Remember my piece on the John Podhoretz article? Let me expand the argument so it can't be missed by even the most fragile minds.
Option #1: Kerry really did spend Christmas in Cambodia. Or even spent a picosecond there -- who knows, maybe hagiographer Brinkley will yet have a miraculous rehabilitation from his hidden foxhole and bring forth witnesses -- sometime before he high-tailed it back to the States a few months later to become the VVAW front man. In sum, secret briefcase compartment or no, Kerry is the proud owner of a magic hat that is real and that he forgot to throw over the fence.
As Podhoretz points out, the credibility of Kerry's Cambodian claim can't be taken seriously since he didn't use it at a time when it would have broken the incursion story wide open and first to market by a long shot. The positive impact to Kerry and the VVAW would have been absolutely huge and he would have been an incompetent moron to not use it to enhance his position. It's just impossible to emphasize enough the enormity of the Cambodia incursion story to the anti-war crowd in that timeframe.
And there you have it: If Kerry really was in Cambodia then we are being asked to forgive his being an incompetent moron leader for the VVAW and elect him President. Now there's a truly brilliant idea.
(Now the truly discerning among you may suggest that this makes him a Pentagon mole in the VVAW since he blunted them from achieving the full damage they could have -- so at least we conservatives should vote for him on that basis. Uh, never mind...)
Option #2: Kerry wasn't in Cambodia. Not ever during his entire tour. He made it all up after seeing Apocalypse Now and used it to falsely attack Reagan's policies on Nicaragua.
Suboption A: Kerry is a calculating liar who makes up whatever seems expedient to achieve his ends. He made up his visit to Cambodia and he knows full well it's a lie. His 1986 Senate pontifications on Nicaragua were created from the whole cloth to attack Reagan.
Outcome for suboption A: We know he lies on a scale much greater than Clinton -- it isn't just about sex after all -- and we're going to elect him President anyway??? Fool me twice...
Suboption B: He carries around his CIA hat in a secret briefcase compartment in the briefcase that he carries around all the time but somehow never gets photographed by the fawning press.
An argument can be made that he's a harmless Walter Mitty and why is that a handicap in a President? Have you been paying attention? He's carrying around his good luck CIA hat in a secret compartment and showing it to reporters! Oh, and didn't he recently mention that mine that blew up under his boat that didn't much injure himself or his crew but launched his dog "VC" clear over onto the next Swift Boat that didn't operate close enough for its crew to be able to render any judgment whatsoever on his performance?
And there you have the final alternative: He's nuttier than a pecan plantation and should be immediately recalled by his Massachusetts constituents -- not elected POTUS!
Case Closed. Ship sunk in all eventualities.
And stay tuned, we haven't even gotten into the absurdity of loving his "band of brothers" on only his boat alone while calling all the other soldiers baby killers.
UPDATE UPDATED MORE: Need better evidence for the Option #1 branch?
Kerry had about a year before the invasion of Cambodia really happened -- and that included his first run for Congress in Massachusetts -- to expose the secret invasion of Cambodia based on first hand knowledge. AND HE DIDN'T. PERIOD.
Here's Kerry's relevant testimony snippet from his 1971 bile to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. No smugness about being in Cambodia yet, eh?:
Suddenly we are faced with a very sickening situation in this country, because there is no moral indignation and, if there is, it comes from people who are almost exhausted by their past indignations, and I know that many of them are sitting in front of me. The country seems to have lain down and shrugged off something as serious as Laos, just as we calmly shrugged off the loss of 700,000 lives in Pakistan, the so-called greatest disaster of all times.So let me get this straight. Following the logic of Option #1, Kerry really was in Cambodia dropping off special forces or CIA agents or whatever. Clearly people on the ground as opposed to his comments about Laos. And for years he has a golden opportunity to drop a huge bombshell of eyewitness evidence of troops in Cambodia that would reverbrate around the world and he didn't take it??? This would be incompetence in forwarding his cause on a truly mind-boggling scale. Someone this incompetent could not possibly be trusted with the Presidency -- never mind that he's on the other side!
But we are here as veterans to say we think we are in the midst of the greatest disaster of all times now because they are still dying over there, and not just Americans, Vietnamese, and we are rationalizing leaving that country so that those people can go on killing each other for years to come.
Americans seem to have accepted the idea that the war is winding down, at least for Americans, and they have also allowed the bodies which were once used by a president for statistics to prove that we were winning that war, to be used as evidence against a man who followed orders and who interpreted those orders no differently than hundreds of other men in Vietnam.
We veterans can only look with amazement on the fact that this country has been unable to see there is absolutely no difference between ground troops and a helicopter crew, and yet people have accepted a differentiation fed them by the administration.
No ground troops are in Laos, so it is all right to kill Laotians by remote control. But believe me the helicopter crews fill the same body bags and they wreak the same kind of damage on the Vietnamese and Laotian countryside as anybody else, and the president is talking about allowing that to go on for many years to come. One can only ask if we will really be satisfied only when the troops march into Hanoi.
AND ANOTHER UPDATE: Here's Kerry talking about how he tried to squeal to the press in Saigon about what a disaster the Swift Boat missions were and bemoaning that the press wouldn't bite:
Mr. Kerry: On that I could definitely comment. I think the press has been extremely negligent in reporting. At one point and at the same time they have not been able to report because the Government of this country has not allowed them to. I went to Saigon to try to report. We were running missions in the Mekong Delta. We were running raids through these rivers on an operation call Sealord and we thought it was absurd.So let me get this straight: He was a participant on secret missions to Cambodia and he was squealing to the press just that the Swift boats were "absurd" and that was his big bait? Not that he was participating in Cambodian incursions before they became public a year later? None of the press would have bitten on this?? The only conclusion that can be drawn from this is that he would have been stunningly incompetent. Or, as Podhoretz notes, it's proof he was never there -- not to mention there is still no eyewitness corroboration...
We didn't have helicopter cover often. We seldom had jet aircraft cover. We were out of artillery range. We would go in with two quarter-inch aluminum hull boats and get shot at and never secure territory or anything except to quote Admiral Zumwalt to show the American flag and prove to the Vietcong they don't own the rivers. We found they did own them with 60 percent casualties and we thought this was absurd.
I went to Saigon and told this to a member of the news bureau there and I said, "Look, you have got to tell the American people this story." The response was, "Well, I can't write that kind of thing. I can't criticize that much because if I do I would lose my accreditation, and we have to be very careful about just how much we say and when."
I repeat: My verdict on Option #1 remains uncontested.
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