Alston-gate Revisited, More SwiftVets Disasters, and the Internal Disarray at Camp Kerry
Ed Morrissey has done a fantastic job reporting Alston-gate, a fabricated story with many elements. Chief among these was Kerry substituting himself for a fellow named Peck who was commanding PCF 94 when it was attacked in late January 1969. Now it seems that Kerry’s staff is conducting an internal sweep of his website to remove materials that would tend to support the notion that he is, uh, a lying weasel. This from the Boston Globe via Command Post and Roger Simon:
The Kerry campaign removed a 20-page batch of documents yesterday from its website after The Boston Globe quoted a Navy officer who said the documents wrongly portrayed Kerry’s service. Edward Peck had said he — not Kerry — was the skipper of Navy boat No. 94 at a time when the Kerry campaign website credited the senator with serving on the boat. The website had described Kerry’s boat as being hit by rockets and said a crewmate was injured in an attack. But Peck said those events happened when he was the skipper. The campaign did not respond to a request to explain why the records were removed.
We have noted earlier that one of the funniest things about the Kerry campaign is how things keep disappearing from his website. If the removals keep up at this pace, the website may soon be empty.
Meanwhile, the Swift Boat Veterans have the Kerry campaign so discombobulated that they tried, via the Boston Globe, to make Kerry look good by noting that one of Bob Dole’s purple hearts was for a flesh wound. Smooth move, fellas. Hat tip: Captain Ed.
Which brings me to this morning’s, Meaningless Predictions of the Day:
(1) when in doubt, reorganize. The Kerry campaign is so screwed up and in such CYA mode that some heads will roll soon, and these will include some major campaign figures. When you have to do opposition research on your own website and it’s almost September of election year, you have to look up to see the top of the doo-doo pile.
(2) whatever October surprise Kerry has, we’re going to see it very soon as an attempt to change the subject.
I don’t think there is any recovery possible for Kerry. Hugh Hewitt has a nice summary of all the sources for the Kerry fabrications we currently know about, Christmas in Cambodia, the magic hat, Alston-gate, hearts and stars, etc. Kerry’s problem is that, given his history, we now that there are plenty more to follow.
Kerry said somewhere that he wished there was a “delete” button on Lexis-Nexis. How right he was. The really shocking element in this funny and sad meltdown of Kerry is that he was not taken to task long ago by the MSM, or at least by the opposition research operations of his primary opponents.