Lies Swiftly Disintegrating

Fantastic reporting by the NYT on the Swiftvets. Loads more on this in the morning. In the meantime, who wants to lay odds on how Glenn Reynolds reports this, if it all? I'd say even money to link, better than even money, maybe 1:.5, to cite this as an instance of media bias. The SBVF"T" are falling apart at a rapidly quickening pace, and Instapundit is going to have to distance himself from the bullshit really soon if he wants to pretend to be a credible commentator in the future.

UPDATE: Funny how right I was about Glenn Reynolds' reaction to the Times piece. Glenn's complaints are 1) that it's not nice to the Swiftvets, and 2) that it doesn't have a lot to say about the Christmas in Cambodia story. Let's go in reverse order. Kerry said publicly about 16 years ago that he was in Cambodia in December, 1968, while the government was denying any US presence in Cambodia. Just so that we're clear, the government was, in fact, lying about US forces in Cambodia. Now it turns out that Kerry was 50 miles from Cambodia at Christmas, but in Cambodia several times between January and February 1969. That's it. The entire story. That's apparently what Instapundit thinks is incredibly damaging to the Kerry campaign. Um, Glenn, it's a non-story. Nobody gives a shit. Nobody should.

Okay, back to the first point about the Times piece, that's it's all-around not nice to the SBVF"T". I think---and this might just be my impression---that that's because they can't keep their stories straight, they have no evidence beyond thirty year old third-hand recollections, and new records continue to be released discrediting their individual charges. For all Glenn's whining about the Times, everything, everything they've reported is true. Glenn has good reason not to want to get involved in the substance of the charges the SBVF"T" have made against John Kerry, namely that they're not rationally believable. Look at the Insta-weasel's back-peddling:

UPDATE: Something I said there that bears repeating -- the reason why the Christmas-in-Cambodia story is getting the media cold-shoulder, and why what SwiftVet coverage there is focuses on the medals, etc., is that the Christmas-in-Cambodia story is clear, and has already been proven false. It's easy to understand, and that makes it much more devastating for Kerry.

The medal stuff is complex, and can be spun in a way that makes people's eyes glaze over. So that's what we'll mostly get, along with "political" stories that will treat the SwiftVets stuff as partisan hackery in a way that Michael Moore never gets treated by the same outlets.

If you think it's important that Kerry was in Cambodia several times, but only slightly later than he claimed to be, then I guess Glenn's right about the C-i-C story having been "proven false," though why that would be important to anyone is beyond me. But look at the rest of Glenn's comments. The medal stuff is "complex," "can be spun," "difficult to understand" (by implication), etc., you know, hazy, fog o'war, who knows who's tellin' the truth, whaddayagonnadoaboutit. Glenn doesn't evince the slightest concern that all of the substantive SBVF"T" charges have themselves been proven false---if not by a strict legal standard, then by the illuminating standard of Occam's Razor and common sense, which are the only valid criteria for drawing conclusions about this affair. (Indeed, the fact that Kerry's accusers can't be demonstrated to be lying in an absolute or transcendental sense is entirely the purpose of the exercise: throw enough mud, and some will stick.)

What the Times story makes clear, and what Glenn and his pals really would prefer not to talk about, is that the SBVF"T" deliberately fabricated evidence, presented third- and fourth- hand accounts as if they were eyewitness accounts, deliberately distorted the words of some veterans whom they interviewed, all the while refusing to speak to the men who actually were there at the time with Kerry. No rational person could believe their theories.

I'm going to say this again because it bears repeating: John O'Neill is a Nixon hatchet man. He is the protege of a convicted Watergate criminal. To those who say, "well that doesn't tell us anything about the veracity of the charges," I say bullshit. They would not be taking a Lyndon LaRouche pamphlet seriously. There was a publisher at St. Martin's who had to resign over the controversies involving a book accusing George Bush of crimes related to cocaine use in the 1970s. I'm sure Instapundit gave that a lot of play. The point is that journalists can't take just anyone seriously, and having a slick media presentation and a lot of right-wing money is not a legitimizing credential. The defamatory gangsters of the Nixon White House are the scum of the earth, and should be assumed to be lying until proven to be telling the truth.