Reading notes

One more and I’m done …

Michael Tomasky writes well, effectively reminding me how the Big Lie can be weirdly effective if we let our guard down, because its “colossal untruth” gives it a phantom, perhaps diabolical, believability.

The larger story here is clear: John Kerry volunteered for the Navy, volunteered to go to Vietnam, and then, when he was sitting around Cam Ranh Bay bored with nothing to do, requested the most dangerous duty a Naval officer could be given. He saved a man’s life. He risked his own every time he went up into the Mekong Delta. He did more than his country asked. In fact he didn’t even wait for his country to ask.

George W. Bush spent those same years in a state of dissolution at Yale, and would go on, as we know, to plot how to get out of going to Southeast Asia. …

While Kerry was plying the Mekong Delta, Cheney was safe and dry stateside, dropping out of Yale because his grades weren’t sufficient to maintain the scholarship the school had offered him. …

So now we’re having a debate about whether the man who did the honorable thing may have embellished his record a little (although nothing in the documentary record suggests he did this), while we have two cowards who did everything they could to stay miles away from the place Kerry demanded he be sent. This is the fundamental truth. …

Is it really Kerry who deserves scrutiny for how he behaved in 1968 and 1969? Why shouldn’t the major media be doing comparisons of how Kerry, Bush, and Cheney passed those years?

I do not condemn anyone for escaping a tour of duty in Vietnam, as I don’t think I could have survived it myself, but I will not tolerate anyone who wasn’t there slandering others who were there, serving honorably.

2004-08-24 update:
This LA Times editor sums up the extra-campaign campaign situation (MoveOn.org, SBVfT, etc.) this way:

There is an important difference, though, between the side campaign being run for Kerry and the one for Bush. The pro-Kerry campaign is nasty and personal. The pro-Bush campaign is nasty, personal and false.

[via Atrios]