Absolutely Damning

Atrios has the goods here and here.

Excerpt 1:

CNN's Newsnight just played the O'Neill-Nixon tape, with text graphic on screen:

O'NEILL: I was in Cambodia, sir. I worked along the border on the water.

NIXON: In a swift boat?

O'NEILL: Yes, sir.

Excerpt 2:

JOHN O'NEILL: The whole country's watching him avoid the question. You asked about Cambodia. How do I know he's not in Cambodia? I was on the same river, George. I was there two months after him. Our patrol area ran to Sedek, it was 50 miles from Cambodia. There isn't any watery border. The Mekong River's like the Mississippi. There were gunboats stationed right up there to stop people from coming. And our boats didn't go north of, only slightly north of Sedek. So it was a made up story. He's told it over 50 times, George, that was on the floor of the Senate. He wrote articles about it, it was a malicious story because it painted all the guys above him, all of the commanding officers, in effect, as war criminals, that had ordered him into a neutral country, it was a lie.

I suspect that a thorough search of the Nixon tapes would produce enough material to send O'Neill back into whatever hole he crawled out of. [Is Houston, Texas a hole?--ed.] [Yes!--F.]

I've been wondering for a while what the point has been of making a controversy out of Kerry's statements about Cambodia. Whether he was there in December 1968 or January or February 1969 just isn't interesting. The idea, I guess, is to suggest that Kerry was never in Cambodia. If that were true, then by pulling a simple Van Odell, we can conclude that no American soldiers were ever in Cambodia, at least until R. Milhous Nixon told us that his invasion of Cambodia "[was] not an invasion of Cambodia." As with Kerry's medals, the record on this is clear and incontrovertible. There were covert missions in Cambodia as early as 1967. Has Glenn Reynolds read William Shawcross? Does he know who Shawcross is?

The meta-strategy on the part of the accusers and some of their Insta-accomplices is to make the election about the justice of the Vietnam War---and to rely on what Gore Vidal called the "United States of Amnesia" to forget that John Kerry's testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was absolutely true, and along with the BCCI investigations, the noblest act of his political life.