I WON'T LET THAT DRINAN OUT-LEFT ME EVER AGAIN:

Antiwar stance is Kerry's real vulnerability (William Rusher, 09/05/2004, Arizona Daily Sun)

When Kerry returned from Vietnam, he was thinking seriously of running for political office, but was not notably concerned with the war as an issue. Through the latter part of 1969, however, his attitude hardened, and in 1970 he obtained early release from the Navy so he could run for Congress. (He subsequently dropped out of the race in favor of Robert Drinan, the antiwar Jesuit priest.)

But by now Kerry was morphing into a thoroughgoing antiwar activist. He joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and participated in demonstrations organized by Jane Fonda, among others. In the spring of 1971 he testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. It was here that Kerry made a widely publicized series of charges concerning the conduct of American soldiers in Vietnam. He declared that antiwar veterans "told stories that at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam."

This is the grim bill of particulars that John Kerry laid at the feet of his fellow Vietnam veterans in 1971. And while atrocities did unquestionably occur in Vietnam, as they do in all wars, it was bitterly unfair, and totally false, for Kerry to suggest that such behavior was common, let alone permitted by higher authority. ("These were," he declared, "not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.")

Is it any wonder that thousands of Vietnam veterans who read that testimony, knowing that it was false, and realizing the damage it did to their own proud service on behalf of their country, profoundly resent the man who blackguarded and slandered them? That is the real issue that John Kerry's boasts about his heroism have dragged into this campaign.

William Rusher is still around? Boy does National Review miss him.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 5, 2004 9:02 PM