Next Up: The Gates of Hell

The gates of hell are opening. Here's a stunning entry shamelessly stolen from today's "Best of the Web".

Believe it or not, the Dems would still win the election if they pulled a Toricelli and replaced Kerry with Lieberman. That is if they themselves had the good judgment to vote for him themselves -- which they wouldn't of course...

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Viet Commies Still Cite Kerry Testimony

One of the chief complaints of the Vietnam veterans who are opposing John Kerry is that he slandered them as war criminals in his famous 1971 Senate testimony. Kerry's supporters try to portray his claims then as a youthful indiscretion. Yet Kerry has never renounced them, and they still turn up in Vietnamese communist propaganda. In an article for the English-language Viet Nam News dated June 11, 2004, one Diem Quynh cites Kerry to bolster his argument that the communists treated American prisoners of war well:

Candidate in this year's American presidential elections, John Kerry, who fought in the war, went further in his criticism. In a statement to the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in 1971, he said the war crimes committed by US soldiers in Southeast Asia "were not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command."

But despite these abuses, the Vietnamese did not reciprocate in kind; instead, they treated captured US troops humanely.

John McCain might disagree. So might Jim Warner, a former POW who tells the conservative weekly Human Events that he "first learned about Lt. John Kerry in a North Vietnamese prison camp":

When his captors brought him out of solitary confinement in the infamous Skid Row punishment camp for an interrogation, they made him read the typewritten transcript of a statement by Kerry, speaking in the United States. His interrogator kept pointing at Kerry's words, saying, 'See? This officer from your Navy says you deserve to be punished.' "

"All I could think of was that this must be a really contemptible human being," said Warner, although We can't expect the rest of the country to share our disgust at Kerry for turning on us. A lot of people are too young to remember that." . . .

Tom Collins, another Vietnam POW whose plane was shot down in 1965, was made to listen to Kerry's testimony on tape during his captivity. He explained that the North Vietnamese were constantly trying to elicit confessions of war crimes from Americans, promising them better treatment.

"He knew he was putting us at risk," Warner says of Kerry. "And he was demanding unilateral withdrawal, which means our value as bargaining chips would be gone. And what do you think would have happened to us then?"

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Kerry also estimated that there would be oh, maybe 3000 or so Vietnamese that would need to be evacuated to save their lives when the Communists won. That would certainly explain the millions of "boat people" and Pol Pot's genocide. Did I mentioned that a recent poll says that 90% of Vietnamese-Americans will be voting for Bush in this election? But what do they know?

And LA LA Times Also Forgot To Mention

That when John O'Neill was caught on tape with Nixon, he also said that he came from a long line of Democrats and voted for Hubert Humphrey. But a surprisingly level assessment from the hit squad.

Cambodian Case Closed Conclusively

While the libs sit around popping their champagne corks that Kerry only made a "little" Clintonian lie about Christmas in Cambodia and the evil neocons have once again been thwarted -- what are they going to do, impeach Kerry prospectively? -- they're missing the monster reef that's about to break their Cambodian Swift boat in two and send it to the bottom along with Monsier Kerry.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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."

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...

I repeat: My verdict on Option #1 remains uncontested.

More Karma

Vietnamese-Americans have some strong opinions for some good reasons.

Waves of Magic Karma

Hugh has the overview amidst the festering devastation of Vietnam. Karma is an amazing thing. Jesus talks about the importance of the "secret place" -- but I think it's a fair bet he didn't think you should put a magic hat in it... And did I forget to mention Boorda's suicide?

Can You Say Projection?

WHOOPS! I thought you could.

It's Almost Impossible

to believe who says this:

This spring, the U.S. pushed a resolution through the U.N. Security Council threatening sanctions on Sudan for their disgraceful conduct. The already weak resolution was watered down at the request of a number of countries, including the Europeans.

Europeans cannot criticize the United States for waging war in Iraq if they are unwilling to exhibit the moral fiber to stop genocide by acting collectively and with decisiveness. President Bush was wrong to go into Iraq unilaterally when Iraq posed no danger to the United States, but we were right to demand accountability from Saddam. We are also right to demand accountability in Sudan. Every day that goes by without meaningful sanctions and even military intervention in Sudan by African, European and if necessary U.N. forces is a day where hundreds of innocent civilians die and thousands are displaced from their land. Every day that goes by without action to stop the Sudan genocide is a day that the anti-Iraq war position so widely held in the rest of the world appears to be based less on principle and more on politics. And every day that goes by is a day in which George Bush's contempt for the international community, which I have denounced every day for two years, becomes more difficult to criticize.

Now is the time for the world community to act if they are serious about encouraging an enlightened leadership role for the United States. My challenge to the U.N. and Europe is simple: if you don't like American diplomacy under George Bush, then do something to show those of us in opposition here in the U.S. that you can behave in such a way that unilateralism is not necessary.

Yep. When Howard Dean seems positively level-headed and balanced compared to John Kerry and his character assassination goons...

UPDATE: And some pretty damning evidence suggesting the Eurabians ain't riding to his rescue is at the end of this post.

UPDATE #2: And don't miss out on the last paragraph of this little gem. Wouldn't want anyone to know about something like that now would we?

Fire, Ready, Aim

Looks like the rocket scientists at the NYeT are blinded by incompetence as well as ideology...

A Fair Cambodian History Lesson

Podhoretz puts the nail in the Cambodian coffin:

The 250-plus men who make up the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth dislike, despise or hate John Kerry. And they have good reason to do so. What they have done in gathering to destroy John Kerry is throw everything they can come up at him — like the way a prosecutor will seek to indict someone on hundreds of charges and then with a judge's participation whittle them down to a potent few.

Is that fair? Well, one of the charges hurled by the Swift Boat Veterans has thrown Kerry for a loop. They unearthed Kerry's claim to have driven his boat into Cambodia at Christmastime 1968, ferrying a CIA operative on an illegal mission and getting a mysterious hat from that operative as a keepsake in the process.

He wasn't in Cambodia during Christmas 1968, and he almost certainly wasn't there at any other time. How can I be sure? Consider the history. In 1973, Kerry was a leader of the anti-war movement. That same year, the American Left went nuts when the Nixon administration admitted it had secretly invaded Cambodia in 1969 and 1970 to roust out Communist fighters.

It's hard to overstate just how big an issue this was in 1973. Cambodia was officially a neutral country, and it was the contention of the anti-war movement that any movement across Cambodia's borders constituted a violation of international law.

If Kerry is to be believed, then this leader of the anti-war movement remained silent in 1973 when he could have spoken out about how he was ordered to violate Cambodian neutrality as early as 1968. Which is why Kerry is not to be believed on this matter.

Is it worth knowing that Kerry lied about his one-man invasion of Cambodia? I think most people would say it is worth knowing, even if it won't affect their vote. If life were fair, we probably wouldn't know about it.

So maybe it's good life isn't fair.

So Kerry is either monumentally incompetent, lying or stark raving crazy. My guess is all of the above, with the latter as the root cause.

The political brain. But surely day-long bouts of screaming "BusHitler!!!" is no evidence of emotional behavior? Is it?

Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth...

If Patrick Brady Wrote a Book...

would the Dems want to burn that one too?

It's quite amusing to me that Michael Moore steals Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" -- who's none too happy with the big, fat white man about stealing the title of his book about book burning -- and now the Dems are all excited to have "Unfit For Command" retracted by the publisher. First Amendment, schmirst amendment as they say...