However, after what he encountered on Crossfire with Carvile (sic) & Leapin' Lanny Davis, this'll probably feel like a walk in the park...Limbaugh said today on his show that his contacts with the "gang of 500" (journalists who are coordinating their efforts to write stories slanted against Bush) have told him that some libs are beginning to get very nervous about the Swift Boat issue because Kerry isn't denying or countering it very well - they're afraid it's going to be all true.......
Kerry is deathly afraid that he is being exposed for who he really is-Milo Minderbinder.
In Catch 22, Minderbinder learned to game the supply system in North Africa. People like Minderbinder were all over the U.S. Army in the Mediterranean and Northwest Europe during the Second World War. The U.S. Army supply system was unbelieveably corrupt (not that it hurt us, we had an extreme overabundance of supply). Acres of supplies were built up all over the outskirts of Paris during the fall of 1944, waiting for supply trucks to carry them to the infantry units bogged down in the Rhineland, the Sarr, and the Hurtgen Forest. These mountains of supply were just waiting to be picked over by black-marketeers in uniform.
True story (hat tip: the late Steven Ambrose in Citizen Soldiers): an American Red Cross ambulance is moving through the night during the fighting in the bocage country in the Summer of 1944. It starts raining. The Americans come to a checkpoint and stop. Unfortunately, when the driver opens the door, he finds that he's run smack dab into a bunch of grenadier from Panzer Lehr division. One of the Germans speaks up and tells the American to "turn around and go back to your lines. We don't shoot Red Cross." The Germans laugh it off and mark it down to a clueless American driver.
A half hour later, the same meatwagon with the big Red Cross shows up to the German lines. The Wehrmacht are astonished as the same driver opens up his back door, dumps carton after carton of American cigarettes on the ground, gets in his vehicle and drives away.
We had enough supplies to share with the Germans. That's how obscenely well supplied we were in that war.
The line infantry hated them worse than they hated the Germans. It was the Milo Minderbinders of the world who always got the best socks, the woolen overcoats, the best food, first call on the Chesterfields, and of course, all the good booze.
John Kerry is a Milo Minderbinder. He doesn't want this to get out. He's desperately insecure, and afraid that every vet in the world will see him as the jaunty officer In the Rear With the Gear who always wore the pressed khakis. Of course, Kerry wasn't in the rear, but the mindset is there.
Kerry was aware of the rules. The New York Minute that he got his third PH he was out of there. How many young platoon leaders and NCO's stayed in Indochina after their third wound? Eh? I bet a bunch did. Bull Simon, "Iron Mike" Healy, more Marine NCO's than I can count.
It's the prospect that he's going to get caught campaigning for medals that drives him to unleash the hounds.
But in the end, people, Kerry has built a legend around his Vietnam service that was, perhaps, unwarranted. He asked for this, but he didn't have to. He made it the central plank of his campaign persona because it's what makes him a man. It's what seperates him from Theresa, who doesn't have to remind him every day that she has the money, and he doesn't.
If there is no heroic Prince Hal, all that's left is Milo Minderbinder.
He didn't have to try to shit on President Bush's service record. He did because he was too insecure not to try. And now I think I've figured out why he would do something so stupid.
Be Seeing You,
Chris