Anyway, all I could think of as this thing was starting to unfold was that the Vets were/are really after a full, complete emasculation of this guy.
IMO, their first goal is to derail his bid for the Presidency, and their second is to leave him permanently unhinged, so that he no longer feels at ease when stepping 'forward.' And if his most recent 'midnight cowboy' act is any indication, I think they're well on their way to achieving that goal.
Kerry can only avoid the cookoo's nest if he makes a very public, very sincere 'mea culpa, mea culpa, mea massima culpa.' Any other man would have figured that out by now, and dispensed with it weeks ago. Problem for Kerry now is that it's really too late, if he did that both his internal and external narrative would collapse, and the cookoo's nest still awaits.
They fragged him but good, that's for sure.
Kerry should have apologized on the floor of the senate years ago. He could have written mea culpa letters to veterans' organizations, maybe not telling all his sins, but a graceful apology..the mind boggles though, how to write a graceful apology for that laundry list of treason. So, he'd skip over the messy stuff, and just say he'd learned so much in the intervening years, he'd turned into a Scoop Jackson RAT and thought the US worth defending.
I guess it just goes to show you can't turn a sow's ear into a silk purse. Kerry is such a fool, and his party is furious with him. He's blaming his staff for not stopping the Swifties sooner, but he's the one who wouldn't sign that apology when he had the chance. And I agree that John O'Neill and the rest of the Swifties were after the total destruction of Kerry, and they've gotten it. Richly deserved. Angle on Foxtv a few minutes ago said he was astonished that the entire campaign has revolved around events of thirty years ago...Or put another way, Kerry's collapse is due to those events being made public. He brought it on, himself. It's way too late for him to say anything helpful. The only thing he can do is hit Bush every way he can, all the time, change the subject from his war record.
Tom Lipscombe on Rush's show said if Kerry signed that 180 form, anyone would have access to his military records. They'd be all over the net in a heartbeat. Oh, and another thing was that Kerry wasn't released from the navy until '78, which was way later than usual. Lipscombe said he was going to check into that. And Kerry said some wretched things about Admiral Borda after his suicide over the medal he wore with an extra star, which a journalist had checked into and discovered shouldn't have been on the ribbon since the ship Borda was on at the time wasn't in a combat zone. Kerry's mysterious silver star with the extra star, which his handlers say was just a misprint, and which Admiral Lehman swears he never signed...so who forged his signature...has the same profile as Admiral Borda's medal problem. After his death, though, Kerry said that (paraphasing here), it showed that he didn't have integrity and honor, so his entire life was suspect...he was a liar.
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