My Apologies; Blogging Has Been Light Recently

For now, check out this story in the NYT. Everyone seems to have concluded that diplomacy is failing to defang Iran and North Korea. The usual gang of Clinton holdovers is blaming us for not offering enough protection money. The Bush administration is now thinking covert action. Uh, good timing, guys. The basic premise is undeniable. Of course, to read anything in the Times these days you have to put up with plenty of completely gratuitous swipes at Bush and Iraq (it’s an election year), and the appeasers get all the ink.

I’ll also leave you with a question. If Nixon sent you up the river from Vietnam into Cambodia on Christmas 1968, on which side of the border would you bury the survivors? Yeah, Vietnam is ancient history. No, it shouldn’t be an issue in the campaign. But lying to the Senate, that’s another deal (“Mr. President” in this extract is the President of the Senate, not POTUS). Have I concluded that he did? No, but I’ve concluded that the media won’t follow up, unless this is somehow connected to Bush’s National Guard records.

Depressing.

UPDATE: My own reading of the claims, btw, has thus far failed to convince me that Kerry lied. Now obviously, he’s no presidential historian, but since I don’t happen to have a lot of faith in the human memory, I make plenty of allowances for whether he was in Cambodia on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day . . . whatever. I have real factual issues over whether he was “ordered” into Cambodia, on on why none of the three or four swift boats involved in the famous Jim Rassman rescue apparently had a single bullet hole. Who’s lying? Hard to see or hear bullets flying when you’re up to your eyeballs in brown water. Nothing that meets my “he’s lying” threshhold, but it merits further investigation, which will not happen unless you think Fox will do it. So how does this (by itself, since it’s all Kerry ever talks about) make him capable of strangling al-Qaeda and pacifying Iraq? My hope is that all of this will refocus Kerry on what he would do about those current problems.