I've got it figured out!

JOhn Kerry is actually a Rove mole. That's the only rational explanation for the way the Democrats have run this campaign. How could anybody have expected that his Vietnam bragging would not be disputed? Especially after the drubbing they gave Bush about his term in the ANG. And yet, his Vietnam experience is the ONLY thing of his 35+ years in government that they talked about.

A Rove mole. I bet Lee Atwater is dying of envy.

Pauline Kael syndrome by Nagourney. When you work for a paper that published a 5,000-word adversarial take on the swift boat vets and doesn't get around to the Christmas in Cambodia charge until word 4,880 or so, you might be a little myopic about Kerry's strength vis a vis his Vietnam record.

The problem is that while they can bury the worst of the vets' charges in ad No. 1, the bulk of ad No. 2 not only uses Kerry's own words against him -- hard to refute that except to bring up Mi Lai again and try to make it sound as if his 1971 charges were on the mark -- but the ad also plays in the Democrats' ballpark of emotion and victimhood. We get Kerry's comments, then we get the POW's feelings about those comments, and the ordeals they had to go through in Hanoi are well documented in the media, thanks in part to John McCain's 2000 candidacy.

Unless McCaim bales them out with a denounciation of the ad, it's impossible to see how the Kerry campaign and the media spins out of this dilemma without villifying men who were held captive in some cases for well over half a decade.

Kerry's mistake all along was to assume that if he played up the semester in Viet Nam, everyone would politely avert their gaze from his activities in the decade that followed. By not talking about it at all, he's allowed others to set the agenda on the whole subject. One in which a lot of people still have strong opinions decades later. It was an obvious, easy target, and if these 527 guys hadn't done it first, the GOP was going to in a few weeks. Which then leads to the question-- Why didn't Kerry come up with a coherent, believeable story back in May? The press would have quickly established it as unassailable and forced any critic to first convince voters that the critic wasn't an obsessive crank.

Is he really that out of touch, or arrogant, or whatever it takes to ignore something like this? What kind of person runs for such an office without doing a critical self-examination for exploitable flaws like this? Maybe he should get Edwards to sue all those advisors he's hired for their professional malpractice and incompetence.

The question now is whether his response came in time.

John's right -- Pauline Kael syndrome. Also, Nagourney calls it a 'stragegic error' because he assumes Kerry has a valid defense. Kerry's inner circle 'let the story go unattended' because they were probably hoping someone could turn up some real dirt (the 'brown books,'), that too many inconsistencies among the Swifties' stories would emerge, or that the press could somehow kill the thing. It wasn't a calculation error, and Nagourney quotes Elmendorf that the campaign knew this was serious. Cutter, the communications director, is blowing smoke.

Cutter says that Kerry won't tolerate the "lies" of others.
But Kerry's own lies are apparently all ok.

Please note that Nagourney's article is talking about the Kerry's campaign reaction to the _first_ ad, which has by now pretty much run its natural course, so that they're reacting to it when it's moving off the radar (and, as a consequence, keeping it on the screen). There's not word one in that story about the _new_ ad, with its bombshell audio of Kerry himself blasting his fellow servicepeople, and as far as I can tell, Team Kerry is still trying to figure out how to respond to Ad #2 (aside from that bootless filing with the FEC).

Don't forget the Democratic love-in during the primaries. The Dems were so afraid of being negative that they forgot to point out that it might be difficult to get someone with Kerry's history of libeling the armed forces elected commander-in-chief in wartime.

That Kerry then chose to bring his wartime experience front and center and described his service as noble defence of the country, which had never till Iraq gone to war unless it had to, was a, um, self-inflicted wound.

I don't know how anyone can deny there is a God, after seeing how divine Providence has arranged the self-destruction of the Democrats.

Raoul:

Because he didn't have to go through a rigorous primary process.

If "McCaim bales [sic] them out", I will be even more convinced that McCain learned more at the University of Hanoi than we really wanted him to.

Being a POW is certainly a bitch no matter who is running the camp but Orientials seem to be particularly nasty.

Never the less people change when held captive, not always for the better even when the treatment is relativly benign and has no invidious long range purpose.

At this point, I do not contend, but I sure do wonder.

PJ:

If G-d were taking a hand, Dean would be the nominee. Sometimes I think half the point of nominating Kerry was so, after he lost, the left could repudiate him, arguing that a proud anti-warrior would have won. Kerry's a messenger built for blame.

David:

Excellent point. The Democrats will never recover their position as a great party until a genuine liberal runs as loses.

"Because he didn't have to go through a rigorous primary process."

Exactly. The other 9 Dem hopefuls spent all their time attacking Bush and nodding their heads in unison instead of getting all of this out in the open during the primaries. They were more concerned with creating the facade of a unified front than they were with actually airing out any dirty laundry they had on each other. It's not like anything being said now wasn't already pretty much known a year or more ago.

But wasn't it MacAuliffe's plan to shorten the primaries and get them over early so as to concentrate their energies on the opposition? Even under the MacAuliffe Plan, it seemed by December that all of 2003 had been one long neverending Dem primary campaign, and this stuff should have been opened up. The blame goes to the Dean Left, who consider Kerry's post-war actions good things, and Edwards, who's demonstrating the folly of running a gutless, but positive campaign and then attaching yourself like a remora to the guy who you didn't bother to test when you had the chance.

Mr. Judd;

Don't you mean "That is so wrong the author must write for the Times"?

AOG:

Their editoriasl policy has been crap for decades, but they used to be a great newspaper. Now even their reporting is dubious.

Kerry served, Bush went AWOL. That's the short version that America will remember on Nov. 2.

patriot:

Haven't you guys done enough damage to yourselves on Vietnam yet?

"patriot1955" was the one who posted that Chicago Tribune article in another thread, the one that Mickey Kaus was talking up yesterday as being a _big_ reply to the Swifties. The problems, as I pointed out in my reply to that post, are severalfold, but the biggest is that, as far as I can tell, it just doesn't address Swift Boat ad #2, their real Sunday punch. That's what I call being a day late and a dollar short.

I understand that the Kerryites want to reopen the whole business about Bush's National Guard service. Good luck to them; it was talked to _death_ back last spring and I can't imagine it'll get much of anywhere if it's revived.

**2**

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