The media is amazing. It gave him a full week to get his spin together and comission a new biography.

Unfortunately this spin is pretty effective because it gives the media just enough to justify attacking Kerry's accusers and let him get back to his Band of Brothers roadshow.

Let's get back to that Senate voting record. Glad W did not get involved in this issue. The rest of the Swiftvet accusations are quite plausible and well documented but are interpretations rather than hard facts.

JAB:

It's not the war that matters but his being anti-war when he got home.

You'd think for someone who went before a Senate committee in 1971 to testify about atrocities and other violations committed by U.S. soliders and their commanders in Vietnam, Kerry would have mentioned the CIA's involvement in a covert mission in Cambodia, a year before the April 30, 1970 announcement by President Nixon that the U.S. forces were on Cambodia soil.

His testimony was given on April 22, 1971, while the news that bombings inside Cambodia actually had begun in 1969 was not revealed until 1973. Kerry might not have known about the bombings, but he could have told the Senate he was helping get CIA agents into the country at the time Nixon was taking office.

That would have been a bombshell revelation about the conduct of the war, but he never said a word about it. Based on that, there are only two conclusions -- either the senator is lying about what he did in Vietnam, or he was covering up for the CIA in 1971 when he testified about Vietnam before the Senate.

(Of course, it could be that Kerry actually was a mole planted by the CIA in order to spy on the anti-war movement once he got back to the U.S., and that's why he never mentioned his mission to Cambodia. And maybe, just maybe, those South Vietnamese soldiers weren't firing their weapons on Christmas Eve to celebrate the holiday, maybe it was actually three weeks later, in mid-January, and they were celebrating Joe Willie's 16-7 victory by the Jets over the Colts in Super Bowl III. Sounds as plausable to me as anything Brinkley's going to come up with...)

John, you you should have been a prosecuting attorney. Good point.

JAB, I don't think the spin will be effective. Now the pressure will be to come up with people who sent him, or went with him, on these January/February Cambodia trips, or who were with him elsewhere at the time. If he can't find witnesses who put him in Cambodia, or if witnesses put him elsewhere, then it's bye-bye election.

I am a student of history. This is one of the reasons I enjoy BrothersJudd Blog. Douglas Brinkley should be ashamed of himself. Its bad enough that he allows the media to proclaim him an objective historian whilst being a consultant to the Kerry campaign. But this latest twist is beyond the pale. Brinkley states ex cathedra that Kerry was not in Cambodia over Christmas, 1968, but did venture into Cambodian waters on other occasions. As a ferry master. Clandestinely. Unarmed. But in circumstances 'dangerous as hell.' Based upon? Brinkley's "unique access to the candidate's wartime journals." Nothing that could be peer-reviewed, of course. Never mind. Why would a historian want to check military and other records against the fanciful diary entries of his subject. Disgraceful.

This has all the marks of sowing more confusion while buying some more time. That Brinkley provides zero evidence for the new story says he trusts Big Media to keep a lid on it for a while longer.

This is a disturbing repetition of a pattern established in the Clinton years: Deny, confuse and refuse comment for long enough, and then when questioned, claim that it's "old news." That's the tactic that gave MoveOn its name.

Everything I've read indicates that the river border was closed off and no swift boat could possibly go into Cambodia. I'm not aware of any testimony, by any of Kerry's shipmates, that his boat was ever in Cambodia. Do they really think that this spin will pass the test?

And since when does a 'biographer' say, about his living subject, "On Christmas Eve he was near Cambodia; he was around 50 miles from the Cambodian border . . . he was mistaken about Christmas in Cambodia . . . " A real bummer when the subject of one's 'biography' can't conform to the talking points. Disgraceful.

JAB - The new story is just as unlikely to be true as the old. SBVfT will make hash of it too; as will Kerry's military records, if they're ever released.

>Do they really think that this spin will pass
>the test?

war is peace!
freedom is slavery!
ignorance is strength!
oceania has never been at war with eurasia!
the chocolate ration of twenty grams has been increased to ten grams!
2 + 2 = 5!
bush is golstein!
it must all be true! all these C*E*L*E*B*R*I*T*I*E*S say so!

Ken:
Glad to see you've reinstated the chocolate ration.

Actually, many-many years ago I worked for a company whose management was beyond Dilbert.

They were constantly spinning announcements on the order of "increasing the chocolate ration from twenty to ten grams" and getting pissed that the proles (us) weren't buying the spin.

They didn't even wake up when most of their employees (like me) fled over the Wall as one. Ideology Trumps Reality.

Re the very astute comment above, that no one knew about covert ops in Cambodia until 1973 - pardon the language, and I'll be damned.

Here is the always conspiratorial, ocassionally credible Sy Hersh from 1983, reviewing the planning in early 1969 that led to the bombing of Cambodia:

One aspect of [Alexander] Haig's qualifications was particularly impressive to his civilian colleagues: He confided to a few that while serving in Vietnam he had participated in one of a regular series of highly classified ground reconnaissance missions inside Cambodia. The Americans who went on such missions, whose existence did not become publicly known until ~973, wore specially manufactured replicas of North Vietnamese uniforms and carried captured gear and weapons. They went in "sterile," that is, without any identification or markings to indicate that they were Americans-except, of course, their white or black skin, large body size, and fluent knowledge of English.

Kery did mention Laos in his testimony, and a massacre of Cambodians by the S Vietnamese (with American observers). But I agree, one wonders why he did not announce that Nixon's secret war had begun in 1969.