Come on, Steve. You can do better than a rebuke that begins with “I personally didn’t see personal atrocities in the sense that I saw somebody cut a head off or something like that” — which hardly reinforces his Senate testimony accusations — and ends with General Franks’ honorable reluctance to criticize his fellow warriors.

Atrocities take place in every war and no one’s arguing that this wasn’t the case in Vietnam. So put away that straw man before it catches fire. Rather, it was Kerry’s willingness to use the cooked-up fantasies of fraudulent ‘winter soldiers’ — and his proclivity for tall tale telling (Christmas in Cambodia) — which deserved all the scrutiny and opprobrium it got.

My question remains unanswered: Since when does citing what a man has actually said or done constitute a ‘smear’ or, to make it easier for some folks, ‘swiftboating’?