ROLL THE TAPE

If I were Karl Rove, I’d be drooling in anticipation of using audio or videotape, or simply typed up text rolling across the screen of what John Kerry said in February 1971 in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee:

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over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia. These were not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command. . . . They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do. They told stories that at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.

As James Lileks and Hugh Hewitt have written, Kerry is eminently beatable.

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(Kerry’s post-Vietnam record–and the record of the media in covering Vietnam vets in general, is available online in the latest issue of National Review, but a subscription is required.)

UPDATE: Is Kerry actually planting his own phony hecklers in the audience??

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s more on Kerry’s life during the late-1960s and early 1970s.

ONE MORE UPDATE: Robert Moran, vice president at Republican polling firm Fabrizio, McLaughlin & Associates, writes, “John Kerry should enjoy [his current] poll numbers while they last, because his free ride is about to end.

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