How to read a Washington Post editorial on Kerry, SwiftVets, and Truth
This has been a remarkable political season. The love that dares not speak its name, now Shouts It!
Evan Thomas of Newsweek, following in the footsteps of Daniel Okrent of the NYT, as reporterd by Jeff Jacoby in the Globe:
“Let’s talk a little media bias here,” he said on the PBS program “Inside Washington” on July 11. “The media, I think, want Kerry to win. And I think they’re going to portray Kerry and Edwards . . . as being young and dynamic and optimistic and all, there’s going to be this glow about them that is going to be worth, collectively, the two of them, that’s going to be worth maybe 15 points.” Just how lopsided is the pro-Kerry bias? When New York Times reporter John Tierney surveyed reporters covering the Democratic National Convention last month, the results were striking.
“We got anonymous answers from 153 journalists, about a third of them based in Washington,” he wrote on Aug. 1. “When asked who would be a better president, the journalists from outside the Beltway picked Mr. Kerry 3 to 1, and the ones from Washington favored him 12 to 1. Those results jibe with previous surveys over the past two decades showing that journalists tend to be Democrats, especially the ones based in Washington. Some surveys have found that more than 80 percent of the Beltway press corps votes Democratic.”
(Jacoby follows this with quotes from Dan Rather, Joe Klein, John Roberts and others, all sounding like schoolgirls with a crush, gushing about Kerry and Edwards, via Brent Bozell.)
So we come to this in a WaPo editorial:
Mr. Kerry’s conflicting statements about where and when he was in Cambodia remain troubling. He has backed away from repeated claims that he spent Christmas Eve 1968 in Cambodia, a memory that, he said in a 1986 Senate speech, is “seared — seared — in me.” This does not undermine Mr. Kerry’s military bravery, but it does raise an issue of candor. It’s fair to ask whether this is an episode of foggy memory, routine political embroidery or something more. Indeed, the Kerry campaign ought to arrange for the full release of all relevant records from the time….
As we’ve said since the issue of Mr. Bush’s Guard service arose this spring, whatever the two men did more than three decades ago matters less than where they would take the country in the next four years. It’s too bad that partisans on both sides — former senator Bob Dole saying this weekend that “there’s got to be some truth to the charges” against Mr. Kerry, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) calling the vice president a “coward” — have fueled the controversy. The sooner the campaign debate shifts from Swift boats toward substance, the better off voters will be.
The Washington Post editorial board absolutely, categorically, definitively, does not want to be talking about Christmas in Cambodia, ever again. They are telling Kerry to do what is required to take this off the table. (It is no coincidence that the editorial appears juxtaposed to the Joshua Muravchik piece: Kerry’s Cambodian Whopper, which, as Ed Morrissey notes, establishes that Kerry never crossed into Cambodia.) They make it clear in other parts of the editorial that whenever there are two sides to he said-she said with the SwiftVets, they will side with Kerry. But the Kerry campaign has so far offered no credible response to Christmas in Cambodia. The last sentence of the editorial, which I’ve bolded, is a warning to the candidate, best read by replacing “voters” with the name “John Kerry.”
When the Laker girls are scolding Kobe, the game is not going well.