This Makes Me Feel Better About My Trip

The AP reports that two men have been arrested in New York City on the eve of the Republican National Convention, for plotting explosive attacks on the subway system:

A U.S. citizen and a Pakistani national were arrested in an alleged plot to bomb a subway station in midtown Manhattan and possibly other locations around the city, police said Saturday.

Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said the men were not thought to be connected to al-Qaida or any other international terrorist organization, although he said they expressed hatred for America. The arrests come two days before the start of the Republican National Convention, which is drawing tens of thousands of visitors into the city.

Though there was no clear tie to the convention, authorities moved to arrest the two men before it began, two law-enforcement sources told The Associated Press.

The police report that the men were apprehended before getting their hands on any actual explosives, which means that they had been tracked for some time before their arrest. They scouted out locations around the city, including the subway station nearest to Madison Square Garden, which is where the convention is being held. Not too surprisingly, the pair expressed hatred towards the United States, and also anti-Semitic statements as well. Color me shocked.

Expect to hear more about roundups in the next 24-48 hours such as this. The NYPD and FBI will pull the chains on all surveillance operations that they can ahead of the actual festivities this week, and the arrests may bring more actionable intelligence for later operations.

I may still look askance at the subway station, however ...

A Man Of Honor, And A New Steeler Fan?

We had a great time at our live appearance at the State Fair this afternoon, and having Hugh Hewitt and Mike Nelson as our guests attracted a large number of fans to our booth. Hopefully, all who came had just as much fun as we did. Speaking of Hugh, he ended the suspense and took his medicine, as you can see here:

Being a gentleman, he offered to wear the hat during the entire half-hour appearance, but I gave way so he could wear a hockey helmet in order to answer questions from the Fair audience in his role of Minnesota State Hockey Commissioner. Unfortunately, the helmet didn't help him out much. Since Hugh kept his end of the bargain like the true gent he is, the First Mate and I donated $100 to Young Life, Hugh's favorite charity. This is a great organization and Hugh does a lot of work with them, and since all of you have been so generous in support of my trip, I felt inspired to pay a bit of it forward.

But truly ... don't you think that hat looks just terrific on Hugh? I think black and gold are his colors!

Lehman: I Never Signed Kerry's Modified Silver Star Citation

Thomas Lipscomb breaks another major development in the Chicago Sun-Times this morning, and the Kerry campaign may need to do more backpedaling as a result. Former Secretary of the Navy and 9/11 Commission member John Lehman denies ever signing the modified citation Kerry's site has prominently displayed for months, and states categorically that he didn't write the additional language describing the engagement:

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.

The additional language varied from the two previous citations, signed first by Adm. Elmo Zumwalt and then Adm. John Hyland, which themselves differ. The new material added in the Lehman citation reads in part: "By his brave actions, bold initiative, and unwavering devotion to duty, Lieutenant (jg) Kerry reflected great credit upon himself...."

Asked how the citation could have been executed over his signature without his knowledge, Lehman said: "I have no idea. I can only imagine they were signed by an autopen." The autopen is a device often used in the routine execution of executive documents in government.

Kerry senior adviser Michael Meehan could not be reached for comment on Kerry's records.

So now we have more than just a few disgruntled Viet Nam veterans disputing Kerry's narrative and records. We've now added a former Secretary of the Navy, a man whose bipartisan credentials were sufficient for Congress to get him named to the 9/11 Commission in disputing Kerry's version of events. How will the Kerry campaign react to this? Can they paint Lehman as a partisan hack after his painfully obsequious behavior towards the Democrats during the commission hearings?

Just when I think this story may lose momentum, it just grows new legs. The Torricelli option continues to beckon the Democrats the longer Kerry refuses to release all the records and put an end to all the speculation -- assuming that the records haven't already been doctored, as Lehman's statement today seems to indicate.

Sign the 180, Senator!

Northern Alliance Live At The State Fair!

If you haven't yet caught our Northern Alliance Radio Network show, today would be a great day to start! Not only will we be appearing live at the Minnesota State Fair, in front of throngs of our admirers (note: "throngs" = 7 or more, right?), but take a look at the guest list we have for today: Hugh Hewitt, Mike Nelson (MST3K fans, rejoice!), and James Lileks! You can listen on AM 1280 The Patriot if you're here in the Twin Cities, or on our live Internet stream sponsored by the Taxpayers League of Minnesota. (Make sure you enable pop-up windows in order to make the streaming software work.)

What projects are on Mike Nelson's plate these days? What does James Lileks have to say about deep-fried sausages on a stick? Will Hugh Hewitt renege on his trivia-contest bet? Tune in from noon to 3 pm CT and find out! And don't hesistate to call in at 651-289-4488 to talk with us. Hint: cell phones usually have free minutes and no long-distance charges on weekends!

The Media Breakthrough Has Begun In Earnest

After waiting weeks for the mainstream news media to cover the collapse of John Kerry's narrative on Viet Nam, and waiting out the media attack on the testimony of over 200 combat veterans, two bellwether media outlets have suddenly reversed themselves and reported on Kerry's lies and prevarications in their news sections, as pointed out by CQ reader Bill Millan.

First, the Los Angeles Times publishes a profile of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth organizer John O'Neill which, surprisingly, remains positive and balanced towards its subject. Scott Gold cuts through all of the hysterical Republican-shill charges thrown about by the Kerry campaign and its sympathizers and presents a much more interesting look at O'Neill and what motivates him:

He portrayed himself as a political independent — a Reagan Democrat, he said, if he had to have a label. Although he typically supports GOP candidates, he says, he voted for Democrat Al Gore in 2000. And although the "Swifties" have agreed to focus on Kerry and not to discuss President Bush, O'Neill made it clear he is no great fan of the president, whom he has described to several friends as an "empty suit."

He has become, effectively, a single-issue voter in this election, akin to an otherwise liberal Roman Catholic who cannot bring himself to vote for a pro-choice candidate. O'Neill's single issue is simple: He despises Kerry. Whether Bush benefits from the campaign, he said, is a distant concern.

"I know everybody thinks politics is the most important thing in the world," O'Neill said. "But it's not."

Interestingly, O'Neill gives little support to George W. Bush, whom he calls an "empty suit", and tells Gold that had he the opportunity, he would have supported John Edwards for President. O'Neill himself is a plaintiff's attorney and likes Edwards' track record of activist lawsuits holding big corporations responsible for their abuses of the little guy. In fact, O'Neill himself won over $400 million in a lawsuit representing investors defrauded by a corporation, and currently represents a group of elderly and disabled claiming to have been forced out of business by unnamed superstores.

Wow ... sure sounds like a Republican shill to me!

Gold closes with a quote from a Democrat that demonstrates the clueless nature of O'Neill's opposition in his campaign to expose John Kerry:

"I just think it is sad that we have people who served together in Vietnam — maybe not next to each other, but together — trashing each other," said U.S. Rep. Gene Green, a Houston Democrat. "I don't think it's good for the country."

Is he serious? John Kerry built his political career trashing his fellow Viet Nam veterans as mass murderers, rapists, and war criminals. It takes a special kind of twisted logic to use this tack as an argument for John O'Neill to shut up. And Gold's inclusion of this statement demonstrates something else, as Gold must have been aware of its bitter irony: even the Los Angeles Times has woken up.

And not just the Los Angeles Times, either. Today's Washington Post reports on the effect of the Swiftvet campaign by looking at Kerry's retreat on statements made during the course of the campaign and his conflicts with the facts even when issuing clarification. Michael Dobbs even makes a reference to the Phoenix Project:

Veterans who are sympathetic to Kerry say that the Democratic presidential candidate is vulnerable to political attacks on his antiwar activities because of an extensive public record that his opponents are now combing for any inconsistency. Kerry has already backed away from some of his more inflammatory antiwar statements and an earlier claim that he was not present at a meeting that debated a proposal to assassinate government officials and take over the Statue of Liberty. ...

Told about the FBI records earlier this year, Kerry said through a spokesman that he now accepted he must have been in Kansas City for the November meeting while continuing to insist that he had "no personal recollection" of the contentious debate. Many people associated with VVAW find this difficult to believe.

"There was no way he would have forgotten about being in Kansas City," said Nicosia, who is generally sympathetic to Kerry.

Former VVAW Kansas state coordinator John Musgrave, who served with the Marines in Vietnam, expressed extreme doubt about Kerry's stated recollection. "He had a tremendous confrontation with Hubbard at that meeting. How can he claim not to have any memory of it?"

It beggars belief that anyone who sat in a room while a proposal to assassinate eight US Senators for political purposes would not instantly recall the conversation at any point in their life. It also demonstrates a weakness of character that Kerry chose to keep it quiet rather than warn law enforcement or even the Senators themselves of the plot; even though it got voted down, such a proposal could surely have still been carried out by a minority of the VVAW. Apparently, Kerry's street cred with the radical activists and his political career outweighed his sense of duty to his country and the lives of those eight men, who fortunately were never targeted.

Nor is it the only Post news article targeting Kerry's life story. Ann Gerhart notes the problems in the carefully-crafted narrative and points back to one of its authors, historian Douglas Brinkley. Interestingly, the focus on Brinkley has forced out another Kerry campaign lie, this one designed to keep Kerry's journals private by blaming Brinkley's demand for exclusivity, which Brinkley strongly denies:

For the past three weeks, the dominant issue of the presidential race has been not the war we are in now, but the war of 35 years ago. A group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth has been running television ads accusing Kerry of inflating or lying about his war record. Several of the men in that group said "Tour of Duty" enraged them and prompted their campaign. A best-selling book about their recollections, "Unfit for Command," tries to refute Brinkley's conclusions, charging Kerry with calculation and cowardice during his four months in battle.

The escalating attacks and counter-attacks find Brinkley, a 43-year-old presidential scholar at the University of New Orleans, trying to avoid collateral damage. ...

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."

I expected the media to eventually get closer to the truth on the Swiftvet group and John O'Neill, although I never expected the Los Angeles Times to take the lead in doing so. I am stunned that the Post has, after six months of silence, started reporting on the Phoenix Project. It signals the end of the media's honeymoon with John Kerry and serves as a call for open season on the Democrat's campaign narratives.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!

Niall Ferguson Misses The Point

Usually, OpinionJournal.com features well-written commentary from people serious about politics and the impact it has on the US. Once in a while, they toss in a piece that one suspects targets its readers just to gauge their reaction time. Saturday's edition appears to be more of the latter, as Niall Ferguson tries to argue that a Bush loss in November would actually benefit the GOP:

It is doubtless not the most tactful question to ask on the eve of the Republican convention, but might it not be better for American conservatism if George W. Bush failed to win a second term?

Yes, I know, the official GOP line is that nothing could possibly be as bad for the U.S. as a Kerry presidency. According to the Bush campaign, John Kerry's record of vacillation and inconsistency in the Senate would make him a disastrously indecisive POTUS--an IMPOTUS, as it were. By contrast, they insist, Mr. Bush is decisiveness incarnate. And when this president makes a decision, he sticks to it with Texan tenacity (no matter how wrong it turns out to be). ...

To be sure, there are many tendencies in American political life that will not be fundamentally affected by the outcome of November's election. For example, contrary to what Mr. Kerry claimed in his convention speech, there are profound structural causes for the widening rift between the U.S. and its erstwhile allies on the European Continent that no new president could possibly counteract. And regardless of whether Mr. Bush or Mr. Kerry is in the White House next year, the U.S. will still be stuck with the dirty work of policing post-Saddam Iraq with minimal European assistance other than from Britain--which, by the same token, will remain America's most reliable military ally regardless of whether Mr. Bush or Mr. Kerry is in the White House.

Nor would the election of Mr. Kerry have the slightest impact on the ambition of al Qaeda to inflict harm on the U.S. Even if Americans elected Michael Moore as president, Osama bin Laden would remain implacable.

This passage at the beginning of the article signals to experienced WSJ readers that we will experience an unserious discussion with a seriously unserious writer. Of course it doesn't make a difference to Osama who gets elected, in terms of his ambition. It makes a great deal of difference, however, in terms of his success. Does Ferguson not understand the difference? It hearkens back to the liberal whine of "Why do they hate us?" as being the single most important issue in facing terrorism, instead of "Where are they so we can kill them first?"

So the first fundamental problem with Ferguson's piece is that he can't distinguish between "ambition" and its successful implementation. That basically flows from a cynical and childish view of politics in general, where the point of running a campaign now isn't to win now. Apparently the point is winning later, and the consequences be damned.

In his European example, he correctly deduces that the US-EU rift has little to do with personalities and everything to do with competing interests. He suggests that we elect the stiff who doesn't understand that instead of the incumbent that already does, so we can hold the stiff to one term. However, did it occur to Ferguson that the stiff might make a lot of foreign-policy and security decisions in error before having the scales finally fall from his eyes? Four years in a war is one hell of a long time to wait for a grown-up to return to the Oval Office, and while it might result in a stronger GOP, it likely would also result in a lot of dead Americans.

Ferguson tries to use 1990s Britain as an example of the damage re-electing a weak executive can do to a party, but Ferguson leaves out several key issues that don't match up at all to the British example:

1. We are at war. Britain was not.
2. Britain's Parliamentary system creates pressure to form a moderate executive with legislators from more than one party, which gives both parties some input into the way the executive develops policy. The American system is winner-take-all.
3. In the next term, the President can reasonably expect to name at least two and possibly four Supreme Court nominees as current Justices retire. That opportunity comes once in a generation.

But Ferguson's entire approach bothers me. He treats the election as if it were an end in itself, a shallow and valueless approach to politics that debases and devalues the honest tension between governing philosophies. Quite frankly, I don't vote or not vote for a candidate because of some Machiavellian calculation that a loss here means a big landslide in 2016 for Tim Pawlenty. I vote for candidates who represent my values and philosophy for leadership, and I always want them to win now. Otherwise, I wind up with leadership that passes laws and regulations that I don't want.

In short, I vote to be governed the way I see fit, and it matters a great deal to me when I don't get it. What I deduce from Ferguson's article is that he thinks it doesn't matter much who wins or loses except for the won-loss column itself. If that's true, then why bother playing the game at all?

NYT: Alleged Israeli Spy No Influence On American Policy

When CBS broke the news earlier this evening that the FBI had investigated a high-ranking assistant in the Defense Department on suspicion of espionage on behalf of Israel, the immediate suspicion was that Israel may have unduly influenced American security policy in the Middle East, especially Iraq. Later revelations that the suspect worked as a staffer with contacts to Paul Wolfowitz and other so-called neocons seemed to reinforce that notion. However, the New York Times now reports that the staffer was a desk officer working in Douglas Feith's office and had no influence on policy development:

The espionage investigation has focused on an official who works in the office of Douglas Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy, officials who have been briefed about the investigation said. The F.B.I. has gathered evidence that the official passed classified policy documents to officials at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a major pro-Israeli lobbying group, which in turn provided the information to Israeli intelligence, the officials said. ...

In a statement released Friday night, the Pentagon said that the Department of Defense "has been cooperating fully with the Department of Justice on this matter for an extended period of time."

"The investigation involves a single individual at D.O.D. at the desk officer level, who was not in a position to have significant influence over U.S. policy," the statement continued. "Nor could a foreign power be in a position to influence U.S. policy through this individual. To the best of D.O.D.'s knowledge, the investigation does not target any other D.O.D. individuals.''

One United States official said that he did not know why the desk officer would have passed on the information and that he could not assess the potential damage. "He had a certain expertise and had access to things, but he wasn't a policymaker," the official said.

Such reports won't quell the anti-Semitic rants of the lunatic fringe, such as independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader, who has spewed his venom regarding the insidious nature of Israel's control over successive US administrations. (Curiously, the American government is supposedly 'owned' by Israel and Saudi Arabia simultaneously. No wonder nothing ever gets done around here.) Since the Times' James Risen indicates the material accessed regards Iran and the threat assessments of the Islamicist regime, it seems safer to assume that (if true) the Israelis wanted to get classified information that the US had developed to shape Israeli policy and military preparedness, not influence American policy.

Has anyone mentioned Jonathan Pollard lately? I rather doubt that, if this turns out to be true, that Pollard will get any leniency from this administration. Bush likely won't take kindly to both the espionage and the incompetence used to employ it.

Lipscomb: US Navy Disputes Kerry Combat Awards

An old friend of the Northern Alliance, reporter Thomas Lipscomb (who broke the stories of the Phoenix Project shortly after Kerry took control of the primaries), writes in today's Chicago Sun-Times that the US Navy disputes the records that John Kerry insists backs up his combat stories:

In the midst of the controversy between the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth and Kerry campaign representatives about Kerry's service in Vietnam, new questions have arisen. The Kerry campaign has repeatedly stated that the official Naval records prove the truth of Kerry's assertions about his service.

But the official Naval records on Kerry's website only add to the confusion. The DD214 form, an official Department of Defense document summarizing Kerry's military career, posted on johnkerry.com, includes a "Silver Star with Combat V." But according to a spokesman for the US Navy, "Kerry's record is incorrect. The Navy has never issued a "Combat V" to anyone for a Silver Star." The Naval Regulations do not allow for the use of a Combat V for the Silver Star, the third highest decoration the Navy awards. None of the other services have ever granted a "Combat V" for the Silver Star either. ...

B. G. Burkett, a Vietnam veteran himself, received the highest award the Army gives to a civilian, the Distinguished Civilian Service Award, for his book STOLEN VALOR. Burkett pored through thousands of military service records uncovering phony claims of awards and fake claims of military service. " I've run across several claims for Silver Stars with Combat Vs, but they were were all in fake records." Burkett recently filed a complaint that led last month to the sentencing of a Navy Captain, Roger D. Edwards, to 115 days in the brig for falsification of his records.

Seeveral of you have written to me today regarding Lipscomb's article, which breaks into the open a number of questions being asked in hushed tones around the blogosphere this past week. It shows that the Kerry campaign's hopes of the story burning itself out has not worked out, and that his full frontal attack on the Swiftvets themselves have only served to sell more papers and draw more viewers. And while the media may favor Kerry over George Bush, they favor money most of all.

It's worth noting, as again several of you have in your e-mails to me, the fact that Admiral Jeremy Boorda took his own life when Newsweek questioned his Combat V award on his Bronze Star. Kerry noted the following at the time of Boorda's suicide (hat tip to Joshua Sharf, who covered this three days ago):

"Is it wrong? Yes, it is very wrong. Sufficient to question his leadership position? The answer is yes, which he clearly understood," said Sen. John Kerry, a Navy combat veteran who served in Vietnam. - Boston Herald, May 18, 1996

"The military is a rigorous culture that places a high premium on battlefield accomplishment," said Sen. John F. Kerry, who received numerous decorations, including a Bronze Star with a "V" pin, as a Navy lieutenant in Vietnam.

"In a sense, there's nothing that says more about your career than when you fought, where you fought and how you fought," Kerry said.

"If you wind up being less than what you're pretending to be, there is a major confrontation with value and self-esteem and your sense of how others view you."

Of Boorda and his apparent violation, Kerry said: "When you are the chief of them all, it has to weigh even more heavily." (Emphasis added) - Boston Globe, May 18, 1996

Be sure to read all of Lipscomb's article -- if you can. I understand the demand was so heavy at the Sun-Times earlier today that the server crashed. Do you think that may signal other mainstream media outlets that interest in this issue is not going away?

Little Saigon Is Not Kerry Country

Being a Southern California native and having spent a good portion of my adult life in Orange County, I have more than a passing familiarity with an area known as Little Saigon in the cities of Garden Grove, Westminster, and a small piece of Santa Ana. In fact, I used to live within a few blocks of the area when I was a single young Captain. (I categorically deny ever conducting clandestine missions down Brookhurst Avenue; however, I did get a lucky hat from a guy who claimed to be CIA ... as well as an extra-terrestrial.)

Pete Peterson writes an excellent article in today's American Spectator on the thriving community of Vietnamese ex-patriates who came to the US on barely sea-worthy boats and built themselves a commercial empire in California's most conservative area. Peterson himself, according to the article, frequents coffee bars in the area. It comes as no surprise to me that Peterson reports that the Vietnamese diaspora in Orange County harbor no love for John Kerry, and not just for his role in ensuring Saigon's collapse:

In "America's Most Republican County" (350 elected officials; registration 48.5% Rep./30.6% Dem.) Senator Kerry is considered a traitor to the Vietnamese cause. His anti-war antics that helped launch a thousand boats, coupled with his shelving of the 2001 Vietnam Human Rights Act (a litmus test for a majority of Vietnamese no matter what party), gives President Bush a golden opportunity to woo an often overlooked minority voting block.

"Kerry's action burned bridges nationwide" within the Vietnamese community, according to Garden Grove councilman and Republican California State Assembly candidate Van Tran. Sponsored in the House by Christopher Smith and co-sponsored by the unlikely bipartisan duo of Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) and Loretta Sanchez (D-CA, whose district crosses into Little Saigon), the human rights act passed by a margin of 410-1. Kerry, then ranking member of the Senate subcommittee on East Asian and Pacific Affairs, did not allow the legislation to come to the floor for a vote.

This bill came to the Senate in 2001, the year after Kerry supported UMass-Boston's hiring of two 'scholars' from the People's Republic of Viet Nam to study the mass migration of people from the misery their government caused, rather than hiring people from within the American Vietnamese refugee communities. Squelching this bill the next year when it obviously had tremendous bipartisan agreement in the house reinforces both Kerry's reputation as an extremist in the Senate and suspicions of his sympathies with the Communist regime currently running Viet Nam.

Both qualities tend to play poorly in Little Saigon, where Peterson recalls the case of a video-rental shopkeeper who enraged the community by displaying a large Communist Viet Nam flag in his store. Not only did his action bring numerous protests (and eventually lead to the discovery of his video bootlegging operation), but it also inspired the Vietnamese in Little Saigon to become more politically active. They plan on using that clout to keep John Kerry from becoming president in order to ensure that he cannot further embolden the regime that forced them to flee across the ocean to America.

Do not underestimate the determination of these people. I recall clearly when they began to arrive, broke and and in poor health from their treatment in Viet Nam and their horrific journey. I was in high school and their massive settlement in the heart of Orange County clearly unnerved residents in the area. When the immigrants began putting up shop signs in Vietnamese without even the pretense of an English translation, debate raged about slums, gangs, and the pressure of crimes and the drain on public-safety resources. Some of these issues did arise, especially early on.

Now, however, the area mostly thrives and demonstrates the power of the American economic system. These refugees had experience in capitalist economies -- it was one of the main issues in their civil war, after all -- and they had the desire to carve out a life based on private enterprise rather than the public dole. In fact, they could serve as sterling examples of what George Bush means when he speaks about "ownership societies". They built their businesses almost from scratch, bought their own houses and apartments, and now enthusiastically embrace the notion of personal responsibility and grasping the reins of one's own destiny.

As an example, Peterson notes that Little Saigon's newfound confidence in its own political power got a boost this spring when they took on the government that killed hundreds of thousands of their families and friends:

THE LATEST NEWS OUT OF Little Saigon was the passing of two ordinances in May of this year, one each in Westminster and Garden Grove, which declared both cities "communist-free zones." The communist Vietnamese government had been planning a charm mission to Little Saigon (as well as other expat communities), to promote "Resolution 36," which seeks to define the government's relationship with those communities. The resolution, passed in March, defines the Diaspora as inferior to the homeland, and requires it to support the current regime for its ultimate success (in other words, "send us your money"). The mission was subsequently scrubbed, at least in Orange County. Since then a number of other communities have enacted similar communist-free zoning acts.

A people this energized and motivated will not easily be cowed by the stentorian tones of John Kerry, nor will they accept an outcome which leaves Kerry free to conduct the foreign policy of the United States in order to suck up to their former Communist jailers in Viet Nam. People have been betting against the denizens of Little Saigon for almost 30 years. Those of us who've seen what they can do when united in purpose and pride know better.

Thanks A Million

If you scroll down far enough, on the right sidebar, our Sitemeter hit counter just went over 1,000,000 visitors tonight. Captain's Quarters is also now in the Top 25 of the Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem, at the Mortal Human level.

I have too many people to thank, but here's a list to start:

Hugh Hewitt
Instapundit
My Northern Alliance colleagues at Power Line, Fraters Libertas, Mitch, King, James
Jon Henke
The Commissar
Sean

... and many, many other, such as all of the blogs on my blogrolls, especially the Northern Fleet, the locals in the Upper Midwest. It's been a blast, and better days are still ahead.

Addendum: I got a nice note from The Anchoress, a new blogger who tells me she was inspired by CQ. Drop by and leave her a comment. Here's an example of the pithy writing I enjoy:

Oh, and the anarchists plan to demonstrate in Central Park even without permission. Just because they've been told not to, it seems. I understand. I was 14 once, too.

Happily, I grew up.

And became a blogger? Oh, dear ...

Lo, How The Mighty Have Fallen (UPDATE!)

As many of you know, being fans of Hugh Hewitt as I am, that the Lord High Commissioner has paid us Minnesotans the honor of a visit and two remote shows from the biggest state fair in America. Hugh came into town this morning with Michael Medved (who brought his lovely family along with him), and both accepted a challenge by the gang at Fraters Libertas to joust at Keegan's Pub in their Thursday night trivia challenge.

Hugh knew that he faced the buzzsaw that is the Fraters gang at trivia, since they win almost every week at Keegan's (also a new Northern Alliance sponsor). He prepared his team carefully -- he picked Michael Medved and his wife along with James Lileks, while the Elder, Brian "Saint Paul" Ward and the Atomizer picked up a ringer, Mike Nelson of Mystery Science Theater 3000. When the dust settled, the two teams of trivia titans wound up with a draw, at 14.

But that's not the end of the story.

The Lord High Commissioner did not count on other members of the Northern Alliance taking part in this battle, and foolishly scoffed at their last minute entry. This third team consisted of Mitch Berg, Chumley Wonderbar, Kevin from The Patriot, and yours truly, Captain Ed, and we called ourselves the Leftovers. Hugh felt so secure in his assured victory that he challenged our motley group to a wager. If he outscored us, he would take control of our blogs for a day. If we outscored him, then we would take control of the nerve center of the Hugh Hewitt media empire for a day, firing off missives to the well-oiled machine comprised by the Commissioner's minions around the world.

Plus, there was one significant side bet that Hugh could not resist.

How did this turn out? Well, the Little Leftovers That Could wound up scoring a 17, good enough for second place overall and trouncing the Dream Team. We knew how many stitches there were in a baseball (108), the definition of helmithphobia (fear of worms), and the current won-loss records for the Cleveland Indians (64-64) and the Twins (71-55). We even smoked Medved on a movie question, for Pete's sake! In what movie did Clint Eastwood say, "Go ahead -- make my day"? Sudden Impact ... not Magnum Force, as Team Hewitt answered. (To be fair, Medved traveled all day, and his wife flew in from Tel Aviv early this morning and probably hadn't slept in 30 hours.)

And take a good look at this picture of The Leftovers, which clockwise from top left is Chumley, Kevin, Mitch, and myself with the jacket and cap on.

Take a good look at the cap.

That's right -- Hugh got beaten by a Pittsburgh Steelers fan. And that little side bet? Hugh has to wear my cap for the Saturday show at the Minnesota State Fair. Be sure to tune in on The Patriot or on our Internet stream to listen to the wails of agony, especially when I turn on the fiber-optic lighted logo. (No, I'm not kidding.) And be sure to check in on Captain's Quarters, where I will post a picture of Hugh wearing it.

If he goes the whole hour wearing it, I'll do something to compensate him for his pain, but don't tell him that.

FLASH UPDATE, 8/27 8:09 PM: Hugh's claiming that Chumley Wonderbar has made some sort of statement against interest that absolves Hugh of following through on his bet. All I can see on Chumley's post is a lot of the same classless bragging in which I indulged above ... so you have to tune in tomorrow to the Northern Alliance Radio Network in order to hear the thrilling conclusion of this deepening legal mystery! (Roger L. Simon, please contact us -- we may need your expertise.) Don't forget to enable pop-ups in order for the stream to work properly.

And Hugh ... I'm Bringing It (the cap) On!

I like Hugh's suggestion in his post for a Vegas trivia tournament for bloggers, but they should remove their Internet access when we arrive. No one will come down to the casinos -- we'll all be sitting in our rooms, writing biting commentary in our underwear. It's what we do, after all.

Why Can't Kossy Read?

After the Wall Street Journal published its profile of the accredited bloggers to the Republican National Convention, I expected a bit of blogosphere critique on the selections. After all, with so many excellent bloggers to be found, arguments can be made for inclusion at the expense of any of us who were fortunate enough to be chosen for the privilege.

What I didn't expect was silly, superficial, and factually deficient crabbing like this found at the Daily Kos, this one from Kos himself. Here's Kos' idea of insightful commentary:

Boy, did those conservative bloggers whine, whine, whine when the Big Bad DNC didn't accredit enough of them at our convention. Yet the Democratic Party did invite several conservatives, as well as non-political tech-focused bloggers. None of that at the RNC convention. Not that they should allow Dem bloggers in (I was always clear that only partisan bloggers should've been admitted to the DNC convention), but boy, I remember all that whining. Yet suddenly, those same dufuses aren't so concerned about ideological litmus tests anymore.

Oh, and are there any prominent non-white conservative bloggers. That's a pasty bunch.

Apparently, Kos either can't read or chooses not to, since at least one blogger profiled -- Brian Reich -- publicly stated that he intended to vote for Kerry. As far as I recall, that is one more than the DNC bloggers who proclaimed a solid choice for Bush. Another, David Adesnik, has not made up his mind, while a third chose to keep his decision to himself. Nor is this list complete, as Elizabeth Weinstein did not get responses from all of the RNC bloggers, as she notes in her sidebar:

Accredited bloggers who responded to our questionnaire. Links go to their entry.

Kos asserts that "the Democrats invited several conservatives," neglecting to mention that most were disinvited shortly afterwards. Bill from INDC Journal lost a few hundred dollars in non-refundable travel expenses thanks to that flip-flop from a disorganized organizing committee.

Finally, Kos tries to ignite a little racist war by noting the complexions of those bloggers who sent pictures as a subset of those who responded to the Wall Street Journal's profile requests. Three profiles don't have accompanying photographs of the bloggers. But more importantly, we weren't asked our ethnicity when we applied. It's not like we're on TV, and most of us don't display our picture on our website, at least not on top. All Kos had to do was ask one of us how we got picked, but instead of actually finding out how it was handled, he prefers to just call people bigots instead.

Mean-spirited, ignorant, and lazy -- Kos gives you everything the hard Left has to offer.

McCain-Feingold Finance Reform An Abject Failure

The current presidential election provides the first real-time test of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reforms signed into law during this term of office. Its advocates lauded the bill's restrictions on so-called "soft money" -- a designation from previous and unsuccessful campaign finance reform efforts -- from flowing into political parties which used it to support their candidates indirectly through issue advertising. They promised it would keep floods of money from influencing voter choice. Its critics decried the potential for the law to be used as a club to curtail political speech.

It's apparent that the critics were correct.

Today's editorial in the Washington Post notes that despite the new McCain-Feingold laws, money has poured into this election like never before, both in soft money to outside interest groups and hard money donated directly to candidates. The numbers stagger the imagination; in just four years, both parties doubled their hard-money donations (Democrats to $230 million, Republicans to $381 million), while soft-money donations to 527s has exploded. These tax-exempt groups, which supposedly are not suppposed to campaign to influence voting for any specific candidate, have raised $154 million, a whopping 94% going to Democratic 527s, surpassing their soft-money collection for all of 2000.

However, unlike when the soft money went to political parties that had transparent responsibility for its advertising, the 527s have made accountability for its use of the money a thing of the past. This electoral cycle has seen advertising that once would only have appeared on homemade signs carried by fringe groups, and due to the heavily Democratic nature of the money, the abuses have mostly occurred on the left side of the political spectrum. Advertising bought with soft money and created by 527s have compared George Bush to Adolf Hitler and cast Republicans as the new Nazis. A wartime president has been undermined by the constant accusation of desertion despite all evidence and eyewitnesses that confirmed his honorable service.

More recently, the Democrats have complained about the small 527 of Viet Nam veterans speaking out against John Kerry and calling his service record into question. Instead of ignoring it or producing evidence to refute the allegations, as Bush did with the specious AWOL charges, Democrats have used McCain-Feingold to silence the veterans from speaking out at all. They accused Republicans of "illegal coordination" with the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (a charge the Republicans had also made against the Democrats and other 527s earlier on), but also tried to use McCain-Feingold as a club with which to batter their publisher and bookstores to censor their bestselling book, Unfit For Command.

Is this what we wanted from campaign finance reform? A situation where political advertisements are broadcast with no clear responsibility, where political parties have to spend their time not coordinating with like-minded entities to make a strong case for their policies, and where publishers and bookstores are threatened with legal action if they conduct the honorable business of publishing political speech? And all the while, we stand by and watch the soft-money donations explode, with multimillionaires like George Soros able to float millions into shadow campaigns.

It's far past time to admit the obvious. When accountability is removed from the political parties, it frees up people to run all sorts of shadow campaigns -- and if this cycle the Democrats have had the advantage, the next cycle it could just as well be the Republicans. Instead of transparency, political campaigns have become even more opaque, and voters have no idea what, if any, connections can be made by so-called smear campaigns and the candidates they intend to benefit. And when national candidates and their campaigns start calling for books to be banned, then the worst fears of First Amendment violations have been realized.

We need to put an end to the silly distinctions between "soft" and "hard" money, and instead insist on transparency. If George Soros wants to sink $15 million into Kerry's campaign, let him do so directly and let's hold Kerry accountable for its use. If the Swiftvets want to write a book with documentary evidence of Kerry's malfeasance and a publisher wants to print it, let them abide by libel laws and allow the market to determine their viability. Otherwise, all sides will continue to charge forward in political debate to the lowest possible level in order to out-smear the other without any accountablity and without any recourse, and the electorate, already demoralized, will lose faith in and respect for our democratic institutions. For a nation under attack by fascists and religious fanatics, such an outcome will be fatal to our liberty in the long run.

Patterico Continues To Keep The LA Times Honest

One of my good blogfriends, Patterico from Patterico's Pontifications, has done remarkable work over a long period of time documenting the bias and carelessness that has become routine for the Los Angeles Times. When the paper asserted last week that none of the Swiftvets had ever served on Kerry's boat, Patterico complained to the paper about the inaccuracy on his blog and in a letter to the Times' readers rep, Jamie Gold:

Dear Ms. Gold,

A front-page story in today's L.A. Times titled "Kerry Starts Firing Back at Critics of War Record" (August 20) states: "None of the men in the Swift boat group behind the anti-Kerry ad, including [Larry] Thurlow, served on Kerry's patrol boat during the war."

This is not true.

As an article in your paper's August 17 edition acknowledges, Steven Gardner, a member of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, served on one of Kerry's patrol boats during the war.

This merits a correction.

Finally, seven days later and only after Instapundit noted their refusal to acknowledge Patterico's factual refutation of the most significant argument against the Swiftvets, the LA Times ran this correction:

Swift boat ads — An article in Section A on Aug. 20 about Sen. John F. Kerry's response to a veterans group critical of his military record stated that none of the members of the group served on Kerry's patrol boat in Vietnam. Steve Gardner, a member of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, was a Kerry crewmate. He was not on Kerry's boat during the incidents for which Kerry was awarded medals.

Even that correction elides the truth behind their error, which is not a minor point. Steve Gardner provided critical refutation to what has been the most significant blow to John Kerry's narrative -- the Cambodian Christmas fable. He served on Kerry's boat during that period of time and has stated on numerous occasions that PCF-44 never went into Cambodia on Christmas Eve or any other day while Gardner was on board. Gardner's unassailable testimony forced the Kerry campaign to backtrack (for the first of many times) and attempt to re-spin the Cambodia excursion into January, then February, and finally March in order to escape Gardner's testimony. To insinuate that Gardner's only value to the Swiftvets regards the legitimacy of Kerry's medals is still to deliberately hide information from the readers of the Los Angeles Times.

But kudos again to Patterico, who continues to shine the light on John Carroll and his advocacy enterprise. He's absolutely invaluable, and any Los Angeles Times reader who isn't checking out Patterico daily misses the antidote to the Times' poisoned perspective.

Score One For Sistani

Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani scored a huge political victory and put the Allawi government further in his debt today by accomplishing what they could not do alone -- force rebel cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi army to both abandon the Imam Ali shrine and disarm, according to this Reuters report:

Shi'ite fighters left the holiest shrine in the Iraqi city of Najaf Friday and began turning in their weapons, after tens of thousands of pilgrims celebrated a peace agreement that ended a bloody rebellion. Religious authorities locked the doors of the Imam Ali mosque after the Mehdi Army militia of radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr left. The fighters had defied U.S. military firepower and the interim Iraqi government for three weeks. ...

Militants tossed AK-47 assault rifles and mortar launchers into wooden carts being pushed around near the shrine. Mosque loudspeaker announcements in Sadr's name gave the order. Al Arabiya television said Sadr's representatives had handed over the keys to the mosque, Iraq's holiest Shi'ite shrine.

A Reuters correspondent there said Iraqi police took control of the area around the mosque, as envisaged under the deal.

Over the past three weeks, while Allawi and the US Marine Corps' Najaf contingent lay siege to Sadr's militia, Sadr had brokered several cease-fire agreements, which he promptly violated. For most of that time, Allawi threatened to storm the mosque, a move which would have ultimately been his undoing, at least politically, while being completely necessary militarily. The Marines provided the protection necessary for the Iraqis to act, and so American prestige was also involved. And Sadr continued to vacillate between annihilation and surrender.

Sistani managed to succeed where all others failed, and don't think that will go unnoticed in an area of the globe where power only matters when it makes a difference. Not only did he broker the deal, but Sistani managed to get Sadr to actually follow through on his promise -- for now. He gave up the shrine, which was the only asset he had left and the only protection from the overwhelming Iraqi-American military force in Najaf. Sistani claimed control of the shrine and relieved the Mahdis of most of their weapons. Sadr gets to live another day and either transform his movement into a political party or try to regroup for further rebellion.

So who are the winners and losers from this confrontation? It will be endlessly debated over the next few weeks, and events may change all analyses, but I think a few issues are clear:

Allawi - Loser. He may get points from the West for his nuanced approach and openness to peaceful arbitration from Sistani, but the Iraqis will remember that Allawi couldn't effectively respond when Sadr reneged on previous agreements. Granted, the storming of the mosque and the inevitable damage done would have made Allawi highly unpopular, but it would have demonstrated some confidence and power. Allawi doesn't need the respect of the West. He needs the respect of the Iraqis, and this episode will only reinforce an image of weakness in the interim government.

Sadr - Loser. He's alive, and for a 30-year-old incompetent rebel, that's an accomplishment, but that's about all he can claim. Even that may not last long, as his more fervent rebels may resent being disarmed at the holy shrine they swore to defend. For the third time, Sadr has been stymied from creating a popular Shi'ite uprising, and in the end he wound up only irritating the people he intended to inspire. He lost hundreds if not thousands of militia to death and capture and gave up most of his weapons. He's been exposed as a pretender as both an insurrectionist and a general.

America - Draw. We made it clear from the start that the Marine contingent was only deployed in support of Allawi's initiative, unlike in Fallujah where we clearly went out on our own after the brutal murder and desecration of four American contractors. We had also made clear that we would not attack the shrine. Everywhere else, however, we tore apart Sadr's militia and suffered relatively few casualties as a result. The Marines, as always, performed magnificently.

However, since we hitched the mission itself to Allawi, we will share in the damage to his prestige. After all, although Allawi was not our choice to lead Iraq, the interim government structure was one of American and British design, with UN Security Council modification. Their failure to secure important areas, and arguably whole cities, from pirate 'governments' run by religious zealots underscores a weakness that may be understandable from a process point of view but which won't play well with a shellshocked population. In a time of instability, people look to power and align themselves with it for their own protection. If Allawi can't demonstrate power within the interim government, Iraqis will lose faith in it and him rather quickly.

Which brings us back to the only real winner in Najaf, Ali al-Sistani. Sistani has resisted involving himself in Iraqi politics and focused instead on religious and social matters, and it was on this nominal basis that he stepped in to resolve the Najaf crisis. The question remains as to how long he will resist the urge to seize civil power as well as the moral authority he has obviously built among the overwhelming majority of Iraq's Shi'a. So far, Allawi and the US have been fortunate that Sistani has refrained from doing so. Any more confrontations over mosques in Iraq may lead to different conclusions.

UPDATE: I've been informed by CQ reader Dan H that a significant portion of the fighting in Najaf has been handled by US Army and not just Marine Corps. I don't mean to leave out the fine soldiers of the Army -- you men and women make us all proud.

Bush Overtaking Kerry In Key Battleground States: LA Times

The Los Angeles Times' Ron Brownstein reported yesterday on the state results from the Times' poll, whose national results showed George Bush ahead for the first time in their polling. Three key battleground state that both candidates have campaigned hard to win now have moved towards Bush, with the convention right around the corner:

According to the surveys, Bush has opened leads within the margin of error in Ohio, Wisconsin and Missouri — states at the top of both campaigns' priority lists.

In Missouri, Bush leads among registered voters 46% to 44%; in Wisconsin, he leads 48% to 44%; and in Ohio, the president holds a 49% to 44% advantage, the surveys found. ...

In 2000, Al Gore carried Wisconsin by fewer than 6,000 votes; Bush won Missouri by almost 80,000 votes and Ohio by almost 167,000 votes.

All three states have attracted enormous spending on television ads from the two candidates and the independent groups supporting them.

Times polls in June showed Kerry and Bush tied in Wisconsin, Kerry holding a statistically insignificant one-point advantage in Ohio, and the president leading 48% to 42% in Missouri. Compared to those numbers, the race has tightened somewhat in Missouri and edged slightly toward Bush in Wisconsin and Ohio.

Bear in mind that these results come from the LA Times, which routinely oversamples Democrats in its polling. If the Times says that a Republican has edged ahead, you can bet that Kerry's internal polling shows something significantly worse. One fact is certain: Kerry cannot afford to lose Wisconsin. He has to hang on to every Gore state and make at least one pickup in order to beat Bush. It looks like all of Kerry's post-convention momentum, though, has been backwards.

Getting The Green Bay Pickers Fan Vote

Thank goodness that we have John Kerry on the stump to distract us from ... John Kerry on the run from his Viet Nam narrative. In yet another cringe-inducing moment regarding sports, Kerry managed to goof up the name of one of the NFL's shrines in its home city (via Kerry Spot and a number of laughing fans at Keegan's last night):

On Wednesday, Kerry made his third visit to Green Bay, Wis., this year and made it a point to focus on the main thing the city revolves around: football and the Green Bay Packers. ...

Unfortunately, during the event, Kerry fumbled for a second time, though this one didn't involve a football. As he was taking questions from the audience, he referred to the legendary Packers stadium, Lambeau Field (which has been called that for 39 years) as "Lambert Field."

If the voters catch wind of that gaffe, it could take Kerry another three visits to Green Bay to make up for it.

Kerry, who has his picture playing some sort of proletarian sport at every opportunity, went to Green Bay specifically intending to invoke the ghost of Vince Lombardi and to pay homage to Green Bay's pride and joy -- the Packers and their storied (and recently renovated) home, Lambeau Field. Lambeau Field was named after the Packers' legendary head coach, Curly Lambeau.

Lambert Field would have to be named after Jack Lambert, the legendary member of the Pittsburgh Steeler's defense in the 1970s, often referred to as the Steel Curtain. (I'm just sayin'...)

If you're going to Green Bay to talk football, especially as an analogy to your credibility as President, wouldn't you take the time to make sure you know something as basic as the name of the stadium? This isn't the first time that Kerry has displayed such careless incompetence regarding local sports, either. Earlier this month, while traveling in yet another swing state, Kerry endorsed the arch-rival team in front of an audience that turned hostile as a result:

If John Kerry loses Michigan, he will probably blame it on his joke writers, then Woody Hayes and the mighty Ohio State Buckeyes. But he only has himself to blame. He should have used that several-decade gap between his job in Vietnam and his job of running for president boning up on his knowledge of sports. ...

On Sunday and into Monday, Kerry hit Michigan, where he attempted to use the same Ohio jokes. Clearly, the sports humor has to be taken out of his hands before he really embarrasses himself.

"I just came here from Bowling Green," Kerry told the crowd to subdued applause. "I was smart enough not to pick a choice between the Falcons and the, well, you know, all those other teams out there. I just go for Buckeye football, that's where I'm coming from."

At that point, before all the boos began raining down upon him, Kerry seemed to realize his error. In an attempt to silent the angry crowd of University of Michigan supporters, Kerry said, "But that was while I was in Ohio. I know I'm in the state of Michigan and you got a great big M and a powerhouse of a team." Then his face, presumably, the Botox permitting, turned Big Blue.

These moments capture Kerry perfectly -- the patrician trying to relate to the prols in his interpretation of their language. It goes beyond carelessness to a certain phoniness that resonates more, although with less meaning, than a Cambodian Christmas fable. The condescension almost drips from Kerry's chin in using such metaphors while getting major details wrong. He makes discussing sports seem so effortful, while true fans know these details and understand what it means to get them wrong.

In short, these gaffes make Kerry look like a phony and a poseur. In a month where the Swiftvets have scored success after success in pointing out those exact character flaws, blowing the name of Lambeau Field while sucking up to Green Bay residents only reinforces that impression with the electorate.

UPDATE: Yeah, I corrected 'plebian' to 'patrician'. Danged pre-coffee blogging! (Hat tip to Connecticut Yankee)

UPDATE II: Oh, good Lord, I'm glad I'm not running for President. I misspelled 'Lombardi' for Pete's sake. Fixed it now, thanks to Touched the Obelisk. (This one was just a typo, though.)

This Explains A Lot

CNS News reports on a piece of John Kerry's testimony that, judging from my e-mail, explains a lot about the limited records that the Kerry campaign has released regarding his medals and the combat from which they came. While testifying to the Fulbright Commission, Kerry himself claimed authorship for many of the after-action reports:

Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry's 1971 testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee reveals that the then anti-war activist admitted to writing many of the battle reports during his four months of combat in Vietnam.

Kerry told the committee on April 22, 1971, "...I can recall often sending in the spot reports which we made after each mission..."

Kerry also said that many in the military had "a tendency to report what they want to report and see what they want to see."

Kerry's comments about the battle reports came in response to a question from then Senator Stuart Symington (D- Mo.), who wondered about the accuracy of information from military sources.

Did Kerry give in to that temptation to report what he wanted to report, or to report what he thought his command wanted to read? Kerry answered this question, too:

Sen. Symington asked Kerry, "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.[?]"

Kerry responded, "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.

Kerry later added, "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."

That sounds to me like a demurral. He said that his reports later on were exaggerated to the point that stretched recognition. This fits with Kerry's character; blaming as much on other people around him, and only admitting to mistakes when they can be cast in the noblest terms. He told the Senators that his reports were accurate when they left his hand, but his superiors dummied them up later on.

That, of course, calls into question the reliability of the after-action reports he's used to back his stories up. The Kerry campaign relied on these same reports to attack Larry Thurlow's recollection of the 13 March engagement; Thurlow claimed that no enemy fire accompanied the Rassman rescue, and that all of the gunfire came from the PCFs themselves in case the mine was a prelude to an ambush. When he read the citation, he said that he never submitted any such report, and in fact had been surprised to receive any medal for the action:

Thurlow's own Bronze Star citation states that there was "enemy small arms and automatic weapons fire" directed at "all units." But Thurlow believes his citation was based on Kerry's own account of the day.

"I am convinced that the language used in my citation ... was language taken directly from John Kerry's report," Thurlow said earlier this week. "John Kerry was the only officer who filed a report describing his version of the incident," Thurlow added.

The Washington Post summed up the controversy this way: "Much of the debate over who is telling the truth boils down to whether the two-page after-action report and other Navy records are accurate or whether they have been embellished by Kerry or someone else."

If Kerry is the only one who wrote an after-action report for 13 March, it means that Kerry's argument is nothing but circular. Who says that Kerry saved Rassmann under combat conditions? The records. Who wrote the records? John Kerry. They don't prove Kerry right -- and neither do they prove him a liar, either. They just mean nothing.

The lack of after-action reports from the other commanders, on the other hand, would speak volumes -- because if they took inbound fire, shouldn't each officer have filed a report?

Jib-Jab Song Parody Given Green Light

Good news for fans of political satire -- one of the funniest and most clever political animations this year will be back on the Internet, thanks to a settlement between JibJab Media and the publishers of Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land":

This song is my song, this song is your song. That's the agreement reached between the publishers of Woody Guthrie's classic "This Land is Your Land" and JibJab Media, creators of an animated Internet short that uses the tune in a comic sendup of President Bush and Sen. John Kerry's presidential campaigns.

With nary a jab thrown, Ludlow Music, the song's publisher, agreed in a settlement Tuesday to allow the cartoon — one of the biggest Internet draws of the summer — to keep using the song.

In return, JibJab dropped a lawsuit against Ludlow that sought an order saying its use of the song was protected because it was a parody and "This Land" was in the public domain.

JibJab agreed to donate 20% of all profit made from the cartoon to the Woody Guthrie Foundation, a classy settlement to a regretful spat that took one of the few unifying moments from this election out of the reach of a jaded electorate. I've watched this piece at least a half-dozen times and it keeps getting funnier every time I watch it. Make sure you get a look at it, and mention it to anyone with the ability to laugh at their own candidate as well as the other.

The Captain Goes Mainstream ... And Other News

After posting the long article to Captain's Quarters last night regarding John Kerry's endorsement of UMass-Boston's hiring of Communist 'scholars' from Viet Nam to study the mass flight of Vietnamese to the West, I wondered how the article would be received. I'm pleased to let all of you know that the New York Sun called this afternoon and bought the article for tomorrow's edition (August 26th). It's my first outright sale as a writer, and I couldn't be more pleased with the work that got selected or the newspaper that bought it. I'm hoping to continue my collaboration with the Sun in the future, as they've encouraged. When the article posts, I'll be sure to update this message with the link.

UPDATE: Here's the link, although I think you have to be a subscriber to get to this. If you're not a subscriber, though, you should be -- they've done a wonderful job in really putting a newspaper on the Internet. My article takes up the middle three columns on Page 9 and is sandwiched between columns by R. Emmett Tyrell and Bruce Bartlett and bounded below by Claudia Rosett. Tough company!

That's not the only New York connection for Captain's Quarters tonight. The Wall Street Journal has an article on the Republican convention bloggers on its site, and it's outside the subscription barrier so everyone can use it as a scorecard for next week. I get to join such luminaries as Hugh Hewitt, Roger L. Simon, and a handful of truly fine bloggers. Make sure you read all about us.

Regarding comments: I may be reconsidering my choice about foregoing Typepad registration as a requirement, as the trolls continue to invade the ship and the spam threatens to swamp us. Please make sure you register with Typepad in the next few days, as I will probably be forced to require it for commenting.

And on e-mails: I love getting e-mail, but please, my bandwidth has enough of a load without people sending me full HTML replicas of their blog posts or articles. Please just send a link and a short description of the article so I can take a look at it. Even a long description is just fine.

Thanks for all your support and help!

Kerry Campaign Undermines First Purple Heart Story -- Again

Alert CQ reader Martin points out that the "clarifications" continually being offered by the Kerry campaign are boxing John Kerry into more and more contradictions in his Viet Nam narrative. Yesterday, in response to the revelation of Kerry's 11 December journal entry in which he wrote that "we had not yet been shot at" despite later putting himself in for a Purple Heart for a wound suffered on 2 December, a campaign spokesperson attempted this explanation:

A Kerry campaign official, speaking on background, told The Washington Times yesterday that the "we" in the passage from Mr. Kerry's journal refers to "the crew on Kerry's first swift boat, operating as a crew" rather than Mr. Kerry himself.

"John Kerry didn't yet have his own boat or crew on December 2," according to the aide. "Other members of the crew had been in Vietnam for some time and had been shot at and Kerry knew that at the time. However, the crew had not yet been fired on while they served together on PCF 44 under Lieutenant Kerry."

Mr. Kerry's campaign could not say definitively whether he did receive enemy fire that day.

That weak explanation won't hold water. First off, the 11 December statement, reported by Kerry's own biographer, was written into Kerry's personal journal, not an official Navy report. It described the feeling of cockiness each of them had in their trip to their first assignment, and he attributed that cockiness to not having yet been in a firefight, and he attributed that to himself as well as the men with him. To claim that Kerry used a rhetorical, reverse-royal "We" that specifically excluded Kerry shows the desperation and the remarkable consistency of the Democrats. They're back to debating two-letter words of plain English.

Taking this explanation a step further, however, the Kerry campaign just undermined its earlier argument that Kerry had been the only officer on board the Boston whaler at the 2 December incident. Earlier, when now-Admiral William Schachte insisted that he had been on the boat with Kerry and that no inbound fire of any kind occured that evening, Kerry produced two witnesses who insisted that they could not recall anyone else but the three of them being on board (Zaldonis and Runyon). However, if you accept Kerry's new explanation for his journal entry, then Kerry asserts (correctly) that he had no command assignment prior to PCF-44.

Then who was the OinC on the Boston Whaler?

Here's what John O'Neill said about that in his interview with David Limbaugh (emphasis mine):

John O’Neill: We have to distinguish two things. First, two crewmen, Zaldonis and Runyon, both say that they did not see any hostile fire and do not know if there was any or not. That is my understanding of their current story. At least that is how they are quoted in Tour of Duty and other books. They say that they and Kerry were the only ones on the boat and they say Schachte was not present on the boat. Now, that is a different matter from what they told Dr. Letson and Grant Hibbard all those years ago.

David: As to Schachte or just as to the hostile fire?

John O’Neill: As to the hostile fire.

David: Okay.

John O’Neill: Admiral Schachte places himself on the boat. He was the acting Judge Advocate General of the Navy and was an Admiral in the Navy. In fact, the policies would have required his presence because an officer in charge had to be present on the boat. In addition to Schachte placing himself there, there are a variety of other witnesses that all place him on that same boat.

David: First hand knowledge witnesses, right?

John O’Neill: Correct, first hand knowledge witnesses. People on the PCF that accompanied the boat, as well as people back at base at that time. People like Ted Peck who was a fellow officer in charge of a boat.

So now we have placed Schachte back on the skimmer with Kerry on 2 December and his testimony becomes that much stronger. And Schachte insists that no hostile fire occurred on 2 December, negating the entire basis for Kerry's Purple Heart. Meanwhile, Kerry's explanations become more and more tortured, and they still refuse to release the entirety of the records. They have not even produced an after-action report for 2 December that would support any indication of inbound enemy fire. Why? From all indications, it doesn't exist.

The more Kerry and his campaign staff try to explain away the contradictions, the deeper they dig themselves. Small wonder Kerry begged George Bush to change the subject this week.

New Evidence Of Bush's Collusion With ... The Kerry Campaign?

In its zeal to indict the Swiftvets last weekend, the New York Times developed a ludicrous chart depicting the Six Degrees of Separation between all of the GOP and the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. As I noted at the time, had the Times tried doing that with the Democrats, MoveOn, and America Coming Together, the bill for the ink might have equalled the budget deficit of California. Now we find out that even the Gray Lady's tunnel-vision focus on the GOP came up short, as Rich Lowry at NRO found a Bush administration connection to another political group -- the Kerry campaign itself:

Max Cleland, who made a staged appearance at the Bush ranch Wednesday, was appointed by President George W. Bush to the board of directors of the Export-Import Bank in 2003. The same Max Cleland who is spending nearly all of his time attacking President Bush is, amazingly enough, a Bush political appointee. According to a bank spokesman, Cleland makes $136,000 a year off this very cushy job.

A couple of questions come to mind here: If Cleland had any decency, wouldn't he resign? Why would he accept a political appointment from a man he so loathes and thinks represents the very worst in American politics? Max Cleland's extremely partisan activities are being subsidized by the American taxpayer.

But, wait, it gets more sinister. There is now a definitive link between President Bush and the attacks against him. This link is as direct as most of the links that have been highlighted between Bush and the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth: Bush gave a $136,000 job to one of his attackers and a key member of Kerry's "band of brothers." By the logic of most of the press corps, this means George W. Bush must be responsible for the activities of Kerry campaign's band of brothers (see this chart). Who knows what deep game is being played here, but somebody should call the New York Times.

Someone should remind Cleland of his job when he's out mugging for the cameras and playing nursemaid and delivery boy to a presidential candidate that hides behind his skirts. Working as a political appointee to Bush while tossing personal attacks at him not only is unseemly, it's positively classless. The proper way for Cleland to actively campaign against Bush would have been to resign from his position before proclaiming his boss and benefactor as a shirker. It looks like disloyalty and worse when Cleland doesn't have the integrity to leave the service of a man who he belittles so publicly.

So how about it, Senator? Will you put your money where your mouth is, and resign from your Presidential appointment? Or are you just another in a line of hypcrites trying hard to prop up the empty suit your party nominated?

Kerry Campaign Inspiring All The Wrong People

Instapundit notes today that "You won't like Bob Dole when he's angry," and he's definitely not a happy man. Dole appeared on Scarborough Country last night and reminded everyone why the Kerry campaign had to be insane to poke this sleeping giant:

So this time you’ve got a candidate named John Kerry who had a good record in Vietnam, came back from the service, denounced the war, in effect, trashed the Americans who were still fighting there. Went before a Senate committee in April of 1971, threw away his ribbons or his medals or whatever and now is standing before the American people and saying you’ve got to elect me because I’m this Vietnam hero. ...

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.

I keep thinking about the Eddie Murphy line from Beverly Hills Cop, when he's been captured at the warehouse by the bad guys. He looks at one of the men he tossed into a buffet table earlier and said, "Are you still pissed at me?" I'd say Bob Dole is still angry about having the Kerry campaign question his combat injuries through their proxy at the Boston Globe, and it looks now like he's around for the rest of the campaign. Unfortunately for Kerry, his "friend" will be saying things like this in interviews:

[DOLE:] But this is after we’d had somebody called Vice President Cheney a coward. They’ve called Bush “a deserter” that he was AWOL, that he’s condoned torture, that he’s condoned poisoning of pregnant women. I mean, all these nasty, nasty, over-the-top attacks. ...

SCARBOROUGH: So you spoke with John Kerry. Did he call you, or did you call him?

DOLE: He called me the next day and said “I’m very disappointed.”

I said, “Well, John, I’m disappointed, too, in all these undeserved attacks on President Bush. If you want to question Dick Cheney’s deferment, that’s fine. If you want to question the National Guard, that’s fine. But John, these other guys, these swift boat veterans are a lot of them that have a different view of what happened than you have, and they have a right to speak. We live in the United States of America. It’s a free country. You may not like what they say, but they have a right to say it.”

SCARBOROUGH: And what did Senator Kerry say to you in response?

DOLE: He said, “I haven’t spent one dime in my campaign on a negative ad.”

Well, he doesn’t have to. He’s got George Soros, who put in $15 million. He’s got Harold Ickes up there cranking out millions of dollars of ads. He’s got his former campaign manager in Boston in another group called Bringing America Together.

By forcing Bob Dole out of retirement, the Democrats have brought back one of the best Republican infighters and a man with sterling national credibility back into the game for a GOP ticket that seemed unwilling to do much in that kind of politics so far this year. In a way, Dole's return has an element of poetic justice to it. Kerry's generation has the reputation for narcissistic self-absorption and has embraced victimhood as its highest value, while Dole's generation garnered the mantle of America's greatest. How interesting that Dole has to come back to the house to tell Kerry to stop whining and behave.

More Evidence Of A Seismic Shift

Yesterday Hugh Hewitt linked to a small-sampled poll for Arizona showing a nine-point gain for George Bush in a state that the Kerry/Edwards campaign hoped to make competitive. Even worse for John Kerry, the polling showed that independents made up most of the movement to Bush. If Arizona was a bellwether for the nation, the Kerry campaign had big trouble in a month where the challenger should have had a soaring post-convention lead.

The Los Angeles Times confirms the national shift towards George Bush and the striking erosion of support for John Kerry in August in today's edition. Ron Brownstein, the LAT's political analyst, reports that even their notoriously skewed polling shows a five-point change favoring Bush since the convention, and now has the President ahead for the first time ever:

President Bush heads into next week's Republican national convention with voters moving slightly in his direction since July amid signs that John F. Kerry has been nicked by attacks on his service in Vietnam, a Los Angeles Times Poll has found.

For the first time this year in a Times survey, Bush led Kerry in the presidential race, drawing 49 percent among registered voters, compared to 46 percent for the Democrat. In a Times Poll just before the Democratic convention last month, Kerry held a 2 percentage point advantage over Bush.

You can bet that Kerry's polling started showing this last week, which is why he stopped the groundhog act and came out of hiding to attack the Swiftvets and beg George Bush to save him on national TV. It's also why he sent his valor proxy Max Cleland down to Crawford to deliver a letter to Bush demanding that he stop the Swiftvet ads, only to have to childishly try to avoid being given a letter in return from a number of veterans demanding that Kerry and Cleland stop trying to infringe on their free-speech rights.

Small wonder, then, that one of the issues where Kerry stumbles in this poll is leadership:

Although a solid majority of Americans say they believe Kerry served honorably in Vietnam, the poll showed that the fierce attacks on the senator from a group of Vietnam veterans criticizing both his performance in combat and anti-war protests at home have left some marks: Kerry suffered small but consistent erosion compared to July on questions relating to his Vietnam experience, his honesty and his fitness to serve as commander in chief. ...

Asked how Kerry's overall military experience would affect their vote, just 23 percent said it made them more likely to vote for him, while 21 percent said it made them less likely; the remaining 53 percent 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. ...

Other key questions produced even more troubling results for Kerry.In the July Times Poll, 53 percent of voters said Kerry in his Vietnam combat missions had demonstrated the "qualities America needs in a president" while just 32 percent said 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 percent saying he had demonstrated the right qualities and 37 percent saying he exhibited poor judgment.

Brownstein paints a picture of an imminent collapse, especially from the LAT, whose recall polling last year skewed so badly last year that they had Gray Davis surviving the recall and Cruz Bustamante ahead of Arnold Schwarzenegger until the final weekend, when their polls miraculously shifted overnight to match other poll results in the state. John Kerry better pray that this poll result accurately reflects the electorate, because if this is what the Times has when it's in the bag for the Democrats, the truth would be monumentally worse.

And next week is the Republican convention. The talk this year has neither candidate getting a boost from the nominating conventions. George Bush seems to be getting one beforehand. If he comes out of New York with anything larger than a four-point bounce, Kerry's campaign will be exposed for what it has become -- the most incompetent major-party presidential campaign in long memory.

FBI Files Show Kerry Took Laundered Money In 1996

In a skeleton that CQ noted back in February, the independent watchdog group Judicial Watch has released formerly classified FBI files showing that John Kerry took laundered money from Chinese frontman Johnny Chung for Kerry's 1996 re-election campaign:

Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, today released recently declassified documents showing that Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry accepted laundered contributions for his 1996 re-election campaign from the Communist Chinese government and that, in exchange, he may have arranged meetings between Chinese aerospace executives and U.S. government officials. Obtained from the FBI through Freedom of Information Act and Privacy Act requests, the documents are related to the FBI’s “Chinagate” investigation into the Clinton campaign’s acceptance of contributions from Communist Chinese government sources. ...

“These disturbing FBI documents raise further questions about Sen. Kerry’s involvement in what looks like a quid pro quo (cash for meetings) with the Communist Chinese,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.

In the second document attached at the website, the first section proposes to investigate four points of interest in Chung's relationship with Senator Kerry:

* Meeting with Senator with China Aerospace executives
* Senator arranged meeting at SEC
* Meeting at SEC, other meetings arranged?
* Fundraiser for Sen. Kerry in Los Angeles/ conduit contributions

In fact, it appears from this document that the FBI found more points of interest with Kerry's relationship to Chung than with those of Bill Clinton or Al Gore, who understandably received a lot more of the attention at the time.

Just what Kerry needed this month -- yet another blast from his past coming out to haunt him. (Hat tip: CQ reader and frequent tipster Amelia)

Still More Inconsistencies Between Kerry's Viet Nam Narratives

Now that John Kerry's Viet Nam narrative, which once formed the center of his campaign, has come under a sort of peer review, major and minor inconsistencies keep popping up more often than VC the Wonder Dog. CQ reader Sam Conner notes another one, and in light of speculation about Kerry's Cambodian adventures, it bears investigation.

Kerry's last combat mission has widely been considered his Bronze Star engagement of 13 March, the same mission where he rescued Jim Rassmann from the river and sustained an injury to his arm or shoulder. According to the timeline on the Kerry campaign site, this mission came four days before he put in his request to be reassigned based on his three Purple Hearts. No other combat missions are listed. In the Boston Globe article written by Michael Kranish on June 16, 2003, at the start of Kerry's campaign for president, Kranish confirms the account:

Kerry had been wounded three times and received three Purple Hearts. Asked about the severity of the wounds, Kerry said that one of them cost him about two days of service, and that the other two did not interrupt his duty. "Walking wounded," as Kerry put it. A shrapnel wound in his left arm gave Kerry pain for years. Kerry declined a request from the Globe to sign a waiver authorizing the release of military documents that are covered under the Privacy Act and that might shed more light on the extent of the treatment Kerry needed as a result of the wounds. ...

But Kerry thought he had seen and done enough. The rules, he said, allowed a thrice-wounded soldier to return to the United States immediately. So Kerry went to talk to Commodore Charles F. Horne, an administrative official and commander of the coastal squadron in which Kerry served. Horne filled out a document on March 17, 1969, that said Kerry "has been thrice wounded in action while on duty incountry Vietnam. Reassignment is requested ... as a personal aide in Boston, New York, or Wash., D.C. area."

However, official Kerry biographer and historian Douglas Brinkley tells a different story. On pages 323-328 of Tour of Duty, Brinkley writes several passages that offer contradictory passages to a number of assertions in the Kerry narrative, mostly having to do with Cambodia and Kerry's last date of combat. For instance, on page 323, Brinkley writes (emphasis mine):

Operation Menu [Nixon's secret air bombardment of the Cambodian border area] began March 18, 1969, and during the next four months 3,630 B-52 sorties dropped more than 100,000 tons of bombs within five miles of Cambodia's border with South Vietnam. Kerry and the other Swift crewmen running the rivers near Cambodia were stunned at their government's concentrated bombing campaign directed into a neutral country. Every time they had so much as fired an M-16 round into the Cambodian underbrush it seemed the U.S. State Department had received a complaint from Prince Norodom Sihanouk.

This passage casts John Kerry as Captain Louis Renault from Casablanca; after all, Kerry had run guns, SEALs, CIA, and Green Berets across the border into Cambodia, depending on when and where one heard Kerry tell his story. But on March 18, 1969, the day after he requests his three-hearts transfer to the states and the day after his last mission, he's shocked, shocked to see American military action against Cambodia?

On 324, the narrative continues:

...And that wasn't counting the Cambodian peasants killed by the Menu bombings. And all the while, Kerry's PCF-94 and its fellow Swifts in An Thoi went on dropping US Navy SEALs off along the Cambodian border to destroy Viet Cong base camps along "Bernique's Creek". Kerry described one such mission in his "War Notes":

The banks of the "Creek" whistled by as we churned out mile after mile at full speed. On my left there were occasional open fields that allowed us a clear view into Cambodia. At some points, the border was only fifty yards away and then it would meander out to a hundred or even as much as a thousand yards away, always making one wonder what lay on the other side ...

On occasion we had shot towards the border when provoked by a sniper or ambush but without fail this led to a formal reprimand by the Cambodian government and accusations of civilian slaughters and random killings by American "aggressors".

Kerry describes this mission as a participant, even though the Menu bombings took place after his last recorded mission, and at least the day after Horne signed his reassignment request. As I pointed out earlier on the blog, Kerry's curiosity about the other side of the border certainly implies he'd never been there up to this point. For the next several pages, Kerry relates a compelling narrative about going twenty knots in a canal in pitch-black night by hanging out the side of the PCF and telling Del Sandusky when Sandusky steered too close to the bank. He describes the trip on the river as going past the target point to drop the SEALs and disguising their intentions by traveling all the way to a fork, where one option could take them into Cambodia -- but they stopped, rested, and went back down the river instead, the way they'd come.

On Page 328, Brinkley notes that the clandestine mission was Kerry's last as commander of PCF-94 and the end of his Swift boat career; he was replaced the next day by another lieutenant.

All of Brinkley's version conflicts with both Kerry's own timeline on his website as well as Kranish's article for the Globe. Unfortunately, it also conflicts with the COSDIV 11 chronology, which gives the following descriptions of the next several missions of PCF-94 after the Bronze Star engagement of 13 March:

18 [March]: PCFs 5, 9, 44, 72 and 94 conducted operation on the Cua Lon River destroying 41 sampans and 5 structures.

19: The same 5 PCFs swept the Bo De and the Den Chin rivers destroying 43 bunkers, 67 structures, 49 sampans, and several motors.

20: PCFs 9, 31, 44, 72, 93, and 94 swept the Rach Giang destroying 43 bunkers and 10 structures.

23: PCFs 5, 9, 37, 93, and 94, working with UDT and KSF, destroyed the remaining fish trap barricades in the Bay Hap River along with 7 bunkers and 12 structures.

26: ... PCFs 21, 22, 66, and 94 returned to the Cua Lon that night and destroyed 4 sampans.

Only the entry for the 20th mentions "Bernique's Creek", and the results of that mission hardly sounds like a clandestine insertion mission for SEALs or CIA spooks. Not only that, but that date would have been 7 days after what Kerry and Kranish say was Kerry's last combat mission, while Brinkley's attribution of Kerry's story as his last mission would have had Kerry out two times between his Bronze Star engagement and his twenty-knots-in-the-moonless-dark encore appearance.

How many 'last missions' did Kerry have, anyway? Elvis didn't make this many comebacks. The obvious conclusion was that Kerry either misdated his "War Notes" or he simply made the whole thing up. Brinkley's anchoring the date to the start of the Menu bombings on 18 March strongly indicate the latter.

UPDATE: Man, Brinkley is really confused:

John Kerry's last mission in Vietnam was a deadly Swift boat patrol up the Bay Hap River where everything was ventured but nothing gained -- except another medal and more horrific memories.

March 13, 1969, would prove among the worst and best days John Kerry spent in Vietnam.

Remind me again -- he's a respected historian?

Whose Smear Machine Is This Again?

The New York Daily News reports that "a group of Democratic loyalists" plan to target one of the less public figures from the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth by using humiliation to intimidate him into silence (2nd item):

Sen. John Kerry called a member of the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth over the weekend to try to reason with him over the group's attacks on his record. But fellow Democrats aren't hesitating to try far more aggressive tactics.

A group of Democratic loyalists is compiling incriminating dossiers on the members of the veteran group - and they sent us a preview of what might be in store for Swift Boat activist James Zumwalt, son of illustrious Adm. Elmo Zumwalt - and it isn't pretty.

Zumwalt "attempted to kill himself with an overdose of prescription drugs," after the murder of his ex-wife's fiance, John Kowalczyk, according to the dossier, which is footnoted to news sources, and was "convicted of reckless driving after chasing Kowalczyk at a high speed on the highway."

Well, well, well. Perhaps Max Cleland can stop off on his way to Crawford, TX and put a stop to the "fear and smear" tactics being used by the Democrats. This certainly convinces me that John Kerry has nothing to hide. Riiiiiiiight...

On the other hand, at least the Democrats have agreed in principle that medical records should be released as a basis for public debate in this presidential cycle. Bush released his, now Zumwalt's are out in the open -- so where are Kerry's? They must contain some pretty damaging information if the Democrats are willing to violate HIPAA laws in order to keep them secret.

Sign the 180, Senator. Be a man, take responsibility for having started this entire mess with the Democratic smear campaign back in February and April against President Bush, and sign the 180. If you can't do that, how can we trust you to ever act responsibly? (via Kerry Spot and CQ reader Jim L.)

Kerry Still Sacrificing The Freedom Of The South Vietnamese

John Kerry has taken to pleading for a return to debate on current issues and more relevant qualifications for the presidency in a bid to bury the debate on his Viet Nam record, which at one time was all Kerry would discuss on the stump. Speaking in New York, Kerry told a crowd that all the Bush campaign had was fear, while he wanted to talk about how he could outperform Bush in areas such as foreign policy.

So let's talk foreign policy, as practiced right here at home, by Senator Kerry.

Earlier this evening, I had the pleasure of speaking with Bradley Clanton of the law firm Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz, PC, in Jackson, MS and Washington, DC. Brad represents several Vietnamese-Americans who came to the US as refugees of the Communists in their native land. Some of his clients have names that students of the era would recognize, such as Bui Diem, former ambassador to the US from the Saigon government. This group of Vietnamese refugees filed a lawsuit against the University of Massachussetts (Boston) and the William Joiner Center, one of its research centers, due to irregularities in its awarding of fellowships for researching the Vietnamese disapora.

Their case -- and I stress it has not been concluded -- is that the Joiner Center failed to follow the protocols outlined in its research grant when selecting candidates for the Rockefeller Foundation fellowships offered for the grant. Among other actions, the Joiner Center allegedly failed to publish notices of the grant's availability until just before the deadline for applications expired, failed to advertise in any of the required scholarly journals which targeted the American Vietnamese community, and in general made it almost impossible for the scholars of that community to know about the paying jobs in time. The effect of this failure is to keep Vietnamese who emigrated to the US as adults in the Diaspora from taking part in the program, as younger members of academia already had some access to the grant information up front.

Why? Because the Joiner Center and UMass already had scholars in mind to study the forced migration of the South Vietnamese people. And half of those scholars came from the People's Republic of Viet Nam -- the same Communists who tortured and massacred the refugees into fleeing Viet Nam in the first place, after the fall of Saigon. (The other two fellows are an American-born, 25-year-old person of Vietnamese ancestry and a Caucasian listed in the complaint as "under 40".)

This is akin to hiring Khmer Rouge officials to study the Cambodian killing fields. It's intellectually indefensible, on several grounds. First off, the "scholars" that one gets from a totalitarian government are hardly free thinkers; the Vietnamese would not approve researchers who weren't prepared to toe the Party line. Furthermore, if any of them suddenly got a bad case of truthtelling, their families would certainly suffer the consequences, and in Viet Nam, that means the re-education camps that killed hundreds of thousands of people over the past 30 years. The biggest problem is that the current government in Hanoi has a great deal of interest in ensuring that any such research points away from their atrocities in the final product. They would only approve those researchers who understand that need, which renders the entire exercise unreliable.

So Vietnamese-Americans over 40 got passed over by UMass-Boston and the Joiner Center on behalf of two Vietnamese Communists with an axe to grind. They started protesting the university's management of the research grant in June 2000 and throughout the summer and fall, finally filing suit on several grounds on October 27, 2000. When the protest hit the local press, it provoked a negative reaction in Boston. The controversy made Joiner Center management uncomfortable, and they decide they need political cover from as high up as they can get it.

This is where Senator John Kerry makes his appearance in this case.

Kerry wrote a letter to Kevin Bowen, director of the Joiner Center, dated September 27, 2000, in order to praise both his research and his selection of scholars for fellowships. This is the final paragraph in Kerry's letter to Bowen supporting the hiring of Communist nationals from Viet Nam over hiring Americans who escaped and survived the persecution of the government which these two 'scholars' represent:

I commend and extend my welcome and congratulations to the initial group of fellows selected. Choosing two established and accomplished scholars from Vietnam and two emerging scholars from the United States assures a diversity of views and combines fresh perspectives with time-tested observation. It is essential and critical that a project of this magnitude regarding a phenomenon as sweeping as the Vietnamese diaspora consider candidates from all countries, political backgrounds and cultural orientations to achieve free and unencumbered inquiry. Only through such a free and thorough inquiry and a generous sharing of findings will the cause of the Vietnamese people be advanced.

It may be impossible to find more fatuous thinking in such a short paragraph anywhere else. Before dissecting Kerry's intellectual failings, let's be clear about his intent. He made it clear that he understood that half of the fellowships went to Communist nationals in a study that purported to research a refugee catastrophe their government initiated. Implicit in this letter is Kerry's contention that any dissent erupting from this choice would be invalid. This letter is no mere boiler-plate salutation for a constituent; Kerry knew the situation and gave his blessing to Bowen's handling of it.

Now, looking at the actual reasoning behind this letter, one can safely state that John Kerry has no concept of totalitarianism; the intervening years between 1971 and 2000 taught him nothing. He presumes that Communist 'scholars' have academic freedom. Kerry lauds the diversity of views they bring to the research but fails to recognize the lock-step mentality of a single-party system, and one that caused the deaths of as many as 750,000 of its men, women, and children in concentration camps or on the run from its oppression. He repeats the same tired moral relativism he did in his radical days of 1971 when he presumes that the diversity of "political backgrounds and cultural orientations" will ensure that truth results from the inquiry, even though by 2000 the world understood that totalitarian regimes and truth coexist on rare and usually coincidental occasions.

Kerry's reasoning reveals much more about his philosophy, and this isn't just the radical youth that Kerry uses to excuse his activities at the end of the war. This letter was written less than four years ago. Kerry defended Communist nationals in the Senate in 1971, and 29 years later continued to do so (not to mention defending Bowen's outsourcing of jobs to a country known for its sweatshops). This uncomprehending naivete does not befit the office of President even in times of peace and prosperity, and recalls the more ludicrous exploits of the Carter presidency. In a time of war against Islamofascist aggression, such unseriousness will get us killed.

8/25: Bumped to the top. More later tonight.

UPDATE: My Northern Alliance colleague, King Banian at SCSU Scholars, has more background on this. As with anything King writes, it's well worth reading the entire post. I originally thought of using a Turkish-Armenian analogy to illustrate my point about the indefensibility of Bowen's actions, but I decided it might be a bit far-fetched. Looks like my first instincts were correct.

Hewitt: Why The Blogosphere Will Eat The Media's Lunch

Hugh Hewitt has his new column up at WorldNetDaily, and it's a must read for fans of the blogosphere and for members (and customers) of traditional media:

I have been both a lawyer and law professor for two decades and a TV-radio-print journalist for 15 years of those 20. It takes a great deal more intelligence and discipline to be the former than to be the latter, which is why the former usually pays a lot more than the latter. It is no surprise to me, then, when lawyers and law professors like those at Powerline and Instapundit prove to be far more adept at exposing the "Christmas in Cambodia" lie and other Kerry absurdities than old-school journalists.

The big advantage is in research skills, of course, and in an eye for inconsistencies which make or break cases and arguments. Lawyers turned amateur journalists are going to be much better at it than time-serving scribblers, and even non-lawyer bloggers with superior research skills – think Captain Ed, Tom McGuire and Polipundit – are going to run rings around "pros" who aren't in a hurry to bring down their favored candidate.

Hugh fleshes out some thoughts he wrote earlier in his blog, and as always, it's terrific. Make sure you read this today, and send a link to someone you know who thinks they're well-informed because they read a newspaper or watch the TV news.

Sistani Returns To Iraq While Allawi Fiddles

The Allawi government continues to let the situation in Najaf drag on without taking action to eject the forces of Moqtada al-Sadr from the Imam Ali shrine, despite issuing several ultimata over the past few days. In the meantime, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has returned from his medical treatment in London and wants to lead a march into Najaf to quell the crisis:

Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani arrived Wednesday in Basra, Iraq, from London, where he had been receiving medical treatment, according to a spokesman for al-Sistani in Baghdad.

Before he arrived, al-Sistani -- one of Iraq's most influential Shia leaders -- asked all Iraqis to "march to Najaf in order to rescue the city," according to his spokesman in his Damascus, Syria, office. ...

On Tuesday, Iraq's interim government again gave the militiamen an ultimatum to leave the mosque. Shortly afterward, an al-Sadr aide said the cleric was ready to negotiate a cease-fire and end the standoff.

Allawi had been playing for time up to now, and may have even been playing for popular support. The Los Angeles Times noted yesterday that Iraqis in Najaf had mostly lost patience with Sadr and his Mahdi militia and wanted Allawi's government to end the standoff. However, the continual back-and-forth ultimata and negotiations strains Allawi's credibility, which will come back to haunt him in Fallujah and other places with intractable insurgencies.

Allawi could also be waiting for Sistani's return to Najaf. It's possible that Sadr's forces could be convinced to leave the shrine under Sistani's guarantee of protection, and it might have been worth it as a tactical move had Allawi not issued so many dire warnings of action. The Mahdi army would have been flushed from the only other building Allawi would not gladly raze to be rid of them, and Sistani's presence in the shrine (along with a strong contingent of Iraqi-American security forces) could guard against their return. But that type of eleventh-hour reprieve would tend to undercut Allawi's tenuous grip on power and strengthen Sistani immeasurably.

As long as Sistani refrained from demanding power, that might be tolerable. But how long would he resist the temptation?

Too Many Coincidences

Just as on 9/11, the juxtaposition of multiple airline crashes generates a heavy suspicion of terrorism -- only this time the target is Russia and not the US:

Two Russian passenger jets on domestic flights crashed nearly simultaneously after departing from the same terminal in Moscow on Tuesday night, officials said. At least 88 people were presumed dead.

While precise details surrounding the crashes were unclear, the Russian news service Interfax, citing an anonymous official source, reported that minutes after the first plane went down, the second jet issued a distress signal indicating it had been hijacked. Then it, too, disappeared from radar.

As airport security was tightened throughout Russia, President Vladimir V. Putin, who has been vacationing and working in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, ordered the F.S.B., one of the successor agencies to the K.G.B., to begin immediate investigations into the crashes, a spokesman for the president told the news service.

Putin's deployment of the FSB sends a signal that a higher probability of Chechen terrorism exists than just a coincidence of accidents, or even of ground-crew incompetence. Furthering that impression are reports from eyewitnesses who told Russian authorities that they saw and heard an explosion prior to the crash of the first plane, and that the second plane sent a hijack signal prior to disappearing off the radar screen.

Chechen rebels have assassinated the republic's president and attempted to kill the interim leader, and promise to kill whoever wins the upcoming election for the position. It appears they're branching out in a similar manner as that of their al-Qaeda allies. Let's hope that the Russians can track down those who sent the hijackers on their suicide missions before they can escalate their attacks on civilians.

Kerry Flips Again On Iraq (Or Is This One A Flop?)

The Kerry campaign yesterday issued what must be its seventh or eighth position on ousting Saddam Hussein from power. Jim VanderHei writes in today's Washington Post that the official word on Saddam from Kerry's advisors is that he'd still be running Iraq today had Kerry been president:

A top national security adviser to John F. Kerry said yesterday that he made a mistake when he said the Democratic nominee probably would have launched a military invasion to oust Saddam Hussein if he had been president during the past four years.

On Aug. 7, Jamie Rubin told The Washington Post that "in all probability" a Kerry administration would have waged war against Iraq by now if the Massachusetts Democrat were president. ...

"To the extent that my own comments have contributed to misunderstanding on this issue. . . . I never should have said the phrase 'in all probability' because that's not Kerry's position and he's never said it," Rubin said in a statement. "That was my mistake."

So Rubin and the Kerry campaign now endorse the continued oppression of the Iraqi people? They're just fine with the torture, rape rooms, and the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis that got planted in mass graves? Funny, because for the past 18 days, they've led us to believe that John Kerry would have been just as tough on Saddam as George Bush.

In fact, for 18 days, the Bush campaign has used Rubin's "mistake" as a talking point for its appearances. Bush himself referred to it when he came to St. Paul last week, and added rather presciently, "But I'm sure he'll change his mind again." VanderHei notes that Republicans such as Bush campaign director Ken Mehlman have also noted the similarity in television interviews, such as just this past Sunday on Meet The Press.

So why did it take so long for Rubin to clarify that Kerry's tough stance on Saddam was false?

Some Kerry advisers said Rubin's comments played right into Bush's hands and wanted the record set straight before it exploded into a bigger political issue. Rubin, a State Department official in the Clinton administration who often travels with the candidate, agreed, aides said.

This points to something that often recurs in Kerry's campaign; John Kerry continually redefining himself as the Not-Bush. Kerry can make campaign statements about realigning US forces overseas, especially in Europe and Asia, until Bush proposes an actual realignment after studying the issue for three years. All of a sudden, Kerry opposes realignment. Kerry doesn't make policy statements based on convictions any more, if he ever did -- he just calculates what his answers should be based on whatever comes from the Bush campaign.

Would John Kerry have ever done anything about Saddam Hussein, other than try to talk him to death? Based on the vacillation and confusion among Kerry's own advisors, it appears that inaction and rhetoric would have been elevated to high strategy in a Kerry White House. All we hear is that Kerry wouldn't have gone to war the way Bush did, which means that he wouldn't have gone to the UN Security Council for five months, tried convincing those countries with their hands deep into Saddam's overflowing pockets to end their gravy trains, and when they refused to do so put together a coalition of nations who weren't corrupt to free Iraq and put an end to an ongoing security threat to the US.

But hey, don't worry about it. Just check back with Kerry in another 18 days.

Thanks, INCITE!

I received a couple of tips from CQ readers as well as an e-mail from INCITE's blogmaster himself, Beck, who wrote an analysis of the new information market and used Captain's Quarters as an example:

One of the single most important works ever in modern management literature is a paper titled "Marketing Myopia," by Theodore Levitt. He had an amazing revelation--revolutionary at the time. Put quite simply, most companies have no idea what business they're in.

His classic example is the railroad industry. The railroads revolutionized the world when they began crisscrossing industrialized nations in the 19th century. Without them, the industrial revolution wouldn't have been possible. Today, railroads are an anachronism. They still exist, but it's mostly inertia that keeps them alive. You see, the railroad companies made the fatal mistake of thinking they were in the railroad business. The fools! They should have realized that they're in the transportation business. So when a combination of trucking and air transport began to transform the way people travel and ship goods in the 20th century, the railroads were left behind. They could have kept up, but they didn't. There are still nations on earth where the railroads carry the lion's share of the transportation work. But in the United States, they became dinosaurs--because they didn't realize what business they were in. ...

The New York Times, Time Magazine, NBC, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Captain's Quarters... they're not in the news paper business, the magazine business, the broadcast news business, the cable news business, the talk radio business, or the blog business. They're in the information business. Only most of them don't seem to realize it.

I don't want to give away the candy store here, because Beck's analysis of media in the present and future is, I believe, highly prescient. Read the whole thing, and not just because he has such nice things to say about Captain's Quarters; you could easily plug a number of other blogs like Power Line, Instapundit, the entire Northern Alliance, and many others in the same category. On the other hand, you could just as easily replace the Times and the Post with any other broadsheet or broadcaster, because they are all similarly clueless to Beck's warning.

McQ Figures Out The 13 March Engagement

McQ at QandO has figured out what the COSDIV 11 chronology for John Kerry's Bronze Star engagement means, and it casts a lot of doubt on Jim Rassmann's version of events -- and by definition, Kerry's as well. I must admit that I missed this, and hopefully McQ will be more forgiving to me than he is to the New York Times:

Anyway to the point at hand which will demonstrate two things:

A) The NYT deliberately left out some of the report.
B) The NYT writers who used the report had no idea about the meaning of what they were reading.

First the report (you'll find it on page 8 of the pdf):

"March 13, 1969: PCF's 3, 51, 43, 93 and 94 with MSF RF/PF troops conducted SEA LORDS operations in Bay Hop river and Dong Cong canal. A mine detonated under PCF 3 and units were taken under small arms fire several times during the operation. Friendly casualties were 8 USN WIA and 1 MSF KIA. Units destroyed 30 sampans and 5 structures and captured 16 booby trap grenades. Later intelligence reports indicated 1 VC KIA and 5 VC WIA."

Once I read this, I understood why the NYT had screwed up this part of the story so badly.

McQ analyzes this as two halves of an operation ... and guess which half the mine explosion occurred in? This explains why the only bullet holes for any of the boats were the three in Thurlow's, even though the PCFs sat fairly immobile in the water for a significant period of time while conducting rescue and salvage operations. It makes a hell of a lot more sense than doing all of that in a hail of enemy gunfire.

Read the whole thing.

Little Admiral Has Strange Idea Of A Good Time

I should have been warned when I called the First Mate from the office this afternoon. The Little Admiral spent the day at our house as the FM has been feeling better this past week and wanted to start watching her again, and when I called she had just gone down for a nap. She filled me in on the day's events, and finished with a sinister chuckle, "The Little Admiral has something for you to do together when you get home."

Now, having been married to the woman for several years, I have gotten to know this evil chuckle. I assumed that one of two possibilities existed:

1. She had fed the baby chili con carne for lunch and wanted me to change the diaper.

2. The LA wanted to play trampoline on my chest and finish up with a friendly game of Boot To The Head, pastimes she discovered this past weekend.

As it turned out, neither was true. (I plan on hiding the cans of chili later on, anyway.) The First Mate and the Little Admiral had spent the day in the back yard, where they had discovered the minefield left by our two Labrador retrievers. It turns out that she had wanted the First Mate to pick up the "poopies", but being blind, she told the Little Admiral how much better it would be to make Papa pick up the nuggets!

It worked, too. As soon as I got in, the Little Admiral tugged at my hand and insisted we go out right now to pick up the backyard. As you might imagine, I was somewhat less enthusiastic about the task, but her enjoyment never waned throughout the chore. She got to hold the paper bag while we walked around and cleaned up, and even seemed a little disappointed when I tossed the bag into the trash.

I think this child has a very bright future in politics.

Addendum: I am working on a fairly significant, original story regarding John Kerry that I hope to post late tonight. Keep checking back. It has nothing to do with the Swiftvets.

CORE To Edwards: Stop Blocking Black Judges

The Congress on Racial Equality plans to run advertising in John Edwards' home state of North Carolina challenging him to stop blocking the nomination of California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown to the federal appellate bench:

California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown is among a half dozen of Bush's nominees to the appeals court who've been blocked in the Senate by Democrats. The Senate confirms all judicial appointments. Her nomination is opposed by groups including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

But the more conservative Congress of Racial Equality says Brown is a role model who deserves the promotion, and is challenging Edwards, a senator from North Carolina, on his home turf. The ad also names Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, a fellow Senate Judiciary Committee member who has helped block Bush's judicial nominees.

Senator Edwards wanted to get back to the issues, but he can't be happy about having to defend his position on Brown's nomination when under attack by CORE and Niger Innis. Tying him to Ted Kennedy also damages the Kerry/Edwards attempt to portray themselves as the true centrists in this campaign. While analysts have already debated whether Edwards will enable Kerry to make a dent in what had been a strong Republican state in the past, pointing out Edwards' (and Kerry's) obstinacy on judicial nominations will only make a North Carolina win that much less likely.

Vote Your Pocketbook

In catching up to Power Line on my lunch break, I noticed that Deacon posted a comment from one of their readers I found provocative. Stan Brown asks a very pertinent question:

"Kerry and his attack dogs (which include the news media of course) state as if it were a proven fact that Bush orchestrated the Swift Vet attack. But where is all the money? If Bush is connected to so many rich Republican fat cats, why couldn't the Swift Vets raise any more money than they have? If Karl Rove really had been the evil master mind behind the whole Swift Vet campaign, he certainly should have been capable of raising millions of dollars from his fat cat donors. Or are Rove and Bush so brilliant that they knew they could cause Kerry to self-destruct while spending a mere pittance?"

Obviously, Stan's argument rightly demonstrates the laughable idea that Republicans would have left such a critical campaign piece so woefully underfunded. However, just for fun, let's assume that both candidates have used the 527s deliberately as proxies for running attacks on each other in order to claim some distance from negative campaigning. What can we deduce from the result?

* John Kerry and the Democrats have spent over $60 million dollars in 527 money over eight months or more to derail the Bush re-election bid. The result -- Bush, a figure of hatred on the left, has suffered a few points of job-approval erosion, most of which has been regained in the past month.

* George Bush and the Republicans have spent $250,000 in 527 money over the past three weeks in order to attack Kerry. The result -- John Kerry has had to retreat from three different assertions of his Viet Nam record, he's hiding from the press, he's begging George Bush to stop the ads, and now he's calling veterans from his unit asking why they despise him.

Heck ... just on the basis of wise money management and bang for my buck, I'd have to vote Republican. They've gotten far more out of their investment, 0.5% of the Democrats' bill, than the Kerry campaign has from theirs. Why reward incompetence?

The Post Runs A Stake Through The Heart Of Kerry's Cambodian Fable

Joshua Muravchik writes an article that may prove mortal to John Kerry's presidential aspirations in today's Washington Post. Muravchik's piece, entitled "Kerry's Cambodia Whopper," not only dissects the meaning of the collapse of this so-called epiphany, but it also moves the story forward, thanks to Kerry's hagiographer, Douglas Brinkley:

Kerry argued that contra aid could put the United States on the path to deeper involvement despite denials by the Reagan administration of any such intent. Kerry began by reading out similar denials regarding Vietnam from presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. Then he offered this devastating riposte:

"I remember 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."

However seared he was, Kerry's spokesmen now say his memory was faulty. When the Swift boat veterans who oppose Kerry presented statements from his commanders and members of his unit denying that his boat entered Cambodia, none of Kerry's shipmates came forward, as they had on other issues, to corroborate his account. Two weeks ago Kerry's spokesmen began to backtrack. First, one campaign aide explained that Kerry had patrolled the Mekong Delta somewhere "between" Cambodia and Vietnam. But there is no between; there is a border. Then another spokesman told reporters that Kerry had been "near Cambodia." But the point of Kerry's 1986 speech was that he personally had taken part in a secret and illegal war in a neutral country. That was only true if he was "in Cambodia," as he had often said he was. If he was merely "near," then his deliberate misstatement falsified the entire speech.

Of course, all of this has been explored on numerous blogs, including here. But Muravchik adds this bombshell that has been missed thus far:

Now a new official statement from the campaign undercuts Brinkley. It offers a minimal (thus harder to impeach) claim: that Kerry "on one occasion crossed into Cambodia," on an unspecified date. But at least two of the shipmates who are supporting Kerry's campaign (and one who is not) deny their boat ever crossed the border, and their testimony on this score is corroborated by Kerry's own journal, kept while on duty. One passage reproduced in Brinkley's book says: "The banks of the [Rach Giang Thanh River] whistled by as we churned out mile after mile at full speed. On my left were occasional open fields that allowed us a clear view into Cambodia. At some points, the border was only fifty yards away and it then would meander out to several hundred or even as much as a thousand yards away, always making one wonder what lay on the other side." His curiosity was never satisfied, because this entry was from Kerry's final mission [emph mine - CE].

John Hurley and the rest of the talking heads that the Kerry campaign has sent out over the past two weeks to debunk the debunking of John Kerry's Excellent Cambodian Adventure/Bogus Journey can't spin out of that one. If he had spent time in Cambodia, he would have known exactly what lay on the other side of the banks, if indeed he ever even got that close to Cambodia in the first place. And the revelation that his later journals were actually written after his return to the States for an abortive book proposal makes this even more odd, since he had already begun his anti-war activities -- and an illegal Cambodian excursion would not only add to his radical street cred, but it would have made a book deal more likely.

This Washington Post opinion piece marks a signal from the mainstream media that they have turned the corner on this issue, thanks in no small part, I'm sure, to Kerry's decision to go nuclear against the Swiftvets. Expect coverage in the news sections to follow and the Kerry collapse to continue in the days ahead.

Bringing It On

In charging the Bush campaign with collusion between his staff and the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and filing a complaint with the FEC, John Kerry and his campaign have opened up a can of worms that will be hard to close now. Readers have sent me a couple of examples of the Kerry campaign's interaction with MoveOn, a supposedly independent 527 that targets George Bush using tens of millions of dollars in donations from George Soros and Peter Lewis. Now, with many readers sending the same links and more to Newsmax, the right-wing news service provides hard documentary proof of collusion and coordination between the Kerry campaign, the Democratic Party, and MoveOn:

From Democrats.org, a Web site of the Democratic National Committee, May 9, 2003:

“The Democratic Party is partnering with MoveOn.org, People for the American Way, Campaign for America's Future, and dozens of other groups representing millions of Americans to organize a massive public mobilization. On Wednesday, May 14, join us by calling and emailing your representatives in Congress to let them know that the majority of Americans oppose more irresponsible tax cuts that go overwhelmingly to the wealthiest sliver of Americans.”

In its push to obstruct judges who follow the U.S. Constitution, DNC admitted elsewhere on its site that same day, “The DNC is also conducting a major petition drive in partnership with MoveOn.org. More than 310,000 Americans have signed the petition to protect our courts — with more than 172,000 of those signatures coming in the past 36 hours.”

Here’s the ultimate in hypocrisy last Nov. 13 from one of Vermont’s more extreme ideologues:

“Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, took a short break from the 30-hour Republican hypocrisy-a-thon to come and see the results of the DNC's petition drive. We collected more than 310,000 signatures and comments from Americans who stand with Senate Democrats in the fight to keep ultraconservative ideologues off the federal bench.”

An accompanying photo has this caption: “DNC Chief Operating Officer Josh Wachs (left), Senator Leahy, and Zack Exley from Moveon.org pose with the more than 310,000 signatures.”

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that MoveOn has coordinated its money and advertising with the Democrats and with Kerry (and Dean before that). It's just the result of a badly-written campaign finance reform law that supposedly took the money out of the system and replaced it with accountability, but did the reverse instead. What surprises is the lack of attention to the $60 million spent by essentially two 527s in support of John Kerry as opposed to the $250,000 spent by one 527 against John Kerry -- and not even in support of George Bush. And what's shocking is the success that the Swiftvets have had in damaging Kerry with their miniscule advertising budget. It's as though Don Quixote kept tilting at windmills -- and began to win.

Bringing up Viet Nam as a central qualification for his candidacy was Kerry's first major tactical error. Using the Swiftvet officers as a campaign prop was his second. His third will eventually be identified as his reaction last week to the controversy, and the FEC complaint that followed will invite close scrutiny of his own games of footsie with George Soros and the megamillions behind the Bush-haters on TV.

Just bringing it on, John. Just bringing it on.

Has Kerry Backed Off Of First Purple Heart Claim?

A number of people have written to me overnight stating that a Kerry campaign spokesman has acknowledged on Brit Hume's Fox news show that John Kerry's wound on 2 December 1968 came from an unintentionally self-inflicted wound -- an accident, in other words. So far, I find nothing on this on the Fox web site, but they are notoriously poor at posting transcripts, or even summaries of their own programs. Can someone post the link in the comments section of this post if any confirmation can be made?

UPDATE: Here's the link to the Fox News report from Major Garrett. It mostly covers the Chris Wallace interview with John Hurley and CNN's interview of Bob Dole. Towards the end, Garrett talks about the first Purple Heart:

GARRETT: And questions keep coming. For example, Kerry received a Purple Heart for wounds suffered on December 2nd, 1968. But an entry in Kerry's own journal written nine days later, he writes that, quote, he and his crew hadn't been shot at yet, unquote. Kerry's campaign has said it is possible his first Purple Heart was awarded for an unintentionally self-inflicted wound.

Score another one for the Swiftvets, and another retreat for Kerry, this time on a key contention for both a medal (which some, including me, felt were too difficult to argue effectively) and for his truncated tour of duty. Without that first Purple Heart, Kerry would have had to stay on the Swiftboat assignment past March 17th and remain in combat. Now that the Kerry campaign seems to have retreated from Kerry's citation, the fact that Kerry pushed this award weeks later up a different chain of command takes on a great deal more significance. Instead of bravely taking on combat, he now looks desperate to get out ahead of everyone else and willing to falsify records to do it -- which is exactly the impression that his later assertions have given us.

CQ mentioned the 2 December/11 December conflict back on August 18th in this post, based on a tip from CQ reader Amelia and an article in World Net Daily by Art Moore. Today's links to the Fox News report come from CQ readers Jay Howard and Jim Leonard. Thanks to the entire CQ community for keeping the media on its toes.

UPDATE: Matt Drudge reports that Kerry has tried reaching out to the Swiftboat vets, although not John O'Neill, and according to the former commander he called, he sounded pretty pathetic about it:

The call lasted 10 minutes, sources tell DRUDGE.

KERRY: "Why are all these swift boat guys opposed to me?"

BRANT: "You should know what you said when you came back, the impact it had on the young sailors and how it was disrespectful of our guys that were killed over there."

[Brant had two men killed in battle.]

KERRY: "When we dedicated swift boat one in '92, I said to all the swift guys that I wasn't talking about the swifties, I was talking about all the rest of the veterans."

Kerry then asked if he could meet Brant ["You were one of the best"] -- man to man -- face to face.

Brant declined the invite, explaining that Kerry was obviously not prepared to correct the record on exactly what happened during Vietnam and what happened when Kerry came back.

What kind of defense is that -- "When I called American servicemen murderers, rapists, and war criminals, I didn't mean you guys"?? If Kerry truly thought that half-assed explanation (not even an apology) would fly after all these years, then his diplomatic talents have been blown far out of proportion. The obvious cluelessness of John Kerry may even outweigh his serial prevarications as the most vital impediment to his candidacy. (via Power Line)

Kelly: Blogosphere Triumphs Over Traditional Media

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist Jack Kelly reviews the devastating effect that the Swiftvets have had on John Kerry and his campaign during the short time that they've advertised their claims im his new column for Jewish World Review (which has an abundance of terrific commentary -- a great site). Kelly focuses on the Swiftvet victory on the Cambodian Christmas story which is now widely discredited:

When John Kerry went postal last week, the major media's preferred strategy for dealing with the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth — to ignore them — went down the toilet.

Kerry melted down because the Swifties' exposure of Kerry's "Christmas in Cambodia" fantasy has struck a nerve, and is gaining traction, despite the major media's refusal to report on it.

Kerry has claimed on dozens of occasions — most notably in a speech on the Senate floor in 1986 — to have spent Christmas eve, 1968, five miles inside of Cambodia on a mission in violation of international law. Kerry claimed that incident was "seared" into his memory, and was the catalyst that turned him against the Vietnam war.

The Swifties have provided evidence that Kerry spent Christmas eve in Sa Dec, 55 miles from Cambodia. None of the sailors who served with Kerry on the two swift boats he commanded, PCF-44 and PCF-94, have supported his claim, though Mike Medeiros, a crewmate on PCF-94, said they may have strayed into Cambodian waters inadvertently.

John Hurley, speaking with Chris Wallace yesterday, tried his best to salvage the Cambodian part of the myth and claimed that a crew member would come forward in the next couple of days to substantiate cross-border missions by PCF-94. Inadvertently straying into Cambodia doesn't cut it -- the entire point of Kerry's Christmas fable was his embittered conversion to the anti-war point of view because he was ordered to break the law by a President who denied Kerry and other Americans were in Cambodia. Without orders, Kerry's embitterment narrative loses all credibility -- and his re-enactment on film of later exploits calls it into question anyway.

If he was so embittered about the war by 28 February, why go back on 1 March with the home movie camera and recreate the exploits for posterity?

Kelly continues with another PCF officer who refrained from joining the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, but who emphatically agrees that Cambodian missions would have been well-nigh impossible for the swifties:

But this was impossible, according to Doug Regelin, a swift boat commander in 1969, but who is not a member of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. PCF-94 was part of Coastal Division 11, which was stationed at An Thoi.

"There is no way to enter Cambodia from the An Thoi patrol area," Regelin wrote in the Augusta (GA) Free Press. "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."

Kelly also reviews the mainstream media reaction and finds it lacking in the extreme. Kelly, a former Marine, Green Beret and deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force, bundles the counterattack on the Swiftvets by both the Kerry campaign and traditional news outlets by the New York Times as "Plan B: Blow smoke".

Fortunately, as Kelly notes, the blogosphere has stepped forward to provide the missing pieces to the American electorate despite the advocacy of the media for John Kerry. Kelly singles out some recognizable names:

It's a triumph also for the blogosphere, which reported on a story the major media were trying to bury. Congratulations to Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit), Ed Morrissey (Captains Quarters), John Hindraker, and Scott Johnson (Power Line), Hugh Hewitt and many others for doing the job "mainstream" journalists are supposed to do, but wouldn't.

I appreciate both Kelly's acknowledgement and the opportunity to be counted among some outstanding bloggers and truly excellent people, all of which have contributed greatly to whatever success Captain's Quarters has enjoyed. More to Kelly's point, however, we have filled a niche that the media refused to address, and in doing so they enabled the blogosphere to seize credibility and stature that did not exist earlier. Bloggers have made an impact on the most visible of political processes, not just in the way they are reported, but in the conduct of the campaigns themselves. Having ceded that credibility, the mainstream media may find it difficult to regain it.

UPDATE: Scott Johnson at Power Line has also posted on this and credited Binyamin from JWR for the tipoff to the column:

Binyamin adds that JWR often runs Kelly's column before Kelly's paper (the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette). Thanks both to Binyamin and to Kelly.

I also got the tip from Binyamin, although I refrained from mentioning it. From time to time, I've received tips from mainstream media sources, and they mostly wish to remain anonymous. I had a nice e-mail chat with Binyamin this morning, and I should have asked him. So, thanks again, Binyamin, and my apologies for the lack of credit.

In describing my discretion about such sources yesterday to a friend, I said that it was somewhat akin to the scene from Blazing Saddles, where Cleavon Little tells Gene Wilder that the townspeople will eventually come around, after he took care of Mongo. On cue, a little old lady who insulted him earlier brings Little a pie and apologizes for her earlier rudeness. After Little gloats a little bit, she comes back and says, "Of course, you'll have the good taste not to mention I was here..."

And as you all know, I always err on the side of good taste!

Fact-Checking The Gray Lady

As a rule, media critics do better when they stick to media matters rather than insert themselves into political controversies. Here in the Twin Cities, we have ringside seats to the never-ending entertainment of Brian Lambert and his fact-free insertions of political commentary in his media reviews at the Pioneer Press. Well, never-ending until just recently, when the Pioneer Press announced that Lambert would no longer handle the media beat, anyway.

The New York Times apparently has a similar problem with its media critic Alessandra Stanley. In covering the Swiftvet controversy (hey, at least she's covering it at the NYT!), she makes this whopper of a misstatement while attempting to tweak Fred Barnes:

Fred Barnes, the executive editor of The Weekly Standard and a regular Fox commentator, ardently defended the Swift boat critics of Mr. Kerry, saying on Fox that a majority of the senator's Vietnam brethren believed that Mr. Kerry "fabricated or exaggerated his record." Mr. Barnes added that "the entire chain of command above Kerry have said the same thing." He did not mention any notable exceptions in that chain of command, including Senator John W. Warner, Republican of Virginia, a former secretary of the Navy who said Mr. Kerry fully merited the Silver Star. Mr. Barnes's hyperbole went unchecked.

Maybe Barnes' "hyperbole" went unchecked because Barnes knows of what he speaks, unlike the hapless Ms. Stanley. Alert CQ reader and now honorary fact-checker Scott Hudson did what Stanley failed to do: check to see if Barnes was wrong before scolding him in print. Scott went directly to the source and found this in the listing for Secretaries of the Navy:

John W. Warner.............4 May 1972 - 8 Apr 1974

During Warner's tenure, Kerry spent his time as an anti-war activist, while inactive in the Reserves. Kerry's combat time in the Swift Boat divisions was divided between two other Secretaries of the Navy -- Paul Ignatius and John Chaffee.

Alessandra, I know its difficult, but when you set out to insult someone of the stature of Fred Barnes, it really helps if you do your research before going to print. For pity's sake, I never went to J-school and even I know that. Obviously, the Gray Lady's performance standards haven't changed much since Jayson Blair left.

What Kerry And Edwards Refuse To Denounce

John Kerry and John Edwards refused to take up George Bush's challenge to denounce all outside political advertising by 527s, continuing to complain bitterly about a $250,000 ad buy from one group in three states. However, as Howard Kurtz notes, that reluctance may spring from the upcoming ad blitz about to be launched by its own 527, MoveOn, which has lined up celebrities for its campaign against George Bush:

Hip-hop impresario Benny Boom, who has directed videos for P. Diddy, Lil' Kim and LL Cool J, didn't need to have his arm twisted to join an anti-Bush advertising campaign.

"I felt like Bush stole the last election and the whole country kind of got robbed and bamboozled, and I wanted to make sure I did my part besides voting," he says. When he was approached by the liberal MoveOn PAC, "I was like, yo, I want to do an ad myself."

Yo, Benny, join the crowd -- MoveOn has a number of ads planned, starring such luminaries as Kevin Bacon, Boom, liberal radio hosts Al Franken and Janeane Garofalo, Rebecca Romjin-Stamos, Woody Harrelson, Martin Sheen, Rob Reiner, Ileana Douglas, Ione Skye, Scarlett Johanssen, Ed Asner, and Moby. Benny's motivation?

"I'm more passionate about being opposed to Bush," says Boom. "George Bush is probably the first real gangsta we have had in office."

George Bush is a gangster? Excuse me -- to use the Post's multi-culti sensitivity, a 'gangsta'? This aptly demonstrates the shrill character assassination that the Left has used during the entire presidential campaign. Kerry and Edwards apparently don't mind that kind of campaign advertising, until someone launches it against them and spends a fraction of the money that Lewis and Soros raises for celebrity-studded national advertising.

How hard is it to denounce this? Wouldn't any political advisor with a modicum of sense point out the low-hanging fruit to Kerry on this one?

Kurtz also notes that MoveOn won't talk about the content of the advertising until they release them to the Internet on Tuesday:

The MoveOn spots are edgier, angrier and in some cases funnier -- not to mention riskier -- than anything Bush and Kerry have thrown on the air. The group is not releasing details of the ads until their official unveiling today.

"This is a way of breaking out of the Washington consultant ad frame and doing something more entertaining, creative and original," said Eli Pariser, executive director of MoveOn PAC. "Our hope is that it will better connect with voters because it's not the same old stuff."

Asked about the heavy recruitment of celebs, he says: "If we could get attention for these issues without a Rebecca Romijn, we'd do it."

Boom's ad is a voter-registration pitch aimed at minorities. "A lot of common people in the inner cities just don't see the importance of it because nothing changes," he says. MoveOn describes the ad as an attempt "to counter Republican voter suppression efforts."

Republican voter suppression efforts? What would those be, exactly? Do we have bands of Republicans traveling through the country, pointing rifles at people and telling them not to vote? More importantly, why does Kurtz let Boom off the hook from answering that question while his media colleagues insist on screaming epithets at the top of their lungs at the Swiftvets, who actually have documentary evidence and a multitude of witnesses to back up their claims?

We seem to have a double standard of treatment for those who speak out on politics. When those who speak out are Hollywood entertainers or other spoiled celebrities whose entourages fawn over their every utterance, the media joins in and treats them with the utmost deference, regardless of the hyperbole they use. When 250 combat veterans speak out from their own experiences as eyewitnesses armed with actual evidence, their every word is parsed for the slightest flaw and they encounter the worst treatment possible from the James Carvilles, Paul Begalas, and Chris Matthewses of the mainstream news media.

They should be ashamed of themselves, and if John Kerry can't bring himself to denounce his multimillion-dollar benefactors after whining all weekend about attack ads, he should be man enough to denounce this. I won't hold my breath.

I'll Call Your Bluff And Raise You

Poor John Kerry - no matter what he does, the President always seems to outfox him, and the press can't help but notice. After calling for days for Bush to denounce the Swiftvet advertisements that have bedeviled Kerry's campaign, Bush finally complied -- and then challenged Kerry to denounce all 527 advertising:

Bush praised Kerry's military service in Vietnam. "I think Senator Kerry served admirably, and he ought to be proud of his record," he said.

But, pressed several times by reporters at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., about whether he would specifically condemn the ad, Bush would only say: "That means that ad and every other ad. I'm denouncing all the stuff." ...

Questioned after Bush's remarks, White House press secretary Scott McClellan repeatedly declined to criticize the content of the Swift boat ads. "Senator Kerry wants to have it both ways," by selectively calling on Bush to condemn one group's ads, McClellan said. "Senator Kerry can help put an end to all of this by joining us in calling for a stop to all of these ads."

John Kerry and John Edwards once again whined that Bush's statement wasn't enough, despite the 527s supporting their ticket outspending the Swiftvets by an order of 200 or more:

In Oshkosh, Wis., Kerry's running mate, John Edwards, blasted Bush for not being more critical of the ad and the claims by the group. "Today, George Bush faced his moment of truth and he failed," said Edwards, who has repeatedly called on the president to denounce the veterans group's ad. "He failed to condemn the specific attacks on John Kerry's military record. We didn't need to hear a politician's answer, but unfortunately that's what we got."

How difficult is this for the Kerry/Edwards team to grasp? Neither the SBVT nor MoveOn, America Coming Together, et al on the left, will stop running ads. Denouncing all of them as a group makes for an easy feel-good moment, while having absolutely no effect on the outcome. It gives the candidates an opportunity to rise above partisanship and act parentally, as James Lileks pointed out on the radio this evening. Bush and his team are smart enough to discern that opportunity, while Kerry and Edwards both look like crybabies for complaining about one group that has spent 1/200th of what their groups have in this cycle.

I don't like to use the word often, but the only word that springs to mind is pussies, and fairly clueless ones at that.

While the Washington Post manages to skate past the financial implications for Kerry in 'denouncing' 527 advertising (due in part to Dana Milbank's influence, no doubt), the AP notes it towards the end of its report on Bush's statement:

While Kerry and Democrats have demanded that Bush condemn the attack on his war record, the president has been targeted by an estimated $60 million in commercials by outside groups since the campaign began.

Kerry has declined to call for an end to those ads, which helped him at a time when he did not have the funds to compete with Bush' campaign advertising budget.

So while George Soros and Peter Lewis-funded 527s poured tens of millions of dollars into commercials calling Bush AWOL and a deserter -- charges later proved false -- and using discredited testimony from former Ambassador Joe Wilson to promote the "Bush Lied" meme, the Kerry campaign has gone into hysterics over a $250,000 ad buy in three states by combat veterans who fought for the right to free speech. The dissonance has become too great for the entire press to refrain from comment, and if the Democrats can't keep from begging George Bush to make it stop, the media will take increasing notice of the whiff of desperation coming from the Kerry campaign.

As William Shatner once told Ricardo Montalban in Star Trek II, I'm laughing at the superior intellect.

More Sloppy Work From The Kerry Campaign

Steve Sturm from Thoughts Online notes another inconsistency in the official Kerry Viet Nam narrative and timeline. This error is nowhere near as egregious as the Cambodian Christmas myth, but still indicating a certain level of sloppiness and poor vetting that allowed John Kerry's campaign to get mired in a quagmire of his own making.

In his official timeline and in one of the Michael Kranish biographies in the Boston Globe, Kerry makes certain that both note his arrival in Long Beach at the end of his tour on the USS Gridley came the day after Robert Kennedy was assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles:

June 6, 1968 -- Kerry arrives in Long Beach the day after Senator Robert F. Kennedy is killed in Los Angeles...

"I didn't have any real feel for what the heck was going on [in the war]," Kerry has recalled. His ship returned to its Long Beach, Calif., port on June 6, 1968, the day that Robert F. Kennedy died from a gunshot wound he received on the previous night at a Los Angeles hotel. The antiwar protests were growing. But within five months Kerry was heading back to Vietnam, seeking to fulfill his officer commitment despite his growing misgivings about the war.

The difference between the two passages isn't the inconsistency, and have a perfectly reasonable explanation: Kennedy was fatally wounded on the evening of June 5th, but wasn't pronounced dead until early on June 6th. Similar notes appear in Douglas Brinkley's Tour of Duty on page 460, in Brinkley's timeline of John Kerry's service:

June 6, 1968 - The Gridley sets sail for the United States. Kerry arrives in Long Beach on June 6, the day after presidential contender Robert Kennedy is shot in Los Angeles.

According to the history of the Gridley, however, Kerry would have had to accomplish the novel feat of arriving in port two days ahead of his ship:

GRIDLEY operated along the California coast until sailing for the Orient 18 November. She left Subic Bay 2 January 1967 for plane guard duty in the China Sea and the Gulf of Tonkin. After varied duties in the fighting zone, she sailed for Australia en route to the West Coast and arrived Long Beach 8 June to prepare for future action.

What does this mean? Not a whole lot substantively, although it does smack of a cheesy way to tie himself to the Kennedys. But the poor attention to detail points out the general lack of competence for both Douglas Brinkley and Kerry's campaign staff. Don't either one do any basic fact-checking for the website or -- especially -- the biography? Small wonder that Cambodian Christmases abound...

Restore Irony?

A few weeks back, Jim Treacher noted in an e-mail to me (as Joe Wilson and his Restore Truth website was busy imploding) that the domain name restoreirony.com seemed to be out in the open. I snapped it up before anyone else managed to grab it and it points back to CQ now.

Unfortunately, what with Swiftvets and other stories occupying my time, I not only forgot to give Jim credit for this, but I've also not come up with a good idea what to do with the domain. I'm thinking that a second blog would be one idea, but I'm so doggone busy with this one that the very thought of adding another makes my head pound with dread.

What do you think would be a good use of the domain? Leave your suggestions in the Comments section, and maybe if Jim forgives me for the oversight, he can help me pick out the best suggestions for the domain. The only use so far I've managed is a domain name dedicated to the weekly Caption Contests.

Business Week: Kerry Made His Bed By Lying In It

Roger Franklin at Business Week writes a clear-headed editorial in today's edition, which forms a partnership with an opposing piece in the same issue by Thane Peterson. Peterson makes the claim that despite John Kerry's promotion of his Viet Nam experience as his primary qualification for the presidency, Bush and his alleged front organization are behaving unethically for questioning that credential:

No moral equivalency exists between Kerry and Bush on the issue of service in Vietnam. Kerry served in combat. He was shot at. Not Bush. ...

Why the so-called called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth -- only one of whom served on the same vessel with Kerry -- have decided to attack their fellow vet is a bit hard to decipher, too. I suppose it could partly be an honest difference of opinion. Maybe the "fog of war" led vets to have different memories of the same events.

Peterson neatly steps astride the fact that Bush never claimed to have the "moral equivalency" of Kerry's service, and in fact on several occasions noted the difference himself. However, Bush also never made his tour of duty in the National Guard an issue for the campaign; he never trotted out pictures of himself (or staged movies from his flight assignments) and never pointed fingers at Kerry's service himself.

On the other hand, prominent Democrats such as Rep. Sherrod Brown and party chair Terry McAuliffe have repeatedly called Bush "AWOL", and Kerry himself has alluded to the same on more than one occasion. In addition, 527s such as MoveOn have beat the AWOL/deserter theme for months on end, spending millions of dollars from wealthy donors such as George Soros, and these organizations have been run by people with past and present connections to both the Kerry/Edwards campaign and the Democratic Party.

That's what makes this assertion by Peterson so laughable:

But sorry, my fellow journalists, there's no equivalency here. MoveOn is an avowedly partisan group that openly opposes Bush. The Swift-boat vets tried to cover their political tracks while claiming inside knowledge about Kerry most of them clearly don't have. And several of them have flip-flopped from publicly praising Kerry to attacking him.

So let me get this straight -- MoveOn is more credible because of the transparent nature of the illegal coordination between the Democrats and the 527, while the Swiftvets suffer because no one can establish these links? And they claim inside knowledge because they served in the same unit and the same area as John Kerry, much the way William Rood did -- they went out on patrols with Kerry and observed him from close quarters on rivers and canals where the two banks often spread less than 100 yards apart while they patrolled with their 50-foot PCFs. Peterson hasn't spent much time distinguishing the operational tactics of PCFs, which rarely if ever went out alone on patrols.

Peterson's perspective, then, is that while John Kerry's testimony should go unchallenged because he served four months in combat, the Swiftvets -- who to a man completed at least their one-year tours or left due to disabling wounds -- should shut up about theirs. And the candidate who didn't make his service any kind of qualification should expect to be slandered, but the nominee who wrapped himself in his four-month stint and surrounded himself with former shipmates for his nominating speech should get a free pass to avoid scrutiny of that record. It's a point of view, all right -- one that reeks of hypocrisy and self-service.

Franklin, on the other hand, notes the peculiar nature of Kerry's campaign and explains that this predicament is entirely of his own making:

But now, as another Presidential contest loses the track and plunges back into the same old elephant grass, it's clear that Vietnam never went away. And the blame is John Kerry's, no doubt about it. After 19 years in the Senate, the achievement on which he has chosen to place the most stress in proving he has the mettle to occupy the White House is a four-and-a-half-month tour as a junior officer in a war that America lost.

"Reporting for duty," Kerry told Boston's Democratic conventioneers, snapping a smart salute on the night he accepted his party's nomination. The cheers came on cue, even though the applause must have struck quite a few of the Democratic graybeards in the audience as a tad ironic. ...

Yet Kerry's conduct in that long-ago war remains relevant -- and not just because he has made his time in uniform both centerpiece and touchstone of his campaign, nor even, as the Swift Boat Veterans assert, because he painted his personal history in the false colors of faux heroics ...While voters will never know -- can never know -- if Kerry deserved those medals and his early ticket home, they can be absolutely sure that he did worse than merely embroider his exploits in the years that followed.

Kerry threw his medals over the White House fence -- except he didn't. He slept out on the Mall in Washington, D.C., with anti-war protesters -- except he didn't, having actually bunked down in a borrowed townhouse with Newsweek reporter Robert Sam Anson, according to an investigative story in the New York Observer.

And most troubling of all, Kerry has said he spent the last days of 1968 on a secret mission in Cambodia, under fire and listening to President Nixon deny that Kerry or any other U.S. servicemen were operating on the wrong side of the border. In one version, it was the Khmer Rouge doing the shooting. In another, drunken South Vietnamese troops celebrating Christmas, which isn't even a good fable, since Buddhists generally don't get too excited about the birth of the Christians Messiah.

While Franklin doesn't tie it up completely, the thrust is obvious. Kerry is the one who made his Viet Nam service the central testimony to both his character and his ability to wage war on terrorists. He used it to get to Howard Dean's right just as Dean started to implode and people got nervous that the eventual Democratic nominee would be so beholden to anti-war zealots that they would lose the swing vote. Kerry waved the bloody shirt in order to assuage those fears, and leading Democrats like McAuliffe and Brown slung the AWOL/deserter mud at Bush to make Kerry's service look that much better. Not only did Kerry proclaim his service as his primary qualification, at times it was the only part of his public service record he would talk about. Even today, you'd never know he spent 19 years in the Senate from his campaign speeches -- and you'd be hard pressed to realize it from the sparse list of legislative accomplishment which resulted.

In the end, Kerry has been quite successful in using his Viet Nam combat experience as the focus of his character for this election. It's unfortunate for the Senator that the result has been the exposure of his true character, instead of the fabricated nonsense he attempted to use to defraud the American electorate.

Still Lurching Towards Greater Disasters

The Kerry campaign has decided that frontal assault on an entrenched foe, despite 140 years of military experience to the contrary, is the best strategy they've got in dealing with the Swift Boat Veterans for the Truth. Adan Nagourney and Jim Rutenberg write in today's New York Times that Kerry's team plans an ad blitz labeling the Swiftvets as Republican stooges, even using John McCain footage to tie in the 2000 primary campaign attacks on the former POW to Kerry's current woes. However, in the first weekend of the counterattack, the Kerry campaign made the mistake of stirring a retired giant with a reputation for political infighting:

Senator John Kerry released a television advertisement yesterday blaming President Bush for a campaign by a "front group" of veterans that Mr. Kerry said had smeared his Vietnam record, as he intensified his drive to gain control in a fight that some Democrats said could undermine his campaign for the presidency. ...

Mr. Kerry's advisers had originally planned not to spend any money on advertising in August, but shifted gears last week in the face of concern voiced by Democrats outside the campaign that Mr. Kerry was not moving aggressively enough to deal with this threat.

"Bush smeared John McCain four years ago," the narrator says, referring to attacks by outside groups on Mr. McCain when he challenged Mr. Bush for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000. "Now, he's doing it to John Kerry."

"George Bush: Denounce the smear," the announcer says. "Get back to the issues. America deserves better."

As I noted yesterday, the only issue that Kerry wanted to talk about for the first few months of his campaign was his "chest full of medals" from his Viet Nam service, and his own party chairman took to the airwaves accusing George Bush of being AWOL on a number of occasions. Kerry himself made Bush's service an issue, and the 527s that oppose Bush have spent millions of dollars making that an issue. What exactly does Kerry want to talk about now? Viet Nam, of course; he just wants everyone else to be gagged from responding.

Towards that end, the Kerry campaign enlisted the hometown Boston Globe to write an editorial denouncing the Swiftvets. The paper, a subsidiary of the New York Times, gladly did so and in the process noted that WWII war hero and former Senator Robert Dole was once given the Purple Heart for a "leg scratch". Dole, whose reputation for political unpleasantness undid more than one bid for the Presidency, came out swinging yesterday -- although not with the arm that was rendered useless in his wartime service to his country, a nuance that the Globe and the Kerry campaign were apparently too stupid to consider:

But at the same time, Bob Dole, the Republican presidential candidate in 1996 and a World War II veteran, called on Mr. Kerry to apologize to Vietnam veterans in a television interview on CNN. He appeared to get behind some of the accusations raised by the group, when its most serious contentions have been undermined by official records and conflicting accounts.

"He's got himself into this wicket now where he can't extricate himself because not every one of these people can be Republican liars,'' said Mr. Dole, whose right arm was left limp by a war injury. "There's got to be some truth to the charges," he said.

Mr. Dole also sought to put the focus as much on Mr. Kerry's antiwar activities as on his war record, noting testimony Mr. Kerry gave to a Congressional committee in 1971.

"I mean, one day he's saying that we were shooting civilians, cutting off their ears, cutting off their heads, throwing away his medals or his ribbons,'' Mr. Dole said. "The next day he's standing there, 'I want to be president because I'm a Vietnam veteran.' ''

Smooth move by the Kerry campaign -- Dole had spent the campaign happily retired and limiting his contacts with thr press. Now Kerry has him making headline-generating press appearances, and since his image has softened considerably during the past decade (he ran a respectful if unsuccessful Presidential campaign in 1996), voters will tend to sympathize with his viewpoint.

What I don't understand is the strategic thinking behind the Kerry plan. The Democrats have lined up tens of millions of dollars behind 527s, a huge cry from the half-million or so that the Swiftvets have raised so far. Why not let the proxies handle the counterattack, since (as has become apparent) Kerry will refuse to release his full service and medical records? Why take a story that the national press had studiously ignored, to its own detriment, and blow their editorial policies back into their faces by going nuclear? I'm not the only one asking the question, either:

Mr. Carrick and other Democrats said that this was a risky moment for Mr. Kerry's campaign.

"They've turned this into a raging national press story," Mr. Carrick said of the Swift boat group. "It is certainly keeping Kerry from discussing his own issues and agenda and getting on the offensive."

Another Democrat close to the campaign, who asked not to be quoted by name, was more dire.

"When you're basically running on your biography and there are ongoing attacks that are undermining the credibility of your biography, you have a really big problem."

This could be over in two days if Kerry would sign the 180 and release his records, and if they clear him, it would give him tremendous credibility. Now, however, it may be too late as the Swiftvets have moved on to his post-war activities -- and Kerry's refusal to release his records signals even his supporters that he has something to hide. Under those circumstances, hunkering down and campaigning on issues would be the best strategy, but his refusal to do even that demonstrates not only his need to hide something, but his complete incompetence in doing so.

Lieberman's starting to look good now, don't you think?

New Intelligence Reorganization Proposal Not Much Better

Dan Eggen reports in today's Washington Post that Republican Senators have developed a new reorganization plan for American intelligence to compete with that drawn up by the 9/11 Commission. Senator Pat Roberts surprised Democrats and the White House alike by announcing this new proposal on Face The Nation yesterday and almost immediately, both reacted negatively towards it:

The Republican chairman of the Senate intelligence committee unveiled a radical proposal yesterday to remove most of the nation's major intelligence-gathering operations from the CIA and Pentagon and place them directly under the control of a new national intelligence director.

The plan, announced by Sen. Pat Roberts (Kan.) and endorsed by eight other committee Republicans, is more extensive than the reorganization proposed last month by the Sept. 11, 2001, commission and would result in the virtual dismantling of the CIA. It also would severely curb the power and influence of the Defense Department, which controls the bulk of the federal classified intelligence budget.

Under the plan, the CIA's three main directorates would be torn from the agency and turned into separate entities reporting to separate directors. The Pentagon would lose control of three of its largest operations as well, including the super-secret National Security Agency, which intercepts electronic signals worldwide.

In my opinion, the 9/11 Commission's plan for reorganizing intelligence made a fundamental mistake: it kept all of the CIA/Defense boxes separated while layering two other levels of bureaucracy on top. In effect, it pushed the raw data two more levels of management away from the President and forced everything to come up through one person, giving the President only one voice in his ear for intelligence -- which I believe to be a huge mistake in and of itself.

Now we have the new Senate GOP proposal which superficially corrects one aspect of the commission plan but fails to correct the true failings of the current system -- function duplication, lack of communication, and entrenched bureaucracy. It starts off well by freeing all but the least necessary functions from the CIA and Defense Departments, a move which would allow an independent intelligence chief budgetary control and the ability to prune bureaucrats from the system.

However, instead of combining functions for better efficiency and removing barriers to internal communication, the GOP plan would simply remove the individual units from their current lead agencies and turn them into individual agencies themselves -- which would only create more and larger bureaucracies, more paperwork, more rules regarding cross-functional interaction, and so on. How exactly does this help streamline anything? Roberts referred to this plan as "bold", but both plans are textbook examples of the kind of reorganizations that corporations do when they're bored: a lot of shuffling around, with a couple of the latest management fads tossed in, and in the end nothing changes.

Democrats criticized the GOP for cooking this up on their own instead of inviting them to be part of the process, while the White House took the more pragmatic approach of pointing out the plan's flaws:

The plan ran into several immediate obstacles, including a committee Democrat, Sen. Carl M. Levin (Mich.). He said on the same CBS broadcast: "It's a mistake to begin with a partisan bill, no matter what is in it."

The White House indicated it would study the proposal, but a senior intelligence official said yesterday the plan "makes no sense" and would cause more problems than it solves.

"Rather than eliminating stovepipes, this will create more of them," said the intelligence official, who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the political debate. "Rather than bringing intelligence disciplines together, it smashes them apart. . . . This proposal is unworkable and would hamper rather than enhance the nation's intelligence operations."

On the other hand, one Senate Democrat liked it, at least for now:

The plan was welcomed by the campaign of Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry, who has endorsed the changes advocated by the commission, including creation of a national intelligence director.

Rand Beers, the campaign's national security adviser, said in a statement that the proposal "is very similar to the reforms offered by John Kerry but needs to become bipartisan to be fully successful." Beers also accused President Bush of "dragging his feet and resisting any real changes."

Didn't Kerry endorse the 9/11 Commission's plan five weeks ago when it was released? Perhaps someone didn't mention this to the Senator, but the two plans are mutually exclusive. Had Bush implemented the first proposal (in five weeks!?!), then he would have had to re-organize a second time the following month. It's yet another flip-flop, and this one really demonstrates the superficiality of the Democratic candidate; he's for anything that the White House is against.

What is needed from a reorganization is a complete deconstruction of our current intelligence systems and the creation of a new system from the ground up, one that combines functions and reduces cross-functional bureaucracy. Instead of layering two more levels of management onto the existing structure, or turning individual units into an alphabet soup of individual agencies, we need one intelligence community that combines our civilian and defense efforts, builds teamwork, reduces duplication of effort, and stresses accountability and control through a single executive office or council. Neither proposal in play at the moment does anything approaching this.

Caption Contest #24 Winners!

I think that one of the oddest American holidays is Groundhog Day (although at least it inspired Bill Murray's best movie). How in the world did anyone come up with the notion that groundhogs come up to check for shadows and disappear in a hole for six weeks if they see one? It just doesn't make any sense ... unless you're a political candidate whose past may catch up with you on the trail:

Marc from Cranial Cavity has checked out the multitude of outstanding photo captions from this weekend's Captain's Caption Contest and selected the winners! (Thank goodness.) Here are the winners:

Captain's Award (Behind The Scenes Look) - Bear:

'Go mirrors, go smoke! Go smoke! I don't see anything happening. Go smoke! Go smoke! Go smoke! Standby lawyers. Keep coming,

527s. More attacks. Bring it- smoke, smoke, smoke! We want mirrors, tons of them. Bring them down. Let them all come. No integrity. No integrity yet.

'No honesty. All right, go smoke, go mirrors. We need more smoke. All smoke! All mirrors! Keep going! Come on, guys, lets move it.

Jeez! We need more smoke. I want all smoke to go, g-dammit. Go lawyers. Go lawyers. More lawyers. I want more smoke. What's happening to the smoke? We need more smoke.

'We need all of them coming down. Go smoke- smoke? What's happening lawyers? There's not enough BS coming down! All smoke, what the hell! My polls are falling! What the f--k are you guys doing up there? We want more smoke coming down, more mirrors. More smoke. More mirrors'...

You Have The Conn #1 (Misunderstanding The Little People) - Brian:

"John Kerry creates a "Mini-Me" to appeal to the underrepresented "under 48 inch" constituency."

You Have The Conn #2 (It's Everywhere You Go) - J Blake:

A George Hamilton tan from a day of wind surfing.....$260
A GQ hair style from a personal stylist with 10,000 air miles....$1200
A left leaning media with its head in the sand...priceless.

You Have The Conn #3 (O'Neill's Silver [And Bronze] Hammer) - Mike G:

"Democrat Presidential nominee, Senator John F. Kerry (file photo, right) is shown after getting "whack-a-moled" by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth."

Report To Sick Bay (On The Double) - Randy:

[Ed note -- Quote corrected by Randy to reflect the proper color of Viagra -- Seems he entered the contest -- before entering the contest!

"Remember me? I ran for the Presidency of the United States back in 2004. I'm a highly-decorated Vietnam war veteran, but whether you have three purple hearts, a bronze star, or even a silver star, be sure and ask your doctor about the little blue pill -- Viagra. It works for me, and in my situation that's important."

Special Award for entry into INDC Journal's "Moonbat Research Project." - Shark:

Through use of a sophisticated camera and mirror system, we are able to present to you a rare look at Waffleus Flipfloppus in it's natural habitat, hiding from the truth.

Waffelus was once thought to be found in Cambodia, but that myth has been dispelled. The distinguishing characteristics of Waffelus

include impeccable coiffed grey hair, an extra large mouth so it can speak out of both sides, and an attitude of arrogance. This rare breed puts on a great threat display ("Bring it on!") but quickly falls into whiny anger when actually confronted.

Contrary to reports, Waffelus does NOT eat lowbrow foods like cheeseburgers and fries, preferring to dine on gourmet foods like stuffed wrapped chicken and lobster florentine in the privacy of his campaign bus. When it comes to mating, is constantly on the go, always looking for a mate with richer plumage than the one he currently has.

Though these creatures can survive for up to 30 years in the do nothing confines of the Senate, their shelf life on the national scene is considerably shorter, a mere few months.

Can often been seen in the company of Bloodsuckus Legalis, the common trial lawyer.

Thanks to everyone who entered, and congratulations to the winners! Remember, here at CQ, everyone's a winner -- just some of us have higher winning percentages than others. Comments on this post will remain open, as usual, in order for the winners to gloat, the others to disparage Marc's intellect and/or my parentage, and for any other entries submitted just for the sheer enjoyment of amazing your friends and confounding your enemies. And don't forget to check out Marc's blog!

As I mentioned, your donations continue to flow into the tipjars set up to help me defray the costs of attending the Republican National Convention, and they are much appreciated. You raised about $250 more this past week. I'm extremely grateful, and I hope to give everyone their money's worth when I'm at Madison Square Garden for the show. The tipjars will remain on the left sidebar until the convention.

Send me a photograph or an e-mail with a link to a great picture you think should be the subject of our next Caption Contest, and let me know if you'd like to be the guest judge! I'll have another picture for Friday -- so be sure to come back then for the next contest.

Caption Contest #23 Winners!

Like I told you when this edition of the contest opened, blogging is like politics -- it's a tough balancing act. When something trips you up, like a guest-judging mixup, it's hard to keep your balance! One man who may understand that better than anyone this month may be this guy:

One week late, here are the winners, this time chosen by myself:

Captain's Award (Seared Edition) - Retired Military:

"Back when I was a boy, I used to go where the railroad was being built near my home and bring water to the Chinese laborers. That memory is seared, seared, into me"

"Pssst Pssst Senator Kerry, Chinese laborers havent worked on the railroad for 60 years before you were born"

"I'm sorry, my speechwriteers handed me the wrong speech. Why back when I was a boy, I used to go where the railroad was being built near my home and bring water to the labor union members who were building it. Why that is where I first learned how to use a sledgehammer. That memory is seared, seared into me."

You Have The Conn #1 (Something's Missing) - Stephen Macklin:

I'm John Kerry, and I Have No Platform

(stolen from here, as he admits)

You Have The Conn #2 (Vintage Campaign Advertising) - Shark:

(sung to the Good-n-Plenty song)

Kerry's Lying!
Kerry's Lying!
Kerry's Lying!
Kerry's Lying!

Johnny Kerry was a swift boateer-
Said he was in Cambodia, but he was only "near"
He was taking CIA men on a secret jungle run
But he had a lucky hat to make sure the job got done.

Johnny Sez: "That Memory is Seared!"
Johnny Sez: "Nixon told a lie!"
Johnny Sez: "That memory is seared

But he wasn't in Cambodia, he was only near.

Kerry's lying!
Kerry's lying!
Kerry's lying!
Kerry's lying!..........

You Have The Conn #3 (Bronze Star, er, Medal) - Doppelganglander:

"With the Olympic games opening in Athens this week, I am reminded of my experiences competing on the balance beam for the U.S. gymnastics team. It was the 1968 games in Cambodia, and the event is seared -- seared in my memory."

Report To Sick Bay (Or The Detox Center) - Mike G:

With another sly signal reminiscent of his Puff the Magic Dragon sing along, John Kerry demonstrates that he thinks he knows how to do a line.

Thanks to everyone who entered, and congratulations to the winners! Remember, here at CQ, everyone's a winner -- just some of us have higher winning percentages than others. Comments on this post will remain open, as usual, in order for the winners to gloat, the others to disparage my intellect and/or my parentage, and for any other entries submitted just for the sheer enjoyment of amazing your friends and confounding your enemies.

As I mentioned, your donations continue to flow into the tipjars set up to help me defray the costs of attending the Republican National Convention, and they are much appreciated. You raised about $250 more this past week. I'm extremely grateful, and I hope to give everyone their money's worth when I'm at Madison Square Garden for the show. The tipjars will remain on the left sidebar until the convention.

Send me a photograph or an e-mail with a link to a great picture you think should be the subject of our next Caption Contest, and let me know if you'd like to be the guest judge! I'll have another picture for Friday -- so be sure to come back then for the next contest.

The Day Of Rest

And (for part of) the seventh day, I rested ....

Today we had the Little Admiral with us, so I took the afternoon off from the computer and spent the day playing with the granddaughter and the First Mate. After ten days of Swiftvets, polls, and the like, it was refreshing to play with Weebles buses and go for a drive with the family.

I'll close out the current Caption Contest, judge the previous one, and hit the sack -- and start fresh tomorrow.

Squealing Like Schoolgirls

It seems like a far cry from "Bring It On!," but John Kerry and John Edwards are begging George Bush to violate election law and the First Amendment in order to force the Swiftvets into silence:

Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry on Saturday night urged President Bush to "stand up and stop" what he called personal attacks on him over his combat record in Vietnam.

Personal attacks? He's done nothing but hold up his Viet Nam narrative as his single best qualification for the Presidency since the beginning of this year. Perhaps his staff should play the videotape of his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention, or the speeches in support of him by the discredited David Alston and others, who couldn't talk about anything else.

"That's why they're attacking my credibility. That's why they've personally gone after me. The president needs to stand up and stop that. The president needs to have the courage to talk about it." ...

In Roanoke, Va., on Saturday, Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards also called on Bush to end the Swift Boat Veterans ads.

"This is a moment of truth for George W. Bush," Edwards said at a Democratic rally. "We're going to see what kind of man he is and what kind of leader he is. ... We want to hear three words: Stop these ads."

I don't know what kind of a lawyer John Edwards might be, but he's obviously rather deficient on tax and electoral law. Candidates can't direct the actions of independent 527s; otherwise, it violates both codes. Not only should both Edwards and Kerry know this as lawyers, they should know it as candidates, since independent 527s like America Coming Together and MoveOn have spent over $50 million against George Bush this year, compared to the microscopic $250,000 the Swiftvets have spent on their campaign.

In regards to the nature of the attacks, the Bush campaign should condemn that -- just as soon as Kerry/Edwards condemns Congressman Sherrod Brown, who took the opportunity during a public hearing with Colin Powell to accuse George Bush of going AWOL:

Powell, however, became testy when Brown said, in a reference to questions about whether Bush completed his National Guard service: "You are one of the very few people in this administration that understands war. We have a president who may have been AWOL" from duty.

Or, for that matter, when Kerry fires his own party chairman, Terry McAuliffe, for also calling George Bush AWOL:

While none of the presidential candidates has directly criticized Bush's service, some Democrats, including Democratic National Committee Chairman Terence R. McAuliffe, have accused the president of shirking his military duties in 1972, when Bush transferred to an Alabama unit. McAuliffe on Sunday called Bush "AWOL," or "absent without leave," during that period.

Or for representing that viewpoint as the official position of the Democratic party:

But while the AWOL charge may be absurd, the question remains: Since John Kerry went to Vietnam and George Bush didn't, is Kerry more qualified to be a wartime president than Bush? Terry McAuliffe seems to think so. "I look forward to that debate when John Kerry, a war hero with a chest full of medals, is standing next to George Bush, a man who was AWOL in the Alabama National Guard," McAuliffe said. "George Bush never served in our military in our country. He didn't show up when he should have showed up."

Note that these examples involve Democrats, one an officeholder and the other its national chairman. The incidents go back to February of this year, while both Edwards and Kerry were still running for the nomination. Neither one of them have ever condemned McAuliffe or Brown, or for that matter Michael Moore, who has repeatedly called Bush a deserter. In fact, they invited Moore to their nominating convention, where he sat in an honored position with former President Jimmy Carter.

But now that the shoe is on the other foot, both Kerry and Edwards are reduced to squealing like schoolgirls in the onslaught of Swiftvet allegations that have raised disturbing questions about Kerry's character and his precious Viet Nam narrative. In schoolyard terms, they picked a fight with someone they thought couldn't defend himself and now want everyone else in the playground to rescue them from the battle they provoked. They've broken out the lawyers and even invoked the McCain legend to help them squirm out of the debate they started.

In fact, they've done everything except release all of John Kerry's service and medical records from his service in Viet Nam, a move they pressured Bush to make months ago, which he did.

Is this how tough the Kerry/Edwards ticket will be in defending American security?

UPDATE: Kevin at Cadet Happy notes a few other examples of Kerry's pusillanimous history:

Kerry demands Bush condemn the Swift Vets, though he poured fuel on the "AWOL" story in February . . . Far from condemning the attacks on the President, Kerry specifically pushed the story forward: "The issue here is . . . was he present and active in Alabama at the time he was supposed to be? I don't have the answer to that question and just because you get an honorable discharge does not, in fact, answer that question." SEN. JOHN KERRY, D-Mass., in Richmond, Va., commenting on Bush's statement.

And in the Washington Post on April 27th of this year (no link, article by Jill Zuckman and Jeff Zeleny):

Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry scolded the White House for criticizing his protest of the Vietnam War and said Monday that President Bush "owes America an explanation" about whether he lived up to his own wartime obligations a generation ago. "I've fought for my country. I know what it means to defend my nation," Kerry said in a television interview here, directly challenging Bush's service for the first time. "This president can't even prove he actually showed up for duty in the National Guard."

So just as soon as Kerry condemns Sherrod Brown, fires Terry McAuliffe, and withdraws from the race for starting this debate, Bush will happily condemn the Swiftvets.

Newsweek: Kerry's Bronze Star Story Doesn't Hold Water

In the latest edition of Newsweek, reporters Evan Thomas and T. Trent Gegax take on the story of John Kerry's Bronze Star engagement of 13 March 1969 and write a fairly balanced article describing the controversy and the effect it has had on the Kerry campaign. In the middle of the article, Newsweek notes an interesting change of story from Del Sandusky, one of Kerry's crew (emph. mine):

As sailors who weren't on Kerry's boat tell the story of what happened on March 13, 1969, Kerry did nothing very heroic. That day Kerry was leading five boats back from a mission up the Bay Hap River. Encountering a fishing net across the canal, the boats split. Kerry and one other boat went through a gap near the right bank, and the other three boats headed through an opening on the left. Suddenly, the lead boat on the left, some 25 yards away from Kerry's boat, hit a mine and stopped dead in the water. All the American boats opened up with machine gun fire, hosing down the shoreline. The firing stopped after about 40 seconds, according to the Swift Boat vets, when they realized that no one was shooting back. Kerry, they say, had roared ahead and then turned back to pick up a soldier who had fallen off his boat. When Kerry pulled the man out of the river, they claimed, no one was shooting.

Del Sandusky, the man steering Kerry's boat, told a different version to NEWSWEEK. He says his boat was jarred by an explosion, probably from a rocket, knocking the soldier, Jim Rassmann, off the boat. Kerry was thrown against the bulkhead, injuring his arm. Sandusky says he could see muzzle flashes from the jungle and bullets skimming across the water. Sandusky says he can't remember if anyone was still shooting when Kerry pulled Rassmann from the river, but in any case, the boat was banged up and taking on water. An official report made available to NEWSWEEK shows windows blown out and the engine and steering damaged; it's unclear from the report when the damage happened.

Sandusky's story presents a problem for the Kerry narrative -- he received his commendation for retrieving Rassmann under enemy fire, not for coming back after the shooting stopped. Not only that, but as I mentioned last Friday, here is the complete damage report for PCF-94:

BRAVO: ... 2. PCF not capable of executing Market Time Patrol. ...

DELTA: Two stbd and one port main cabin windows blown out. VRC-46 radio and all remote units pilot house inop. AC wiring shorted out. Onan generator inop. Steerage control after helm inop. Stbd bilge pump broken. Screws curled and chipped. Radar gear box frozen. Main engines experienced RPM drop.

Not one mention of a single bullet hole, despite Kerry's contention on his website that he turned his boat back into hostile fire to rescue Rassmann:

Lieutenant (junior grade) Kerry directed his gunners to provide suppressing fire, while from an exposed position on the bow, his arm bleeding and in pain and with disregard for his safety, he pulled the man aboard. Lieutenant (junior grade) Kerry then directed his boat to return and assist the other damaged boat to safety.

Again I ask -- how does a boat that has curled screws, engines power diminished, no AC power or generator on line, and no radio communication manage to get back to Rassman to pull him out of the water, and how does such a boat tow another back to harbor? These boats aren't dinghies, after all; they're 50-footers with some heavy equipment on board. Some speculate that the damage assessment for PCF-94 got confused with PCF-3, but now we have Sandusky claiming that PCF-94 was "taking on water", even though the patrol selected it to tow PCF-3 back to base. And how exactly could the boat be taking on water when the damage report doesn't include and hull breaches?

And how exactly could all that damage be repaired in five days? The COSDIV11 chronology shows this action for 18 March:

PCFs 5, 9, 44, 72, and 94 conducted operations on the Cua Lon River destroying 41 sampans and 5 structures.

That's a might quick recovery time for a boat whose engines were damaged, AC systems shot, generator inoperative, steerage control useless, and screws curled and chipped. PCF-94 also patrols on 19 March, 20 March, 23 March, and 26 March, and so on.

Sandusky told Newsweek that PCF-94 was taking on water, but Kerry's stories don't seem to hold much water on their own.

Rood Story Doesn't Quite Add Up

As William Rood's testimony gets parsed more closely and the initial novelty of a factual refutation of a Swiftvet allegation wears off, certain elements of the story will begin to beg nagging questions. The Bandit, with whom I've worked on elements of Kerry's presentation of his Viet Nam service, may be the first to spot some inconsistencies in Rood's recollection:

In his eyewitness account, Rood describes coming under rocket and automatic weapons fire from Viet Cong on the riverbank during two separate ambushes of his boat and Kerry's boat.

Bill Rood goes on to say "What we did on Feb. 28, 1969, was well in line with the tone set by our top commanders." Perhaps Bill Rood would be kind enough to provide evidence that he and Kerry's standing order's were changed from DO NOT EVER BEACH OR LEAVE YOUR BOAT DURING AN AMBUSH, to 'it's fine to beach in front of an enemy ambush if you think it might be a great idea.'

As Bill Rood is well aware of, ambushes most always occurred from both sides of a river or canal simultaneously. To beach your boat on one side of a canal leaves you open to counter attack from the opposite side, and to make matters worse, your forward guns are rendered useless for defense. The canal Rood and Kerry were on that Feb. 28th day, the Dong Cung, was no more wider than a four lane highway. If there had been intense fire as Rood suggests, then both boats would have been heavily damaged with many wounded or killed from taking fire from both sides of the shore as he suggests happened while both his and Kerry's boats were defenseless aground.

Bill Rood's description of how both swift boats came under intense enemy fire that day is very suspect. There are no tell-tale signs that either Rood or Kerry came under heavy, intense enemy fire that day. Both boats were loaded with at least 15 VN troops and yet no injuries [were reported] from such close range of contact in such a narrow canal. Furthermore, both boats (Rood's PCF-23 and Kerry's PCF-94) were back on patrol the very next day, which strongly suggests there was never any intense enemy fire, or both boats would have suffered multiple holes in the hull that would have required repairs and delay of patrol.

According to the chronology of COSDIV 11, both boats did indeed return to patrol on 1 March, "towing fuel bladders up the Bay Hap River to Cai Nuoc." They took light fire that day and no patrol missions for either boat were recorded after that until at least 8 March.

Bandit also takes Rood to task for testifying to events at which he was not present:

As pointed out above, Sen. Kerry received a Silver Star for running after a fleeing wounded young enemy soldier with a B-40 rocket, who by revised accounts over the years from Sen. Kerry's crew who were there -- was standing and prepared to fire the rocket just before Kerry killed him. Bill Rood did not witness this, nor anyone from Rood's boat had witnessed this event because the PCF-23 had beached and unloaded its troops some distance from Kerry's boat.

Interesting enough, one of Kerry's crewmembers who was there with Kerry on that Feb. 28th day, Del Sandusky, told the Los Angeles Times on August 8, that no one clearly saw Sen. Kerry kill the wounded soldier. This supports early accounts by another witness who had followed Kerry off the boat, Michael Medeiros, who had said no one saw Kerry kill the fleeing VC. A Army advisor who was on Rood's swift boat that day, Doug Reese, was the first man from Rood's boat on the scene, some 10 minutes after the VC soldier was allegedly killed by Kerry. Doug Reese has said he could observed no other wounds on the VC soldier other than the leg wound inflicted by Kerry's forward M-60 gunner.

My feeling about this is that Rood means well; his account does not appear to be that of a partisan shill, no more than the other Swiftvets' accounts do. It was 35 years ago, he's tried to forget that day ever occurred most of that time, and he and Kerry just recently went over his reminiscences, during which memories can easily get tangled. In cases like these, it's best to go over the preponderance of evidence and testimony -- something that the Swiftvets have been saying all along.

Did Kerry chase after the VC? By all accounts, yes.

Did Kerry shoot an unarmed teenager in the back? Unknown.

Did anyone but Kerry witness the shooting? No.

Did they plan on beaching the boats during an ambush? Apparently, the y did, even if it was a foolish thing to do.

Were they under intense fire by a numerically superior foe, as Kerry's commendation claims? Looking at all of the evidence available, one would have to conclude not. Even I could hit the side of a 50-foot boat sitting dead on a riverbank across 100 feet of water with an automatic weapon, and I'm not terribly experienced with firearms. And yet we're to believe that large numbers of battle-hardened insurgents lined on both sides of that narrow canal completely missed two or three huge targets for several minutes while they were beached, and the men aboard them?

It doesn't add up.

UPDATE: McQ and Jon from QandO have more observations, on either side of the question.