Bob Dole says that Bob Dole is skeptical about his friend Senator Kerry’s Purple Hearts. He’s not very kind to his friend Senator Kerry in general:

…what I will always quarrel about are the Purple Hearts. I mean, the first one, whether he ought to have a Purple Heart — he got two in one day, I think. And he was out of there in less than four months, because three Purple Hearts and you’re out.

[Update a couple minutes later]

This Boston Globe editorial is simply mind boggling:

Kerry, on the other hand, may have done more than Dole to qualify as a genuine war hero. Although his tour in Vietnam was short, on at least two occasions he acted decisively and with great daring in combat, saving at least one man’s life and earning both a Silver Star and a Bronze Star. That’s not our account or Kerry’s; it is drawn from eyewitnesses and the military citations themselves.

Ignoring, of course, the much greater number of eyewitnesses who dispute it, and the possibility that the citations are based on false testimony.

And this bit is amazing as well:

Rather than seeking debate, however, this group, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, is attempting political assassination, claiming in ads and a best-selling book that Kerry is “Unfit for Command.” In many cases the charges conflict with statements the same men made in the past. Sometimes the allegations contradict documentary evidence.

“Rather than seeking debate”? They’re eager to join in a debate, but the media refuses to interview them for the most part. It’s John Kerry who is resisting debate. He won’t even address the charges, instead slandering them and accusing them of being Republican attack dogs.

Anyway, on to the relevant part of the Dole interview with Wolf Blitzer:

Continue reading A True Purple Heart Weighs In →

Fred Barnes just predicted that Arnold will call Democrats “girlie men” in his convention speech, and that it will bring down the house.

I hope he does. It was pretty funny to see him stir up the hornet’s nest in Sacramento (and San Francisco) the last time, in which they all got outraged and acted as though they were going to hit him with their collective purse.

If the Dems are smart, they’ll be figuring out a way to respond ahead of time that doesn’t make them look ridiculous, so they’ll be ready for it this time. But so far, they haven’t shown much sign of being smart.

That’s the only word I have for this piece from the AP. It’s a compilation of all of the Dem talking points in a single article. As someone at Free Republic said, they’re not even attempting to pretend to be objective any more. There’s an amusing howler in the first graf:

John Kerry’s Vietnam War service records run to multiple medal commendations and a notation of “conspicuous gallantry” in combat. President Bush’s file tracks the stateside career of a National Guard test pilot. Yet the combat veteran is the one under attack as a wartime pretender in the race for the White House.

The National Guard has test pilots? And George Bush was one of them? Who knew?

Apparently not David Espo.

Of course, if he was smart enough to know the difference, he’d also know that a test pilot has a much lower life expectancy than a Swift Boat commander in the post-Tet-offensive Mekong Delta of late 1968, after much of the Viet Cong had been wiped out.

The last line in the paragraph somehow reminds me of Monty Burns grumbling after he loses the race for governor: “Ironic, isn’t it Smithers? This anonymous clan of slack-jawed troglodytes has cost me the election. And yet, if I were to have them killed, I would be the one to go to jail! That’s democracy for you.”

Read the whole thing, and be amazed.

The primary strategy (at least until his story began to implode this week) of the Dems this year was to put forth a decorated Vietnam vet, and attempt to contrast him with a president and vice president who hadn’t served in that war. The hope was that they could set up his record as sacrosanct, and unquestionable. For the most part, until the Swifties came along, the Republicans went along with the deal (“No one questions Senator Kerry’s service to his country in Vietnam”).

But here’s a problem with that argument that occurred to me the other night. The stock response from the Dems is “He volunteered to go to war, he gave his blood for our country, he fought bravely, he earned commendations.”

But unfortunately, he’s not the only person of whom all that could be said. Clearly, his four-month resume, by itself, even if accepted at face value, will not be sufficient to launch him into the White House. Now that his war stories have been severely damaged, the real battle in the fall will be what he’s done since the war, and I don’t think that it’s going to be very pretty picture.

[Update at 12:30 PM PDT]

Am I the only one that sees nothing in this story to justify the headline “Kerry Campaign Unfazed by Bush Attacks”?

First of all, these aren’t “Bush attacks.” They’re Swift Boat Vet attacks. And there’s nothing in the behavior of the Kerry campaign that could be characterized as “unfazed.”

And of course, trial lawyer John Edwards urges the president to violate the law, by coordinating with a 527:

“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.”

And the Bush spokesman makes the excellent point that the only campaign that’s denigrating the service of Vietnam veterans is the Kerry campaign (in their attacks on the Swift Boat Vets). And speaking of denigrating vets, check out this latest outrage from Pat Oliphant.

[Update a few minutes later]

No, of course I’m not comparing John Kerry to Benedict Arnold.

Sheesh.

Benedict Arnold was a competent military commander.

Somehow, this headline takes on an irony that wouldn’t have been discernable when it first appeared, over three weeks ago, right after the Dem’s convention.

It will be quite amusing, and poetically just if, after raising hundreds of millions for these Dem-supporting groups to disseminate spin and lies, Kerry’s campaign is sunk by a small group of dedicated Navy veterans and a few hundred thousand dollars. By the way, their fund raising has apparently been going great guns since the story has gained traction. They reportedly raised almost half a million yesterday alone.

Campaign finance laws are a disaster, and I agree with Andrew Stuttaford that signing McCain-Feingold was one of George W. Bush’s more shameful acts as president. Even Michael Kinsley on NPR said this morning that the situation is hopeless, and that we need to get rid of all the rules, and just have full disclosure. I agree.

[Update a little after 11 AM PDT]

Power Line has a nice roundup of reader commentary on the Swiftboats, almost all of which is more intelligent than what we read in the vaunted mainstream press. Example:

The men who were best able to observe and judge John Kerry’s performance in combat were the men who had the same level of training and expertise that he did; and those are the young officers and noncommissioned officers who commanded the boats operating in close proximity to his, young men whose very lives depended on the coordinated action of all units participating in any particular mission. Successful riverine combat maneuvers require inordinate observational skills. So were these officers and NCO’s, all of them skilled observers, asleep at the wheel while some pillaging preppie ravished the countryside unbeknownst to all but himself?

Well, if you will but listen to them, no, they weren’t. These men, these Swiftvets, several dozens of them, who ate, slept and fought with John Kerry will tell you that, no, they were quite aware of what was going on around them, and that their recollection of events is far different from those attested to in Congress by their onetime comrade in arms. They are as befuddled as the rest of us that a man who launched his political career on claims of being duped into committing war crimes in an unjust war wants to now use his service in that war as the foundation of his campaign for the presidency.

Think about this: John Kerry had to know that his fabrications were ultimately unsustainable and that the men he falsely condemned would not remain silent were he to run for the presidency. Yet he has ignored that reality and attempted to build his whole campaign on his wartime service and his questionable awards. It would be interesting to hear what a psychiatrist might conclude from such bifurcated reasoning. Which brings us, unavoidably, to this question:

Does this sound like the kind of judgment we want in a Commander in Chief in this time of terror?

Mark Steyn says that Canada needs to be broken up.

At a superficial level, America

According to Brit Hume’s show, Kerry is being defended by a group of expatriate Americans. In Hanoi.

[5 PM update]

Here’s the link.:

HANOI, Vietnam (AP) — Vietnam veterans supporting John Kerry for president made their case Friday in the heart of what was once enemy territory.

Calling President Bush a draft dodger, the veterans in Hanoi donned T-shirts emblazoned with “Americans Overseas for Kerry” and showing Bush’s face with a line crossed through it.

You couldn’t make this stuff up. Maybe they can help elicit more support for Senator Kerry from “foreign leaders.”

It’s being reported that the Kerry campaign is going to petition the FEC to pull the Swift Boat ads.

[voice=”Jack Nicholson”]
The truth? You can’t handle the truth.
[/voice]

This bespeaks desperation. And these folks call Republicans Nazis.

I wonder what their grounds for this egregious violation of the First Amendment will be?

Virginia Postrel posts an email with some speculation about Kerry’s Cambodia story. Read it if you still give a damn. Long story short: some of the problems with the story go away if you assume Kerry confused Christmas and Tet. Read it and make up your own mind.

We now know why the Paper Formerly Known As The Paper of Record has waited so long to report on Senator Kerry’s Excellent Southeast Asia Adventure. They had to gather enough chaff to thoroughly obfuscate the issue. Reading this piece, it’s clear that the primary motive is not to report all the available facts, but to put up a solid phalanx against anyone standing in the way of John Effing Kerry becoming the next president. I’m sure that bloggers with much more time than I will dissect it line by disingenuous-and-one-sided line.

And so the media suck up to the Democrats, and associated decline in its credibility, continues.

[Update on Friday morn, and ignoring the brouhaha in the comments section]

The dissection begins. And Patterico lays off the LA Times momentarily to go after the Gray Lady as well:

The article accomplishes something that I would have thought impossible just two days ago. It makes the L.A. Times’s coverage of the Swift Boat Vets look (almost) like responsible journalism.

That’s gotta hurt.