Catching up on blog reading, I see a post by Tom Maguire that raises the question: can Media Matters’ Eric Boehlert tell the truth?

Tom quotes Boehlert as saying:

But the servicemen who were on the boat that night don’t remember seeing Schachte. Since the boat was a small skimmer, it would have been hard for him to escape notice. Besides Kerry, the other crewmembers that night were Bill Zaladonis and Patrick Runyon. They had told the same story for years, and they both insisted neither Schachte nor anyone else was with the three of them that night.

Tom responds:

Zaladonis and Runyon had “told the same story for years“? To whom, other than perhaps each other (as Zaladonis claimed in his Lisa Meyers interview)? Douglas Brinkley interviewed Zaladonis “repeatedly” for his 2004 Kerry hagiography “Tour of Duty”, yet there is no mention whatsoever that Zaladonis was with Kerry during Kerry’s first combat when Kerry earned his first medal; nor does Runyon get a mention in the book (if the index is reliable).

And Michael Kranish of the Boston Globe (or a non-bylined Globe staffer) interviewed Zaladonis for the Globe’s 2003 “Candidate In The Making” series yet apparently never elicited from Zaladonis that he was with Kerry on that dramatic evening Zaladonis later described as “one of the scariest nights” of his life. And again, Runyon is a no-show.

Tom ends by saying he can’t wait to see Boehlert’s evidence.

He’s very good at the tongue-in-cheek thing.