And Kerry appears to have gone insane in trying to shut these down. Is there no one among his 7,423 advisors to tell him that it does not look good for a billionaire Presidential candidate to claim that a bunch of Vietnam vets should be legally prevented from criticizing him?

The Dems mistake seems to have been to assume that they owned the Viet Nam issues (heroism and opposition toit) and that no one would dare challenge them because they couldn't possibly do so. They are also trying to rerun Clinton's first campaign, where all you need to do is stick to the script and ignore the opposition and the press will make sure you never have to deal with your past or your contradictions.
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If this keeps up, Kerry's record in IndoChina will be seen as being to his campaign what Dien Bien Phu was to his French relations 50 years ago.

Heh--now that Kerry's gone to the FEC, more people are going to see this ad than ever. Am I the only one who finds this whole situation frickin' hilarious?

Well, the Baby Boomers and the Dems couldn't let go of their VIETNAM! VIETNAM! VIETNAM! security blanket/nostalgia, so the swift boat vets are meeting them on that battlefield.

(Will future historians, with only surviving media as research materials, write about this mythical centuries-long global war called "Vietnam" that never made it into the serious histories of the period? Some sources name "Vietnam" -- the East Coast of a peninsula on the SE corner of the human homeworld's largest continent -- as the site of a long skirmish of the Cold War; others cite a vast mythology of VIETNAM! -- too fantastic to be real -- as the reason for all the problems of all the ages AND The Most Important Event In The History Of The Universe.)

I've only read the transcript of the ad so far, but it's devastating - far more so than the first one. Not to mention that one of the POW's speaking is a close friend of John McCain, in fact was his campaign chairman in Virginia in '00. A lot of people are thinking that the Kerry campaign is going to walk into a real buzzsaw if it tries to attack these particular people. What say you?

Joe:

How do you deny film of your own congressional testimony?

Orrin:

Exactly. Also, I should mention that some people think this was a brilliant sucker move by the Swifties; get the Kerryites all hot and bothered over the first ad, with its charges about medals and Cambodia, then drop the bomb laden with the 1971-testimony high explosive.

Joe:

Whether they planned it that way or not it is devastating.

By the way, talk about asymmetrical warfare: here are two ads that few people have actually watched on TV (although obviously many have viewed on the 'Net), a book sold to half a million people, and a group whose funding ranges (depending upon where you read) from $250,000 to a million dollars. And it's driven the Kerry camp absolutely berserk.

Meanwhile, there have been so many books, movies, newspaper and magazine articles that have attacked President Bush that James Lileks wrote a column describing the average person getting warn out from it all and coming down with a case of "Sudden Bush Hatred Fatigue Syndrome". There have been very few of these attacks that the Bush campaign has actually reacted to. This could be the biggest rope-a-dope of them all.

I hear also the book has over half-a-million copies already in print, huge for any political tome. The NYT hates the whole idea but can't hide it; the volume is said to be debuting at #3 on its bestseller list, and is still #1 on Amazon's sales list.

And you know what? This just goes to prove the point I made earlier this evening about the astounding incompetence of Kerry's campaign troopers. The 1971 testimony has been floating around the net for _months_, in fact there was a whole big thing made about it earlier and I don't remember whether Team Kerry ever even said anything substantative about it back then. They should have been ready for the probability that it would come up again. If they weren't, then the only thing to be said about them is that they're a bunch of boobs.

Just looked at the ad. It's devastating. And now that Kerry has engaged them on the medal issue he has to engage them on the congressional testimony issue. He can't possibly make that look good or fudge it in any way.

Odds are Kerry will trot out the "youthful mistake" claim he gave Tim Russert when part of his testimony was aired on "Meet the Press" issue some sort of statment apologizing for the remarks but not for his stand against the war and hope the press will triumph this a a dramatic soul-baring moment that should end the controversy once and for all (though I still want to know why he didn't blow the lid on the covert CIA activities in Cambodia when he had the national spotlight before the Senate panel in April of '71).

If he calls his testimony a youthful mistake, aren't we entitled to also conclude that the even earlier "heroic" war record no longer reflects the man Kerry is today?

There is a reason that John Kerry doesn't want to talk about his 20+ years in the senate after all.

If McCain were to now denounce, criticize, or even rebut Kerry for what he said about the military after coming home, Kerry would be unable to respond, and would find himself with about 38% of the electorate. This might be what has driven the Democrats to insanity.

Kerry wants Bush to debate him over the ad, but John O'Neill should accept the rematch from the Cavett show.

John O'Neill is a genius. The ad is devastating, and rebuttal-proof. No facts to argue, and it's a Red White and Blue issue. Dems aren't comfortable with those. I expect some kind of 'youthful mistake' pirouette, but Kerry isn't out of the Cambodia hole yet. OJ has a link to a WaPo article above that dovetails with the SwiftVets' script on this, and it isn't pretty for Kerry. Raoul above got it right. Kerry used the convention to claim the Vietnam/warrior issue. Now he's stuck defending that turf. Strike that. Defending that quagmire.