Always Darkest Before It Goes Pitch Black

The Swift Veterans for Truth are getting some press in their attack on John Kerry: the Boston Globe, NY Times, LA Times, WaPo, and CBS News join in, and I know there are more. CBS News will delight the media bias crowd, BTW - it shows the most gusto in repackaging the Kerry spin, which amounts to "anyone opposed to anything I ever did can only be a Bush henchmen - ignore them". Whatever - these guys didn't like being tagged as war criminals in 1971, and they still don't like it.

The Boston Globe includes a profile of John O'Neill, one of the leaders of this group (we met him last week as "Some Vet With An Axe To Grind"). Our fave detail:

...earlier this year, O'Neill recalled in an interview, he was sitting in a hospital recovery room when he saw Kerry's image on television. O'Neill had just donated a kidney to his wife, and Kerry had just won the Iowa caucuses.

Feeling pensive, O'Neill said, he decided that he had to speak out against Kerry.

O'Neill donated a kidney to his wife, Theresa donated a picture to her husband - it's like these guys are living parallel lives!

OK, let's get serious - this is awkward for Kerry, since his new ads tout his Vietnam service, but he doesn't really want to talk about what came next. But however bad this is for Kerry, it can always get worse - there is no way the lying, crooked Republican Attack Machine is unaware of the oddities and confusion surrounding the timing of Kerry's discharge from the service. At the time and place of their choosing, a new wave of embarrassing press coverage will wash over the Good Ship Kerry.

MORE: John O'Neill writes in the Opinion Journal:

...I still believe what I believed 33 years ago--that John Kerry slandered America's military by inventing or repeating grossly exaggerated claims of atrocities and war crimes in order to advance his own political career as an antiwar activist. His misrepresentations played a significant role in creating the negative and false image of Vietnam vets that has persisted for over three decades.

Neither I, nor any man I served with, ever committed any atrocity or war crime in Vietnam. The opposite was the truth. Rather than use excessive force, we suffered casualty after casualty because we chose to refrain from firing rather than risk injuring civilians. More than once, I saw friends die in areas we entered with loudspeakers rather than guns. John Kerry's accusations then and now were an injustice that struck at the soul of anyone who served there.

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