The Corner’s Kathryn Jean Lopez — K-Lo to her friends — is troubled by many things this morning, including John Kerry’s fondness for French skiers and how gymnast Paul Hamm, despite splattering his landing on the vault, managed to win a gold medal.
Also bothering K-Lo: Kerry’s refusal to say whether he prefers the Beatles or the Stones. “I don’t have to [pick],” Kerry told GQ. “And that’s the glory of life. I play them both. I do!” K-Lo also asserts today that (she believes) Scott McClellan has condemned the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, contrary to Kerry’s claims in a speech this morning. But that’s a stretch: “Although [McClellan] suggested that all the ‘unregulated soft money’ advertising should cease,” writes Joe Conason, “he pointedly refused to condemn the swift boat ad,” or the group behind it.
The Washington Post got its hands on the military records of one of John Kerry’s chief Swift Boat critics, Larry Thurlow, and the records back up Kerry’s version of events. Josh Marshall, however, isn’t ready to celebrate. “On the one hand it’s tempting to smile or take some grim satisfaction in seeing this character hoisted on his own petard,” he writes. “But doing so would give these guys too much credit. Catching a liar lying isn’t a coup; it’s a definition.” Jumping off from an exchange in Slate, he also takes to task journalists who equate the Swift Boat ad with those being run my Moveon.org. “There is a great desire among journalists to appear even-handed in such cases and create equivalences where there simply are none. And this is a great case of that.”
Glenn Reynolds, meanwhile, is troubled that while the Post is all over the story discrediting Thurlow, it has steered clear of writing about Kerry’s conflicting claims about his time in Cambodia. “[T]his story seems to me to be absolutely fascinating in that it reveals just how in the tank for the Democrats the mainstream media are, and how little the vaunted Cronkitean claims of objectivity and research and factual accuracy really mean when the chips are down,” he writes. “…the “Fourth Estate” is a big part of the unelected Permanent Government that in many ways does more to run the country than the politicians. And it’s unraveling before our very eyes, which I think is the biggest story of the election so far.”
Finally, on the satire front: Fafblog, in response to a speech by the president on the importance of a missile defense shield, takes to task “Namby-pamby suspiciously-French-lookin’ Democrat John Kerry,” who “is plannin’ to take money AWAY from this incredibly important overpriced boondoggle and send it towards expanding the military!” And Jesus’ General posts a letter to Deal Hudson of Crisis magazine, who recently lost his job for “attempting to perform an adulterous act with a drunken student against her will,” as the General puts it. “The fact that you’re the publisher of a conservative Catholic Magazine, the force behind the calls to deny communion to Kerry, the person responsible for getting a man fired from his job at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops because he’s a Kerry supporter, and [Bush’s] Catholic outreach advisor doesn’t exempt you from having irresistible needs that drive you to perform acts of sexual predation,” he writes in mock support, before signing off with the words “Heterosexually yours, Gen. JC Christian, patriot.”
–Brian Montopoli
