by one CIA operative. In a part of his journals which I didn't use he writes about discussions with CIA guys he was dropping off." .. an anti-Kerry book published this week, Unfit for Command, .. states: "All the living commanders in Kerry's chain of command . . . indicate that Kerry would have been seriously disciplined or court-martialled had he gone" to Cambodia.

And today's Op-Ed "leader" in the Telegraph:

Kerry's military daze. The most striking image from John Kerry's campaign for the presidency is him offering a beguiling, if rather hesitant, military salute to the Democratic convention, accompanied by the message that he was "reporting for duty". This reference to his record as a decorated war hero was a signal that he would exploit what was thought to be his strongest card in a contest with George W Bush, whose own youth was noted for a notoriously unheroic evasion of active duty in Vietnam. Perhaps carried away by this favoured theme of personal bravery, Mr Kerry has offered up anecdotes from his military adventures that are now coming under the sort of detailed scrutiny that a closely fought political contest brings with it. His most noteworthy story involves what would have been a secret, and illegal, foray into neutral Cambodian territory during the Vietnam war on Christmas Eve of 1968. Mr Kerry's alleged memory, laced with touching recollections of his longing for hearth and home, has now been challenged in terms so authoritative as to call into question not only his war record, but also his basic integrity. Faced with the bald assertions of men who served with him that this incident never occurred, Mr Kerry's campaign staff have responded by subtly altering the geography of the region. "On Christmas Eve in 1968," they say, Mr Kerry was "in fact on patrol in the Mekong Delta between Cambodia and Vietnam". Quite apart from the forthright statement from the gunner's mate on his own boat, that they "were not anywhere near Cambodia", this response is bizarre. There is no such territory "between" Vietnam and Cambodia. The two countries abut one another on the Mekong Delta. As well as inventing a fictitious South-East Asian no-man's-land, the Kerry camp is attempting to smear his critics by implying that they are a politically driven arm of the Bush campaign. But whatever the motives of Mr Kerry's dissident ex-comrades may be, the hard facts of their case remain disturbing, as the frantic fiddling of national borders suggests. There are only two possible interpretations of this paradox. Either Mr Kerry is knowingly fabricating history for crass electoral advantage (and in rather odd contrast with his own renunciation of his Vietnam war experiences in the 1970s), or else he spent a fair amount of his time at war completely unaware of where he was. Neither possibility fits well with a campaign so squarely centred on Mr Kerry's war record.

MORE. Drudge has this:

TOUR OF DUTY author and John Kerry historian Doug Brinkley is rushing a piece for the NEW YORKER: to set-the-record-straight on Kerry's Christmas in Cambodia tale .. Kerry has turned to author Brinkley for a "modification" after it was exposed that Kerry was not in Cambodia during Christmas of 1968, as he once claimed from the Senate floor ..

.. John O�Neil�s, author of UNFIT FOR COMMAND, comments on the �clarification:�

�John Kerry describes Christmas Eve in Cambodia as a critical turning point in his life. We now know that his story is completely false. My question is how many people do you know have invented a turning point, one that is seared in his memory? While it makes sense for John Kerry to come clean about the Cambodia story, it is one of several tales that the Kerry campaign will have to face and clarify. By claiming we were engaged in a war crime and crossing international borders, John Kerry damaged the credibility of all the commanding officers above him and insulted the sailors who served with him.�

Stephen Gardner served with Kerry for two months on his swift boat, until the middle of January. Gardner has been outspoken about the fact that he never went into Cambodia, not with John Kerry or anyone else. In fact, Gardner has given quite a lot of background as to how improbable a swift-boat excursion five miles into Cambodia would be, not the least of which is the less-than-stealthy nature of the boat itself. Putting John Kerry in Cambodia at the end of January allows them to cut Gardner off at the knees and avoid dealing with the one man on Kerry's boat that opposes Kerry. It's a transparent ploy to rehabilitate a transparently false story. It still doesn't address Kerry's repeated assertions that he was ordered into Cambodia on Christmas Eve, a story he has told repeatedly in order to give him credibility.

MORE. The "Kerry in Cambodia" story makes it into Investor's Business Daily.

MORE. Pat Buchanan takes on the "Kerry in Cambodia" story.

MORE. Another expert witness with evidence against the idea that John Kerry and his Swift Boat were in Cambodian waters, on a 'black ops' mission which saw combat with the Khmer Rouge. This time it's Andrew Antippas. Quotable:

"I served as a Foreign Service officer in the American embassy in Saigon from March 1968 to February 1970 and subsequently at the American embassy in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, from 1970 to 1972 ..

There were established U.S. forces "rules of engagement" that governed the activities of American forces near the Cambodian border. There was, for example, a "no-fly zone" along the Cambodian border, where U.S. forces ground units, aircraft and boats were prohibited from routinely approaching or entering Cambodia ..

The Cambodians patrolled the crossing border points on the Bassac and Mekong Rivers and had fortifications above the frontier. In mid-1968, just before Adm. Zumwalt took over, a U.S. Army LCM landing craft sailing north on the Mekong River � loaded with lubricants, gas, rations, beer and a forklift, as well as a number of U.S. soldiers � missed the turn from the Mekong River to the Bassac River (the two main north-south rivers that flow through the Mekong Delta) in order to reach its destination on the southern portion of the Bassac. Apparently the troops were somewhat bemused from the heat and the beer consumed and sailed right up into Cambodia, where they were halted by a Cambodian patrol craft and taken to the frontier base and then up to Phnom Penh. Gen. Creighton Abrams, newly in command, was furious, and Adm. Zumwalt's predecessor was nonplussed, blurting out that it wasn't one of his boats. Gen. Abrams snarled, "Yeah, it was one of mine and why did they do it?" We got the crew and LCM back eventually, but that was the only river incident involving the Cambodian border or Navy actions inside Cambodia to my recollection. There were continuing firefights along the Vinh Te [sic] Canal, which is a kilometer inside the Vietnamese border and stretches straight as a shot from the Gulf of Siam to the Bassac River. The canal fronted the southern Communist base areas inside Cambodia and the Navy patrol craft frequently interdicted Communist infiltrators.

UPDATE: Answer -- there were. Quotable:

On October 14 1968, shortly after Admiral Zumwalt conceived of SEALORDS, Swift Boat OinC Mike Bernique was informed by local Vietnamese at Ha Tien that the VC had set up a tax collection site a few miles up the Giang Thanh River from Ha Tien. Even though it was strictly forbidden by the Rules of Engagement for Swift Boats to operate that far up the rivers, Mike proceeded to follow up on this lead and investigated. He discovered the tax collection site and a fire fight ensued. This resulted in five enemy KIA's and the collection of weapons, ammunition, supplies and documents left behind by the fleeing communists. Mike was called to Saigon to explain his unauthorized conduct and to answer a diplomatic protest by Cambodian Prince Sihanouk that he had fired across the border into that supposed neutral country. Facing possible disiplinary actions, he answered Admiral Zumwalt's questions with an emphatic "Tell Sihanouk he's a lying SOB." The Admiral declared that Bernique was exactly the kind of aggressive skipper he was looking for and awarded him a Silver Star instead of a general court marshal.

From that point forward, the Giang Thanh became known as "Bernique's Creek" Eventually, patrols were augmented throughout the length of the Giang Thanh River and extended from its northeastern head along the Vinh Te Canal to the east all the way to the western bank of the Bassac river. Interdiction operations included not only Swift Boats, but also PBRs (Patrol Boat River) and units of the Navy's Mobile Riverine Force.

ABC's August 12 NOTE intrigues us with this comment about the subtlest of flaws in the Kerry campaign:

"E. . Let's face it: there is something squirrelly and unsettling and not quite right about the way Michael Meehan answers the media's Vietnam-era questions � something that makes nearly every member of the Gang of 500 think there is still something there."

And there is a reason for that - like the rest of us, this campaign is on a voyage of discovery into John Kerry's past. And like the rest of us, they are repeatedly learning that their candidate's memory of his Vietnam era is conveniently unreliable.

MORE. Other reactions here, here, HERE, and here.

MORE. Observations from Ed Driscoll.

THE KERRY CAMPAIGN

(Click on "OPTIONS" To set your own video media settings).

Transcript:

Major Garrett: The Kerry campaign has been forced to admit errors in statements Kerry made in a 1979 Boston Herald article and in a 1986 Senate speech -- shown here in the Congressional Record -- about vivid memories of his leading a Swift Boat deep into Cambodia and taking enemy fire on Chrismas eve in 1968.

John Hurley, Kerry campaign spokesman: I don't know that anyone can actually say whether or not they were in Cambodia.

Garrett: Kerry's camp now says that on Chrismas eve Kerry's swift boat was at or near the Cambodia border, not five miles inside as Kerry has said repeatedly.

Hurley: Very watery area. It is .. there is no sign that says 'Welcome to Cambodia'. It is .. ah .. it is obviously dusk and getting darker. Ah .. and .. so they are in those waters.

Garrett: The Kerry campaign also says Kerry was in Cambodia on a different mission with Navy Seals but can provide no date for that mission.

Kerry campaign spokesman: He was 5 miles into Cambodia, but what's happened is that these two stories have gotten confused.

Major Garrett: In the past Kerry has written that the Cambodian incursion on Christmas eve was, quote, 'seared into his memory.

Hurley: I think the experience is seared into his memory. I think that he knows that he was under fire in Cambodia. I think that the date is what is inaccurate .. that the .. that is was just not Christma eve day.

[Posting updated, with additions -- the link to Major Garrett's report is no longer on the "Special Report web page.]

ACCORDING TO

"I think what's fair to look at is how he was affected by Vietnam. He himself would say that you really have to look at a lot of his thought process as what was happening during Vietnam. And in one short anecdote I'll tell you, that in Christmas of 1968, he was on a small boat with his men, basically in Cambodia at a time when Richard Nixon was telling the American public that we're not in Cambodia. And he basically became skeptical. Well, the government is saying this, but he knew himself that wasn't true. And it's also why he says he came back to protest the war that he had served in."

So, if we follow Kranish, our biographical understanding of John Kerry's character -- really his very indentity -- begins to fall apart at the place of the central turning point in his life.

So this story (or this fantasy, if it's that) is a major one -- it is central to the very question of understanding who Kerry is. Which makes it a story we need to know and understand if we are to know and understand this man.

Footnote: Notice how this Boston Globe reporter doesn't seem to have a clue that Nixon wasn't in charge of the country in the Christmas of 1968?

More on the character issue. Lanny Davis was asked this question:

Now, if John Kerry lied about being in Cambodia, if he lied about being on a secret mission like Martin Sheen, if he lied about not being in Kansas City when he was there when they all chatted about that crazy assassination idea, if he lied about Americans committing rampant war crimes all over Vietnam which he witnessed and which were authorized by his superior, if he lied about all those things, is it not possible he lied about his medals?

"AT THE 2003 REUNION

5,000 CONTRIBUTORS

THE OFFICIAL

THE BLOGOSPHERE IS HOPPIN'.

What's hot now? TNR's partisan case for suing the Swift Boat vets to death. Beldar gives a sustained fisking here.

THE DEMOCRATS STRIKE BACK

So who is smearing whom?

UPDATE: "I was just passing through the room a couple of nights ago, Fox News was on, and there was Lannie Davis, literally screaming ad hominems against John O'Neill, the principal author of ''Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry.'' I thought: ''Wow, that book must really have them.''" -- Jay Bryant.

UPDATE II: InstaPundit points to this commentary by Lead & Gold: "Kerry didn't just use his Vietnam experience to enhance his stature as a man or leader. His campaign used it to shut down debate on his Senate record. They made the biography the issue."

UPDATE III: More reactions here , here, and here . Quotable:

Today, the Washington Post runs an editorial on the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, titled Swift Boat Smears. The editorial is a window into the mindset behind the apparent decision by most of the mainstream media to ignore the Vets' accusations of dishonesty by Kerry. The editorial begins plausibly enough .. But then the editorial changes its tone. All of a sudden, any accusation against Kerry is suspect, while any evidence supporting him becomes unimpeachable. Critical thinking goes out the window. The editorial ignores, or badly misunderstands, many of the principal arguments made by the Vets.

For example, the editorial completely misapprehends the allegations made by Dr. Louis Letson, who says he treated Kerry for a minor shrapnel wound forming the basis for Kerry's first Purple Heart. The editorial pretends that Letson's principal claim is that Kerry's injury was too minor for a Purple Heart .. [The] passage [quoted by the Post] completely misses the point of Letson's accusation that Kerry lied. As a look at the Swift Vets' website shows, Letson's claim is that the evidence shows Kerry's wound was self-inflicted, making it ineligible as a basis for a Purple Heart. The evidence shows that crewmen accompanying Kerry told Letson that Kerry had actually wounded himself, with a grenade launched from an M-79 grenade launcher. Nobody, not even Kerry himself, claimed to have seen enemy fire. The tiny fragment Letson removed from Kerry's arm with a pair of tweezers appeared to be an M-79 fragment, corroborating the account of the crewmen accompanying Kerry. That is the basis for Letson's claim that Kerry lied.

Powerline asks, "What did we do before God created the blogosphere?."

Well, Who do you trust?

At the Aspen Institute's Conference on Journalism and Society in mid-July, a question was put to executives of major news organizations: Whom do you trust in online media today? Most answered with a list of the usual suspects: the Web sites of The New York Times, NPR, the Los Angeles Times.

Jeff Jarvis, a blogger and president of Advance Internet, gave a different answer: "I have learned to trust the voice and judgment of my fellow citizens."

TRANSCRIPT -- WOLF BLITZER

JOHN O'NEILL: Wolf, unlike Admiral Crowe, the people in our organization have no partisan tie, we didn't campaign in the last four elections for Democrats. By and large we didn't campaign for anybody, but we were there. There are 254 Swift Boat people who have signed our letter at Swiftvets.com, including 60 Purple Heart winners, for example, and include 17 of the 23 officers who served alongside John Kerry in Antoy. These were in boats literally five and ten yard away. These were people that bond together every night.

BLITZER: Let me interrupt you, John. But were any of them, was one of them on the boat with John Kerry?

O'NEILL: Yes, as a matter of fact, Steve Gardener (ph) who is the guy that broke the story that Kerry lied about Christmas in Cambodia. Steve Gardener was on his boat for the longest time of any enlisted man and he has signed our letter. He's the guy who came forward to demonstrate that Kerry's story that he had been illegally in Cambodia over Christmas Eve was a total falsehood.

BLITZER: All right. Well, let me then ask you this, there's one person that you say served with him on that boat, but there are at least a dozen others who say he was a hero, a commander and they support him. It's 12 against 1.

O'NEILL: Not quite, Wolf. It's 254 against 12. Every single commander of John Kerry in Vietnam has signed our letter condemning him. Almost 17 of the 23 officers that served with him -- these boats operated in convoys of two to six boats, they were yards apart. In the scene you just showed, for example, Kerry's ad showed all of the boats fleeing and then Kerry coming back. But all of the boats didn't flee Wolf, they couldn't. The three boat had been blown up, it had no screws left. Everybody went to save the three boat and Kerry fled.

THE LONDON TELEGRAPH

UPDATE: Captain Ed asks, Does America's Media Outsource All Its Work To The UK?

SPECIAL REPORT WITH BRITT HUME

UPDATE: This was an expanded repeat performance for the Kerry campaign. Earlier in the day on Fox the Kerry campaign hastily backpedelled from Kerry's often repeated claim that he had spent the Christmas of 1968 in Cambodia fighting communists.

JOHN KERRY'S CAMPAIGN MANAGER

FOX NEWS

UPDATE: And so does WorldNetDaily.

"ON MORE THAN ONE OCCASION,

JOHN O�NEILL,

The people in our unit are appalled at John Kerry�s war crimes charges, which he has now claiming were a bit exaggerated and a lie. They struck at the heart of everyone in our unit living and dead. It�s something that none of us will ever forget. And they were repeated in his book, �Tour of Duty.� It is also true that his service in Vietnam was wildly exaggerated. Pat, that coronation where he behaved like a peacock at the Democratic Controversy, it made people physically ill in our unit. There is a certain truth in the world. To claim that the guys who saved the 3 boat fled and that he came back is a total perversion of the truth. You can imagine what the people that actually stayed and could have been shot think about that, and their families. And so, this is a guy that treats the truth very casually.

HERE IS

All the living commanders in Kerry�s chain of command .. deny that Kerry was ever ordered to Cambodia. They indicate that Kerry would have been seriously disciplined or court-martialed had he gone there. At least three of the five crewmen on Kerry�s PCF 44 boat�Bill Zaldonis, Steven Hatch, and Steve Gardner�deny that they or their boat were ever in Cambodia. The remaining two crewmen declined to be interviewed for this book. Gardner, in particular, will never forget those days in late December when he was wounded on PCF 44, not in Cambodia, but many miles away in Vietnam ..

The truth is that Kerry made up his secret mission into Cambodia. Much like Kerry�s many other lies relating to supposed �war crimes� committed by the U.S. military in Vietnam, the lie about the illegal Cambodian incursion painted his superiors up the chain of command�men such as Commander Streuhli, Commander Elliott, Admiral Hoffmann, and Admiral Zumwalt, all distinguished Naval heroes and men of integrity�as villains faced down by John Kerry, a solitary hero in grave and exotic danger and forced illegally and against his will into harm�s way.

The same sorts of lies were repeated over and over in Kerry�s antiwar book, The New Soldier, a book filled with preposterous, false confessions of bogus war crimes committed by the participants (who were often not even real veterans) against their will and under orders from dishonest superiors. Kerry�s Christmas in Cambodia typifies the sort of lie upon which Kerry has built a false persona and a political career.

UPDATE II: He also has this reminder for those on the "Kerry in Cambodia" story: ""Christmas is Cambodia" is a Kerry creation, and he deserves to be hammered on it. However, "St. Patrick's in (or near) Cambodia", especially with SEALs, has got life. Be careful with the undated "hat" story - SEALs and CIA both operate covertly, and that mistake would be easily overlooked. I'm just sayin'." Just One Minute.

"KERRY IN CAMBODIA"

The question of the day: where are The New York Times, The LA Times and The Washington Post on this story? Have they deserted to Canada?

UPDATE: Some dead on analysis: "Now two of New York's dailies have written on this story; can the Grey Lady avoid it much longer? Byron York nailed that on Hugh's program yesterday; the Times will bury an offhand mention of the story in the 27th paragraph of a 39-paragraph story on Kerry's medals so that they can say they covered it. If you remember, this is how they handled Kerry's attendance at a VVAW meeting where the assassination of US Senators was discussed."

UPDATE II: Hugh Hewitt challenges the big city newsrooms.

UPDATE III: They also serve. John Kerry's 5th column shipmates. Quotable:

"On NBC, the swift-boat-vet ad isn't a new frontier for investigative journalism, but an undesirable outbreak of free speech that should have been prevented by law. Tom Brokaw asked Friday night: "Up next, NBC News 'In Depth' tonight: The latest campaign ad from an independent political group. Harsh attacks. Are these ads totally out of control?" Could he telegraph any more blatantly that he wished this ad did not exist, or that he would have liked to control it right into the dumpster? He later explained: "NBC's Andrea Mitchell tells us tonight, the campaign-finance law supposed to fix the system left this very big loophole." The network stars have discovered that "527" groups, which the Democrats have built willy-nilly to defeat President Bush, have suddenly become undesirable. So we should ask: Is Tom Brokaw out of control? Aren't he and his fellow reporters one giant "loophole" in our campaign speech system?

The mere fact that we're at this embryonic stage of Kerry's biography in August shows the lack of media vigilance about Kerry's resume. If anyone would question the timing of the current Swift Boat vets campaign, they are correct. They could have started in May at the National Press Club. They could have started in February, when Terry McAuliffe and the Democrats drew two weeks of meticulous network pounding of George W. Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard .. But they should have been exploring this story on their own in January, when Kerry broke out of the Democratic pack through powerful and repeated war heroism stories. Since Sen. Kerry began putting his Vietnam experience into biographical overdrive before the Iowa caucuses, it might have seemed like an obvious task for reporters to assess Kerry's service in greater detail. But they did not. They are more interested in electing Kerry than telling us about him."

"UNFIT FOR COMMAND".

And this clears up a lot: "There has been some confusion about whether the witnesses against Kerry had an adequate view of his conduct, compared with the view of his supporters who were on his boat. The book explains that the swift boats usually moved in a pack of three or four on the same mission. They operated within yards of each other. Moreover, they all docked, bunked, ate and lived in the same camp. If one compared their relations to an army company of men, the fellow junior officers who captained the tiny swift boats were the functional equivalent of squad leaders, each with their own handful of men under them. Squad leaders, operating on the same mission together are in excellent positions to assess the performance of their fellow squad leaders. They are covering each other's flanks. The book is filled with testimony of these men, describing what they claim they clearly saw John Kerry doing and not doing."

"DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN

KERRY BOATMATE

UPDATE: Leftists / Democrats have a rather unhealthy stake in broadly cast fantasies and deceptions Captain Ed suggests:

"For some reason [George Bush's] opponents this year have attempted to smear him with various factually-deficient charges of desertion and draft-dodging, even though Bush flew a notoriously dangerous fighter jet in home-defense missions. They have built up a mythology of Bush the Deserter, Bush the Dodger, Bush the Evil, because mythology is how they lived their own lives. As we watch the Christmas in Cambodia mythology disintegrate before our very eyes, taking with it John Kerry's entire supposed motivation for his disenchantment with the war and the US government, Kerry has been exposed as an unprincipled phony, using bits and pieces of other people's lives to build his own resume. The subset of people supporting Kerry by using the Bush mythology may prove just as resistant to reality as John Kerry and Terry McAuliffe (and Michael Moore, et al), because they'd rather live in their fantasy world where everything wrong in the universe can be traced back to Evil W. Terrorism? George Bush provoked it, and even if he didn't, he's covering up for Saudi air-force pilots who really committed 9/11 in order to control world oil output. WMDs? George Bush made it all up, even though the same data led Congress to declare regime change the official American policy in 1998, and even the French and German intelligence agencies believed them to exist in large quantities. It's beyond irrational; it approaches schizophrenia."

Well, the tables get turned with the relevations of the Swift Boat veterans ..

UPDATE II: Don't miss Lileks on all this. Quotable:

If Kerry�s story is a lie, it�s significant, but not because we have a gotcha moment � gee, a politician reworked the truth to his advantage, big surprise. This is much larger than that. This is like Bush insisting that he flew an intercept mission with the Texas Air National Guard to repel Soviet bombers based in Cuba, and later stating that this event was �seared in his memory � seared� because it taught him the necessity of standing up against evil governments, such as the ones we face today. In other words, it would not only be a lie, but one that eroded the political persona he was relying upon in the election. Kerry has made Vietnam central to his campaign. If he�s making crap up, it matters. But the story of the CIA agent he ferried into the Heart of Darkness gives the gotcha a curious twist; as lawyers say on TV courtroom dramas, it goes to state of mind. What sort of man bedecked with genuine decorations feels compelled to manufacture a story like this one?

FOX NEWS

They get this wrong: "But while the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth have been hammering Kerry's record, every living soldier who served under Kerry's command is backing their former commander."

The truth is out there.

THE HAT,

HERE IS INSTAPUNDIT'S

And Hugh Hewitt has much more -- with permalinks!

CRUISING TO CAMBODIA --

THE "KERRY IN CAMBODIA"

But elsewhere the Cambodia story is getting spiked, as this Google News search makes clear.

A CLOSER LOOK

THE NY POST:

NIGHTLINE

This is pre-packaged, paint by numbers reporting. All of it well between standard left/Demo talking point lines. Not what you would call award winning journalism. I watched it and my interested would have been better held by a show on Midwest cooking or weather in Europe.

THE HUNT IS ON.

WAS JOHN KERRY

InstaPundit raises another possibility -- Kerry was old-fashioned stoned the Christmas of 1968 on some good brownies.

Well, where are we? No Oil for Pacifists has the bottom line on Kerry: "The Democrats nominated a long-standing liar with a worldview from wonderland. A man whose experiences, though "seared," are false. Someone who relies on his record of service, while withholding relevant service records."

HUGH HEWITT

WHO'S THE BIGGEST LOSER

For a devastating takedown of David Brinkley and his book, read this review by Andrew Ferguson.

RAMIREZ

KERRY IN CAMBODIA --

Hugh Hewitt has pertinent thoughts on the press and John Kerry's latest documented lies about his service in Vietman. (Warning, Hewitt still hasn't fixed his permalinks. What's up with that?)

UPDATE: Now Hewitt's web site is down. A denial of service attack by Democrats? Hugh wouldn't be surprised if it was.

MARK STEYN:

JOHN KERRY

THE SWIFT BOAT VETERANS

(via polipundit).

FROM THE CONGRESSIONAL RECORD:

InstaPundit has a photo of the transcript, and this email from a reader: "You forgot about Kerry's mission to kill Col. Kurtz." And lots more of course. He's InstaPundit after all. And don't miss this from Roger Simon (via the Great One).

"MY POINT IS,

BACK UP

"WHEN [JOHN KERRY] GOT HIS THIRD PURPLE HEART,

IN THEIR OWN WORDS --

JOHN KERRY PROMISES

This PC stuff has reached a "you can't parody this" point of no return, I'm afraid.

THE SWIFT BOAT VETERANS

UPDATE: Here is an example of how the Democrats in the press are spinning the Swift boat story.

(Reality check -- 12 of ever 13 reporters in D.C. are pulling for Kerry in the 2004 election, a recent poll showed).

UPDATE II: The CNN story on this hits hard in a straight-forward attemt to smear the Swift Boat veterans -- and all but ignores the substantive case against Kerry. CNN is following the classic M.O. of the propagandist -- attack the messenger, ignore the content of the message.

UPDATE III: Hugh Hewitt on John Kerry, Vietnam and the press: "Since Kerry made his Vietnam service the centerpiece of his acceptance speech --from "reporting for duty" through the close-- this story in all its ramifications deserves far more attention than has been paid to the Bush air gurad story, the other ads, and those other books. Will that coverage happen? Probably not, at least not without a huge push from the blogosphere and talk radio, because Kerry enjoys a huge favorable tilt in the elite media, and nowhere more so than on his Vietnam service because he is the anti-Vietnam anti-hero, a status which appeals so powerfully to media types of a certain age who were part of the narrative of those years. They were against the war, and Kerry came back from Vietnam to lead the charge against the war. They never earned medals, but he threw his away. In a very real way, Kerry gave every anti-war protestor cover that all the others like Hayden, Fonda, and the rest could never deliver. They were noisy kids who never impressed anyone off-campus. Kerry was very different indeed, as were all of the veterans who opposed the war on their return from service. Those who opposed the Vietnam War who are now in the media aren't about to rush to focus on the story that undermines not only their preferred candidate in 2004, but the key anti-war figure from that long-ago era."

#1 AT AMAZON.

UPDATE: Wizbang has chapter three of the book posted here. (pdf file).

"JOHN KERRY CANNOT BE TRUSTED".

THE SWIFT BOAT VETERANS FOR TRUTH

FRUM ON TED KENNEDY

A LITTLE OL' COUPE

THE SWIFT VET ADS --

Opens With: Footage of Jane Fonda

Cuts To: Stills of Kerry, protesters, then Kerry testifying

Cuts to: Fonda at a press

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