His Methods Have Become Unsound
A friend once said that he thought that, in life, we pick out a movie that we constantly act out. We know now that John Kerry picked Apocalypse Now. From Glenn Reynolds we have Kerry’s own review of the movie in the Boston Herald, including this:
On more than one occasion, I, like Martin Sheen in “Apocalypse Now,” took my patrol boat into Cambodia
In fact, I remember spending Christmas Day of 1968 five miles across the Cambodian border being shot at by our South Vietnamese Allies who were drunk and celebrating Christmas. The absurdity of almost being killed by our own allies in a country in which President Nixon claimed there were no American troops was very real. But nowhere in “Apocalypse Now” did I sense that kind of absurdity.
No, Kerry’s absurdity is of an entirely different order of magnitude. In Kerry’s fanciful tale of the magic hat, he ferries his own Captain Willard into Cambodia, who gives him the hat as a thank-you. Who was this Willard going to terminate with extreme prejudice?
Kerry has made two critical mistakes in his handling of this credibility issue. First, he didn’t take my advice and go with “rhetorical excess” as his excuse. Cambodia was a metaphor for the evil of the war, and he may have exaggerated when he said “in” rather than “near” Cambodia. He has not taken this route, preferring for the moment to have his people say that the date might not have been 12/24/68, which is pathetic, since all it does is give the story a few more news cycles. In all likelihood, Kerry now has lost his opportunity to deep-six this story.
Kerry’s previous lies in the past have now become lies in the present, and that makes the story real news at last. Kerry says he went into Cambodia more than once (above), well, how many times? When and how did he get the magic hat? The dates were not 12/24/68, although that was “seared — seared in his memory:” okay, what were the dates? His spinner now says that it was getting dark and there were no signs when Kerry ventured into Cambodia — what was the date of that incursion? Why was he going there? etc, etc.
August 11th, 2004 at 5:01 pm
“I love the smell of ‘waffles’ in the morning. It smells like…victory”
whose victory will be depend if the activist, leftist media can maintain the smoke screen. Perhaps a large enough portion of the people in swing states will choke on this enough to react against the empty promisses of East Coast Leftists who now demand ‘acceptance’ of their ideals instead of ‘tolerance’ of those with different ones.