BROTHER, CAN YA' SPARE A MEDAL?:

Exhuming John Kerry's Past (Howard Kurtz, November 26, 2002, Washington Post)

John Kerry has survived the Joe Klein primary.

For the Massachusetts senator who wants to be president, the profile in the new issue of the New Yorker loomed as an early test of how he would beperceived by the press. And the article's focus – on Kerry's struggle with his opposition to Vietnam, and the details of his long-forgotten heroism there – can only boost his candidacy in this post-9/11 era. [...]

[T]he fulcrum of the piece is Vietnam, and there's a fairly dramatic moment when Kerry discovers in his files a 1966 address he gave on the subject at Yale, after he had enlisted in the Navy but before he left to fight in that jungle war.

"I am criticizing the propensity – the ease – which the United States has for getting into this kind of situation. . . . Never in the last 20 years has the government of the United States been as isolated as it is today."

For some reason this reminds us of Clinton trying to maintain his political "viability" while playing footsie with the college ROTC program. The difference, of course, is that Clinton didn't serve, while Kerry was wounded three times in Nam and then, in 1971, led a protest in which he tossed his combat ribbons onto the Capitol steps.

That's actually not true. What Mr. Kerry did do was throw a different set of ribbons, not his own. His service was mostly honorable, his subsequent behavior less so. Posted by Orrin Judd at November 26, 2002 2:29 PM