Kerry Spot    [ jim geraghty reporting ]
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Is it just me, or has Mickey Kaus — one of Kerry's toughest and most tenacious critics, from the beginning — been kind of quiet on the Swift Boat Vets stuff?

I mean, Kausfiles was ripping Kerry new excretory orifices long before it was cool. I look back to the Kausfiles of December 2002:

What is it that makes so many people, myself included, intensely dislike Sen. John Kerry? This is the great mystery surrounding his 2004 presidential campaign. I don't think "aloof and arrogant," the traditional Kerry negatives, are exactly it — he may be aloof and arrogant, but there are plenty of aloof and arrogant people I don't rule out instantly due to their gross characterological deficiency, which is what I do with Kerry. It's not just his "long record of opportunism," though again that's part of it. ... My own attempt: I think it starts with the phony furrowed brow. Perpetually furrowed and perpetually phony. It's been furrowed for so long I doubt he could unfurrow it now even if his advisers convinced him that would be a good tack to take! ... Then add the sense that Kerry would never ever take a principled or unpopular stand if losing the argument might actually threaten to derail his precious political career. (He apparently made some anti-affirmative-action noises in 1992 and quickly backed down when the obvious groups complained.) Add in relentless, obvious self-promotion to the point of indignity..."

Or this one, from February 2003:

think Kerry's problem isn't simple, run-of-the-mill calculating opportunism. It's more comically transparent calculating opportunism, of which his Jewish "epiphany" is a good illustration. In other words, his opportunistic zig-zagging is so instantaneous and shameless — changing week-to-week in the case of Iraq — that it becomes counterproductive, losing Kerry the benefit the opportunism is supposed to gain. Why suddenly turn Jewish just when half the press corps is ready to pounce on any indication of convenient chameleonism? How dumb is that? It's calculation, but also incompetent calculation — not what you look for in a president. ... Now the press has three recent examples of Kerry flip-flops. And every reporter knows if you have three examples you have a trend. ...

P.S.: I forgot. He tactically zig-zagged on the death penalty too. That's four. ...

P.P.S.: Kerry also ostentatiously agonized about affirmative-action when that was an attention-getting thing for a thoughtful Democrat to do in 1992, before retreating. Recently he told NPR's Tavis Smiley "I have a vision that says we should have affirmative action in the country." But it's hard to find many other clear, unequivocal recent statements by Kerry of support for affirmative action. (You won't find any on his web site, for example.) Maybe Kerry's still genuinely agonizing, or cynically straddling, or keeping open the option of eventually opposing racial preferences (perhaps while defending some 'original' limited idea of "affirmative action"). Or maybe this flip just hasn't completely flopped back yet...

Mmmm. Good times.

So here's John Kerry's ultimate moment of flipfloppitude, if that's a word. He built his political career on the national spotlight, garnered from a way over-the-top denunciation of the men he fought with, and now is shocked that they hate him. They criticize him in no worse or better terms than the way he criticized all soldiers and sailors in Vietnam in 1971, and his response is to send threatening legal letters to television stations. His campaign urges bookstores to pull "Unfit for Command" from shelves. He dismisses all of the group's allegations as lies; quietly backtracks on the first Purple Heart and Cambodia Christmas; blames the whole thing on George W. Bush and promptly demands that the President defend Kerry's reputation by denouncing the Swifties. Chernobyl didn't melt down this fast.

Wouldn't you think Kaus would be cackling madly in his moment of triumph? That now, the entire world can see the truth that Mickey has been warning us about for two years?

But Kaus's comments about the Swifties have been pretty mild. He's wondered how the Boston Globe could write about Kerry's Cambodia story and not mention the word "seared". He's passed on the news that a "respectable big-time journalist friends who met with the anti-Kerry vets recently found them a lot more credible than expected." He's concluded that "if this is Kerry's mighty, mighty "push-back," I'd hate to see what a Kerry retreat would look like." Kaus called William Rood's account of the Silver Star incident "quite convincing, and the Swifty response (in the Tribune, at least) is weak. ... P.S.: But we could do without the "purple martins." They make the whole piece seem speech-written (and therefore suspect)."

Then he wrote, "The impression is forming: Kerry behaved honorably and capably in battle, but he was a hero in the write ups! [Update: That may be unfair, at least for the Silver Star incident, if William Rood's now-published account is accurate. Kerry comes off as innovative and brave — worthy of commendation. But see this. And on second read Rood doesn't quite say turning the boats into the enemy fire was Kerry's idea, does he? He only says Kerry "had talked to Droz and me beforehand about not responding the way the boats usually did to an ambush." Maybe this ambiguity is unintentional. Or maybe Rood's piece is very carefully written.]"

Maybe Mickey would prefer to see the S.S. Kerry sink because of a policy issue (welfare reform!) instead of his Vietnam record. Maybe Kaus isn't enthusiastic about criticism of Kerry over in Vietnam, as he's written, with blunt honesty, about his student deferment and then "escaping the draft in the lottery." Maybe he is "coming home" to his Democratic party roots.

Kaus can react to the latest twist in the campaign, and the Kerry's recent troubles, however he likes. It just seems a little odd to see the guy who analyzed each Boston Brahmin misstep with such contagious glee to be sounding so subdued.

[Posted 08/24 06:00 PM]