Who Can Really Say?

He's My Liar

Mark Steyn often nails the point home, and he does it again in the Jerusalem Post:

This is an election campaign, not a coronation – though you may be confused on that point if you get your news from the Times and the networks. Let us stipulate that the snoots at the Times are right – that the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth are a "Republican-financed group of partisans." Just as the handful of Swift boat veterans prepared to support John Kerry are a Democrat-financed group of partisans. After all, it seems unlikely that they're picking up their own hotel bills and air fares as they travel around the country as his loyal, if small, "band of brothers."

So both groups are "politically motivated." Good for them. That's what multi-party democracy is all about. The New York Times and CBS News are also "politically motivated." So is this column. It's a political column, and it's "politically motivated." One day I'll start a ballet column, and that will be balletically motivated.

So now that we've got all the preening patrician media snobbery out of the way, would it be too much to expect so-called political journalists to investigate Kerry's Cambodian stories? You know, the way they did when the comparatively minor question arose of whether Bush was AWOL from his National Guard base three decades ago. Boy, The New York Times loved that one:

February 4: "Military Service Becomes Issue in Bush-Kerry Race"

February 11: "The President's Guard Service"

February 13: "Seeking Memories of Bush at an Alabama Air Base"

February 15: "Still the Question: What Did You Do in the War?"

As the Times put it, "Mr. Bush himself also made the issue of military service fair game by posturing as a swashbuckling pilot when welcoming a carrier home from Iraq."

Well, the other feller made his military service fair game by posturing as a swashbuckling Swift Boat lieutenant to the exclusion of the other 59 years and eight months of his life. The story now is not John Kerry's weird secret-agent fantasies but the media's willingness to act as elite guardians of them. They're his real "band of brothers," happy to fish him out of their water, even if their credibility sinks in the process.

Well, actually Steyn almost does it again. What he misses (and he's not the only one who's done this) is that Kerry used his "seared . . . seared" memory of his presence in Cambodia to embellish his credibility while debating important foreign policy matters in the United States Senate. How so? Because he had been betrayed by President Nixon, so Kerry said, who Kerry'd heard on the radio while in Cambodia, denying that troops were there. Indeed, even were Kerry to ultimately prove he'd been in Cambodia during Christmas of 1968, Nixon was not President then and and did not make the statements Kerry claims were made, at least not during Kerry's window of opportunity to be in Cambodia, meaning his entire 4 months of Vietnam combat duty.

But hey. Bush lied, people died, right? Or to put it another way, maybe that just makes Kerry's supporters protective because to them, he's "my liar".

[Linked to Beltway Traffic Jam.]

Posted by Peter at August 25, 2004 07:43 PM