The Not-So-Swift Lying Scumbags for Character Assassination have made much ado about nothing about a paragraph in a speech John Kerry made on the Senate floor in March 1986, in which he claimed to have spent Christmas 1968 in Cambodia. It will hardly come as a surprise to anyone not actively drinking the Kool-Aid that they have cherry-picked the speech to find ammunition against the man they all apparently hate so much that they have waited 30 years to kick him in the 'nads (and despite the fact that many of the men now criticizing Senator Kerry have had very complimentary things to say about him in the past).
I'm a classicist, a librarian, and an historian in training. In all of those disciplines, we're taught to look at the whole story before we decide what it means. The Not-So-Swifties and the wingnut bloggers will only give you a paragraph or two from Senator Kerry's speech. If you want to read it in its entirety, here it is (I'm taking Kos' words to heart about not junking up the diaries with huge text files: I put it on my own blog). Now you decide if the man who spoke those words is the kind of man you want running the country in a time of war.
I know I sure do.
In fact, I think Kerry would do well to dust off that speech, update it to the 21st century, the régime of George the Unready, and make it about the Shrubbery's flip-flops and lies about the War on Terra and the fight against al Qaeda. Then take it to New York and read it out at a big ol' protest rally in Central Park during the Repuglican's national slime-fest next week.