furthermore, sam, Kaplan can't explain why Kerry would stop boasting and deny crossing the border on that particular day once people began looking into the facts. So Kaplan doesn't even mention that Kerry's staffers have issued a denial and rendered his whole thesis pointless.
and as long as you're accusing me of skimming, perhaps you missed this bit in the WaPo article above: Next, the campaign leaked a new version through the medium of historian Douglas Brinkley, author of "Tour of Duty," a laudatory book on Kerry's military service. Last week Brinkley told the London Telegraph that while Kerry had been 50 miles from the border on Christmas, he "went into Cambodian waters three or four times in January and February 1969 on clandestine missions." Oddly, though, while Brinkley devotes nearly 100 pages of his book to Kerry's activities that January and February, pinpointing the locations of various battles and often placing Kerry near Cambodia, he nowhere mentions Kerry's crossing into Cambodia, an inconceivable omission if it were true. Now a new official statement from the campaign undercuts Brinkley. It offers a minimal (thus harder to impeach) claim: that Kerry "on one occasion crossed into Cambodia," on an unspecified date. But at least two of the shipmates who are supporting Kerry's campaign (and one who is not) deny their boat ever crossed the border, and their testimony on this score is corroborated by Kerry's own journal, kept while on duty. One passage reproduced in Brinkley's book says: "The banks of the [Rach Giang Thanh River] whistled by as we churned out mile after mile at full speed. On my left were occasional open fields that allowed us a clear view into Cambodia. At some points, the border was only fifty yards away and it then would meander out to several hundred or even as much as a thousand yards away, always making one wonder what lay on the other side." His curiosity was never satisfied, because this entry was from Kerry's final mission. so to clarify for you, Kerry's own campaign undercuts Brinkley, and Brinkley serves as the basis for Kaplan's flights of fancy, ergo, well, do i really have to spell it out for you?
There goes that. It's wonderful, every time the swift boat liars try to dredge up something that Kerry said about Vietnam, there's invariably documented proof of them contemporaneously saying the same thing.
doesn't change kerry's retraction of his seared-seared memory. and last i checked, o'neill wasn't running fro president.
the editors of the WaPo still find it troubling. -- Mr. Kerry's conflicting statements about where and when he was in Cambodia remain troubling. He has backed away from repeated claims that he spent Christmas Eve 1968 in Cambodia, a memory that, he said in a 1986 Senate speech, is "seared -- seared -- in me." This does not undermine Mr. Kerry's military bravery, but it does raise an issue of candor. It's fair to ask whether this is an episode of foggy memory, routine political embroidery or something more. Indeed, the Kerry campaign ought to arrange for the full release of all relevant records from the time. Mr. Kerry granted historian Douglas Brinkley exclusive use of his wartime journals and other writings; the campaign should seek to be freed from that agreement and to make all the material public. Though the ads are being underwritten by longtime Bush partisans, the Kerry campaign's claim of illegal coordination between the Swift boat group and the Bush campaign is unconvincing.
another "seared" memory, from a Kerry speech commemorating Martin Luther King Day, Jan. 20, 2003: http://www.vote-smart.org/speech_detail.php?speech_id=4724&keyword=seared&phrase=&contain= I remember well April 1968--I was serving in Vietnam--a place of violence--when the news reports brought home to me and my crewmates the violence back home--and the tragic news that one of the bullets flying that terrible spring took the life of that unabashedly maladjusted citizen. except he didn't go to vietnam until november 1968...
If misstatements disqualify you from the presidency, then GWB would have been out in the primaries in 2000.
wrong he didnt take command of a swiftboat no. 44 til Nov 68 he was aboard the USS Gridley starting in Dec 67 the Gridley operated in the waters off North Vietnam, as such was considered service in Vietnam next ?
Look, Chump, you can let the facts derail you all you want, but basso won't let the evidence get in the way of his preconceived notions.
Is it just me or are NV waters IN the Pacific Ocean? http://www.lonelyplanet.com/destinations/loc-asi.htm
USS Gridley departs for a Western Pacific (WESTPAC) deployment, to engage in operations in support of the Vietnam War. Ship spends time in the Gulf of Tonkin off North Vietnam, at Subic Bay in the Philippines and in Wellington, New Zealand http://www.johnkerry.com/about/john_kerry/service_timeline.html NO SOUP FOR YOU! NEXT!
point taken, however, the quote says he was in vietnam not on a boat off the coast. make of it what you will...
here's some more soup nazi news Arsonists set fire to a Jewish soup kitchen in central Paris early on Sunday morning and daubed Nazi symbols on the building, police said, in the latest anti-Semitic act in France.
HOLY CRAP! Are you actually trying to claim with a strainght face that Kerry's claim is false even after you have been proven very, very wrong?
