Instapundit Watch

This is either weird or infuriating---Glenn Reynolds, today:

IN THE MAIL: One Solder's Story: A Memoir, by Bob Dole. Reading just the first few pages, it's easy to see why he got so angry at John Kerry last year.

Can this make any sense without assuming that the fabrications of the Swift Boat Veterans for "Truth" were true? (I'm not getting back into that but this is useful.) Or is Reynolds taking the line that Kerry's testimony at the Winter Soldier hearing was treasonous? Interesting factoid about that: Kerry's testimony was true in almost every particular. Maybe Instapundit is one of those who thinks telling the truth about what (some) American soldiers did in Vietnam is a form of treason.

Whatever the precise means by which Glenn Reynolds does yet more violence to the study of history, I'd like to offer an alternative explanatory model that, and maybe this is just me, does a pretty good job predicting the only datum available, i.e. that Bob Dole did angrily impugn John Kerry's record of military service last year. And that explanation is: Bob Dole is a highly partisan Republican (d'ya know he was once the Republican Senate Leader? No, really) who will do rather a lot to aid in the election of Republican candidates. Not as heartrending a story as the one in which Dole reluctantly decided to get himself entangled in all this only after a bald eagle and a crying Indian came to him in an astral vision and showed him the way, but it does (I hope) have a certain plausibility of its own.