Viet Nam All Day and All Night

The Swift Boat Veterans ad is starting to attract attention from mainstream media. As I mentioned earlier it is a brutal ad, that in some ways may be over the top. However, since Kerry made his 4 months in Viet Nam the centerpiece of his campaign, it seems perfectly fair for people - especially those who served there with him - to assail him on the subject. The greater issue, of course, is that Viet Nam is completely irrelevant in the current campaign and in our current war. There is no way that someone could convince me that being a junior officer in a jungle war 35 years ago gives a candidate any kind of legitimacy or credibility in our current war with Islamofascism, especially if that candidate has expressed in his statements a strong spirit of appeasement. Mark Steyn criticizes this strategy of the Democratic Party.

Had enough of Vietnam yet?
Most Americans had enough of it at the time. The clever clogs at the Democratic Party should have figured that out before they decided to relaunch John Kerry and John Edwards as Bob Hope and Jill St. John on their USO tour for the presidency. They should never have signed on to this vanity candidacy, even before the multiplying barnacles began encrusting the hull of the campaign boat.

The one thing the Democratic Party owed America this campaign season was a candidate credible on the current war. The Democrats needed their own Tony Blair, a bloke who's a big socialist pantywaist when it comes to health and education and the other nanny-state hooey but believes in robust projection of military force in the national interest.

John Kerry fails that test. If you wanted to pick a candidate on the wrong side of every major defense and foreign policy question of the last two decades, you would be hard put to find anyone with judgment as comprehensively poor as Mr. Kerry: total up his votes and statements on everything from Grenada to the Gulf war, Saddam to the Sandinistas, the Cold War to missile defense to every major weapons system of the 1980s and '90s. He called them all wrong.