Put the blame where it lies

Tried to post this over at DalyThoughts... Lileks put it very well this morning: "It's like saying a body in a pine box is 'dead' but 'lifelike.'" As Rather might say, that dog won't hunt. In 1972 Bush was the son of a junior congressman, elected from the minority party. He may well have had some unasked-for help getting his Guard slot. So what? He did nothing that hundreds if not thousands of other guys did at the time, and more than most: Rather than fulfill his committment by marching in circles and pushing a broom, he signed up to fly a supersonic interceptor with a reputation as a widow-maker. Oh-and-by-the-way, he also volunteered to go to Vietnam as part of an F-102 deployment, but was turned down because he had too few flight hours. He got stellar performance appraisals from his peers and superiors. Now, TWO guys - one with a long-standing grudge against Bush and another who is Kerry's 3rd-biggest donor - lay out this "failed to fulfill his committment" line and try to back it up with badly faked memos that contradict the known-to-be-authentic record, CBS and the Left eat it up with a spoon. Yet when 250+ SwiftVets (with no particular love for or ties to W) hammered Kerry's version of events in the Mekong with living-eyewitness testimony, they were castigated as liars. Blame Terry McAuliffe. The Democrats could have nominated Dean or Lieberman, and we could be having a discussion of how to fight THIS war, not rehashing one from a generation ago.