[Guest post by DRJ]

Glenn Greenwald claims conservatives are duplicitous with regard to Idaho Senator Larry Craig. My response:

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[Guest post by DRJ]

From yesterday’s BeldarBlog:

“Sen. Kerry’s home state of Massachusetts has a very unusual, extremely generous and pro-plaintiff three-year limitations period for defamation claims. Massachusetts’ three-year statute of limitations for defamation claims made it the very last feasible venue in which Sen. Kerry conceivably could file suit and gain his public vindication, if the SwiftVets’ allegations about him were false. Those claims were certainly, indeed deliberately, injurious to his reputation; his damages arguably include the loss of the 2004 presidential election, however that might be valued in dollars and cents; and if John Kerry could hope to find a home-town advantage anywhere, surely it would be there. But now he’s let the incredibly generous Massachusetts statute of limitations run out, too.“

Beldar’s offer? It’s generous:

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[posted by Justin Levine]

Senator John Kerry made this eyebrow-raising statement while giving a speech to a group of students at Pasadena City College. [Listen to the actual MP3 audio and decide how to interpret it for yourself.]

[Hat-tip: The John Ziegler Show on KFI.

Disclosure - I am a KFI employee on a different show.]

[posted by Justin Levine]

UPDATE BY PATTERICO: The ever-cautious Allah has more here.

I’ll play Devil’s Advocate: Kerry is talking about Bush and not the troops.

At least that’s what his spokesman will say tomorrow.

UPDATE x2 BY PATTERICO: But then, how will Kerry’s spokesman keep a straight face while making that explanation, in light of the fact that Bush got better grades than Kerry?

UPDATE x3 BY PATTERICO: Tony Snow has called on Kerry to apologize to the troops, as well as the families of those killed in Iraq.

This is going to hurt him.

Pressing work demands caused me to miss the fact that the L.A. Times on Wednesday wrote a story claiming that John Kerry has now released all his military records. Not only did L.A. Times reporter and Kerry sycophant Stephen Braun fail even to mention the fact that Kerry’s grades were lower than Bush’s (a fact emphasized by the nation’s other major papers), he’s once again making it sound like the complete file has been released.

Don’t trust him.

The article is titled Kerry Makes His Military, Medical File Available. The sub-head reads: “The former presidential candidate’s Vietnam records, including a missing document, offer no surprises. Critics say papers are incomplete.” And the beginning of the article wastes no time in telling us that the critics are liars, because (the article claims) the file is indeed complete:

All through last year’s presidential race, Vietnam-era critics of Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) charged that he was trying to hide something by refusing to authorize the public release of his entire military and medical file.

On Tuesday, Kerry provided access to his complete records. The long-awaited documents contained no bombshells, and his enemies still were not satisfied.

Note that the article doesn’t say: “Kerry provided access to what he claimed were his complete records.” It says simply that the records are complete.

But wait, Stephen Braun! Didn’t you tell us during the election that Kerry had already made his military records available? Why, yes — you did! In an article published on August 17, 2004, you wrote:

[Kerry's] staff has directed critics to the Massachusetts senator’s military records, which have been posted on his website.

You didn’t say “some of” his records were posted on his web site, Mr. Braun. You said the records were posted on his web site — which any voter naive enough to trust your reporting would have taken to mean that Kerry had released all of his military records.

You were wrong then. Why should we believe you now?

Critically, the sheaf of documents reviewed by Braun was not provided to him directly by the government, but by Kerry’s office:

The 180-page sheaf of medal commendations, officer’s fitness reports and medical entries released under federal guidelines by Kerry’s Senate office provided a few new nuggets of information about his 1968 to 1969 stint as a Swift boat commander during the Vietnam War.

So how in the world does Stephen Braun claim to know that the documents he reviewed are “complete”? He doesn’t say. And what the “critics” say — buried far, far down in the story — sounds pretty convincing:

[A] former Swift boat officer who led the Navy veterans’ bitter public campaign against Kerry demanded more Tuesday, saying that the file was incomplete.

“We asked him to universally release his entire file, and what we’ve seen instead is a parceling out of incomplete records,” said John O’Neill, a Houston lawyer who was a founder of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. The group last year mounted a well-bankrolled advertising campaign to undermine Kerry’s wartime pedigree.

O’Neill expressed doubt that Kerry’s latest document release included material from the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis. But David Wade, a Kerry spokesman, said that the request to Navy Personnel Command to release documents extended to all government record repositories.

That’s good enough for me! If a Kerry spokesman said it, it must be true!

In a phone interview from Houston, O’Neill said the Swift boat group was pressing for information about three unresolved controversies from the 2004 race: Kerry’s disputed contention that his Swift boat had entered Cambodian waters about December 1968; wording discrepancies among several versions of Kerry’s medal commendations; and a perceived lag between Kerry’s discharge from the Navy in 1970 and a later departure date in 1978.

“If he made a true universal release of his records and not through selective journalists, maybe we could get to the records that would answer some of these questions,” O’Neill said. “If there were orders, for example, that sent him to Cambodia, they should be in his file.”

Navy archives are sometimes incomplete, and Kerry’s latest document release contained no new information on any of those controversies.

That sounds like some decent evidence that the records are incomplete. I’m missing the part that substantiates the unequivocal assertion made in the second sentence of the article: “On Tuesday, Kerry provided access to his complete records.”

Once again, we are seeing a potentially selective release of records by John Kerry, and once again Stephen Braun is falling for it . . . or trying to get you to fall for it.

Don’t.

And you wonder why I want to file my own FOIA request.

UPDATE: Braun should sit down and have a talk with Thomas H. Lipscomb, who has a recent piece in the Chicago Sun-Times. He also has some real questions about whether Kerry has really released all his records.

UPDATE x2: I remembered that Braun did a pretty good story about Kerry’s sometimes awkward ad-libbing, described here. So, while he is overly credulous on the issue of the records, he is capable of writing a good story.

UPDATE x3: The post originally used the erroneous phrase “Thomas H. Lipscomb of the Chicago Sun-Times.” Mr. Lipscomb’s piece was an op-ed. The post has been corrected.

UPDATE x4 [9-14-06]: Apparently all of the Form 180s called for the documents to be sent to the journalists themselves; you can see them here. Braun simply worded the story poorly, leaving the impression that they had been released though Kerry’s office.

She understands and applauds your paranoid fears about your privacy. Although you failed, you worked hard to protect these fears, which, after all, are more important than catching her murderer after she had been declared a cold case. The criminal also has been linked to several rapes in New Orleans.

Proposition 69 scores its first victory. I hope it will be only the first of many. Just think, this man would still be free to rape and murder without it.

Michael Kranish had his chance to do trust-me journalism about John Kerry and his military career. He failed, miserably — apparently slandering a good man in the process.

Now he is reporting on John Kerry’s military documents, and he wants us to trust him again.

No way.

Publish the documents.

Remember how smart Kerry was supposed to be, in comparison to that retard Bush? Well, Kerry’s college transcript was released today.

Bush only got one “D” grade in his four years at Yale (a 69 in astronomy, the highest “D” grade available)- Kerry got at least four, including a 61 in geology (two points away from failing) and a 63 in a history course.

The highest grade that Kerry earned was an 89, one point above Bush’s highest grade of 88 (Yale’s grades at the time were on a scale of 0-100), but Bush received 88s in at least three classes.

Some of you might remember my curiosity on why Kerry chose to attend Boston College rather than, say, Harvard or Yale for law school. It couldn’t have been financial- Kerry was loaded. It couldn’t have been sheer competition, since Kerry came from a very well-connected family, and those universities relied on such things even more heavily then than they do today. It couldn’t have been reputation- Kerry had already returned from a combat tour in Vietnam and given highly publicized testimony to Congress. He had also mounted a serious campaign for the House of Representatives.

All of these features would make him a highly attractive candidate for admission to Harvard or Yale law. Both universities took a pass. I speculated that it was because he was so dumb as dirt that they didn’t want him. It looks like I was correct.

There’s relatively little media attention being paid to recent events in the Ukraine (compare this to elections in South America these last few years). Still, among my Ukrainian friends, there’s a nervousness and an energy and, for the first time since the hope of the collapse of the Soviet Union turned to the disappointments of the transition, a feeling that change will come.

It is, quite simply, the Berlin Wall tumbling down again.
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I missed this when it first got posted. A taste:

Well, let’s try this then. Let’s stipulate for the sake of argument that everything the Left claims to fear about the Bush admin and mainstream red-state America is true.

Because if you did, you wouldn’t be talking about it. You wouldn’t be writing whiny letters to the editor; you wouldn’t be fearfully mincing down to the Canadian Consulate to half-seriously inquire about moving; you wouldn’t be sitting in coffee houses denouncing the moronic inhabitants of Jesusland with your fellow smug, self-satisfied pseudo-hip doofuses. You’d be gearing up and arming yourselves for the fight of your lives. And much to your surprise, you’d have a lot of us over here on the right offering to help load mags.

The rest is equally priceless.

PrestoPundit confesses: he voted a moral values ticket. But it’s not what you think.

100% creepy.

(Via Dean’s World.)

What with all the people looking in to moving to Canada, or otherwise generally complaining that their extremist views make them feel like strangers in their own country, or complaining about the mouth-breathing idiots they’re subjected to on a daily basis, I just realized something.
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