The only way that Kerry's speech makes any sense is if someone from the NYT, WashPost, CNN, etc., let them know that they couldn't ignore the stories any longer, and the campaign decided it'd be better to make them cover it by burying the accusations in stories talking about Kerry's response today. Still, it's hard to imagine it's going to lead to anything but disaster...

brian:

Even if they're all frontpaging it tomorrow and saying he didn't even serve in Vietnam, but did commit war crimes, and plotted with Communists to overthrow the government when he came home, he needs to move on. Nothing in the Vietnam era helps him.

Kerry made his 4 months in Vietnam the centerpiece of the Democratic convention, glossed over his participation in V.V.A.W. and ignored 20 years in the US Senate. This was done deliberately so he could run to the middle. He has been running ads clipping his acceptance speech with guff about a strong military and strong alliances with France. The real issue is who is the real John Kerry? Was the convention John Kerry, the real John Kerry?

My own take on the convention is that the whole thing was phony as a three dollar bill. If the convention had reflected what was really on the delegates minds, they would have demanded immediate withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, termination of American aid to Israel, war crimes trials for Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and reparations.

But what about Kerry? Who is the real Kerry? Did the convention show the real John Kerry? or is the real John Kerry the guy who was the V.V.A.W. mouthpiece, who threw somebody's medals or ribbons over the fence and who in a twenty year Senate career has earned highest marks from the ADA while accomplishing almost nothing?

I think most Republicans would like to run against the hard core leftist. But I don't think it's that simple.

I think the real John Kerry is nothing. He is hollow on the inside. He has no core. He has only ambition. He marries for money and social status. He adopts politics for temporary advantage. The accident of his initials gave shape to his military career (thus the choice of the Navy, volunteer for the swift boat, buy the movie camera, hope to star in his own personal PT109) and his route to the senate. When he got back from Viet Nam, the wind was blowing out of the other quarter. Easy, join V.V.A.W., throw medals (not your own they might come in handy later) go back to Massachusetts and do what ever Teddy Kennedy does.

Look at the way he handled the primaries. Dean picks up momentum as the "anti-war candidate." Kerry, who had said it would be wildly irresponsible to vote against the Iraq funding bill, votes against it to cut Dean off.

Why are the Swift Boat guys after Kerry. You may if you wish impugn their motives or you can pull Karl Rove out of the magician's hat, or you can claim Bush put them up to it (on those days when you don't think he is too stupid to walk and chew gum at the same time). My guess, and I don't know any of them, is that they are angry, they are angry at John Kerry because they believe that he is a user who used them, they are angry at the media who defamed then in the 1970's, they are angry at the liberals who have indicted them as war criminals and baby killers (based in part on John Kerry's testimony) and convicted them without ever giving them a chance to defend themselves; and this anger has festered with compound interest for a generation. They see their fathers lionized as the greatest generation, their children sent to Iraq with respect and the first member of their generation to be lauded is the one who betrayed them. Lord that must hurt.

If I were in their shoes, I would write a book if I had to do it longhand, and I would make sure the word got out if had to stand on street corners and shout. If I went to Rove and he sent me to some guy in Texas with money and a publishing house in NYC so much the better. But my guess is that the CREP has had minimal contact with this.

Kerry's problem with the Swift Boat book is not that it makes him out to be a liar or a coward. But that it makes him out to be what he is, a hollow man.

Last spring I saw a Maureen Dowd column about Kerry. I quit reading MoDo a couple of years ago after Bush Derangement Syndrome crippled her. But that column contained a gem of a quote:

"It's not often that you get a presidential candidate to recite poetry to you, especially in a year when W. and J.F.K. are going macho a macho.

But there was Mr. Kerry flying from Boston to New Orleans on Friday, sipping tea for his hoarse throat and reeling off T. S. Eliot's
"Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."

"There are so many great lines in it," he said. " 'Do I dare to eat a peach?' 'Should I wear my trousers rolled?' 'Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets/The muttering retreats/Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels/And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells."

Then he started on "Gunga Din" and " 'talk o' gin and beer.'"

I thought that the following lines from Proofrock were a perfect motto for the Kerry campaign

Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all:I
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

But OJ suggested that another Elliot poem would be more appropriate:

The Hollow Men

Mistah Kurtz -- he dead.

A penny for the Old Guy

I

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us -- if at all -- not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

Of course the literary connection runs deeper than that. The rubric of the poem is from Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which Coppola filmed as Apocalypse Now, which Kerry has worked into his personal narrative as his secret mission up the Mekong.

The thing about truth is that we can not stand it, we seem always to have to push our lives into the narratives we have heard of grander things, we never want to confront our own pettiness, our own selfishness our own errors -- our own humanity. The thing about great art, whether Elliot, Conrad or Coppola, is that it returns us always to the truth, to the heart of darkness.

The Swift Boat vets are laying him Kerry bare, not as a liar, not as a coward, but as a hollow man.

Kerry is an empty shell upon which the "We Hate Bush" doctrine has been projected. In a way, he's pathetic -- a pathological JFK impersonator who married for money & prestige and the high point of whose life were four months being John Wayne up along the Mekong back in '68.

Remember Al bundy, the husband from Married, With Children? White-trash loser always bragging about how "I was a football star in high school. Once I Scored Three Touchdowns In One Game!"

What's the difference between Al Bundy and JFK2 except a billionare wife and bragging about how "I was a Swift-boat Captain in Vietnam. Once I Scored Three Purple Hearts, a Silver Star, and a Bronze Star!"

Robert:

That was excellent. You should get paid for that kind of writing.

Jeff: I will be paid in full if I have convinced just one fence stradler that John Kerry should not be the next President of the United States.

Robert:

Very good. Although I don't think there are many fence-straddlers reading this blog.

I do have one question about Kerry - why does his home movie (the one the networks keep running) show him in green fatigues? Was he trying to look "in-country" or was that just what the average boat guy wore? I have no idea.