Charles Johnson notes that when John Kerry was was Michael Dukakis’ Lieutenant Governor, "Kerry authored an executive order saying the state of Massachussetts would refuse to take part in any civil defense efforts in response to a nuclear attack on America".

Charles describes it as illustrating Kerry's "true radical pacifist nature".

Maybe he'd just seen Fail-Safe one too many times.

The American Thinker reprints an essay it ran in May, long before Christmas in Cambodia became a household phrase in the Blogosphere. This is a riot:

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One thing is for certain: there is no stopping them; the ants will soon be here. And I for one welcome our new insect overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted freelance journalist, I could be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves.

(With apologies to Kent Brockman.)

What do you when you've spent the last 25 years with memories Christmas in Cambodia seared--seared!!--into your brain and you're called on making it up?

Well, if you're John Kerry, you apparently get your favorite writer to write a new piece for The New Yorker that airbrushes your history so that you weren't in Cambodia in December--you were there in January!

Despite having written about receiving brownies from home as a Christmas gift and watching the "Stupid Vietnamese [who] were celebrating Christmas by shooting tracers, fifty-caliber, right up into the air".

The once staid New Yorker, a old line literary magazine that Tom Wolfe lampooned in his classic "Tiny Mummies" two parter for The New York Herald Tribune in the mid-'60s, is now being used as a respository for postmodernist spin for a Democratic presidential candidate who's just gotten the wind knocked out of his swift boat's sails (They didn't have sails--Ed I know--but it's a cool mixed metaphor.) by his fellow "band of brothers", who see through Kerry's self-serving BS from a mile up the Mekong Delta.

But it sounds like by moving the date forward, Kerry's just trying to cover up for his gaffe of mentioning Richard Nixon, who wouldn't actually assume office until about three weeks after Christmas. The swift boat vets are playing at larger stakes--their claim is that Kerry wasn't in Cambodia at all.

It will be interesting to see if the combination of Brinkley's spin and the badgerings of Kerry's lawyers and press buddies can make the Cambodia go away. My bet is that it won't.

For more on Brinkley's airbrushing, checkout "Captain Ed", who's all over it.

Reading the description of how James Carville, Lanny Davis, and Chris Matthews badgered swift boat vet John O'Neill (fellow liberal Al Hunt went apoplectic in absentia on Saturday) on PoliPundit, it sounds like a cross between All The President's Men and A Few Good Men. Kerry's handlers sound like there's no way they can actually handle the truth, so they're doing everything they can to prevent it getting out.

...and they're only making the story grow by doing so. What happens when the swift boat vets' book hits the stores?

David Ramsay Steele has an article that reads like it could be an overview of Jonah Goldberg's upcoming book (although without Jonah's signature humor). Ramsay explores the concept that fascism, long thought to be a product of the right--is actually a byproduct of Marxism. Or as Ramsay writes, "Fascism was a movement with its roots primarily in the left."

Indeed, as Jonah himself wrote, "Mussolini's fascism was conceived as an improvement upon socialism, not a departure from it."

If you're interested in exploring the intertwining roots of the other half of the two most murderous ideologies of the 20th century, it's fascinating stuff.

Oh and Ezra Pound, George Bernard Shaw, Sigmund Freud and Cole Porter all show up, to put in a kind word for their buddy--il Duce.

(Via "Hit & Run".)

Update: One of the themes we've explored here in the past, is the love of so many artists for totalitarians: Stalin had glowing--even loving--words written about him by Paul Robeson. Frida Kahlo committed suicide whilst painting a portrait of him. Francis Ford Coppola was photographed with a Warhol painting of Mao in his dining room, and more recently, numerous Hollywood celebrities made trips to visit Castro, and Oliver Stone recently released a glowing documentary about him.

Of course, as for filmmakers, James Lileks said it best: "Maybe directors like dictators because they understand the desire to have final cut."

As for the rest, I'm open to suggestion. But it's definitely a recurring theme throughout the 20th century to the present day.

Phyllis Furman of The New York Daily News says that NBC is rethinking their agreement with Microsoft over the perpetually moribund MSNBC channel.

One option is pulling the plug on the deal. Since we wrote about that topic almost two years ago, I'll believe it when it happens. In the meantime, MSNBC's ratings continue somewhere under the basement.

My latest newsletter for Electronic House magazine is now online. Kitt from Knight Rider makes a guest appearance.

New Jersey's Governor Jim McGreevy--or "McGreedy" to some of my friends in my home state, resigned today.

And for some reason, the press can't figure out which party he belongs to...

Update: Shades of Bob Torricelli! "The Democrat [Hey, it least they got his party in there!--Ed] said his resignation would be effective Nov. 15."

If a scandal is bad enough that he has to resign, shouldn't he resign immediately (say within 24 hours, or maybe a week)?

Zev Chafets of The New York Daily News recently wrote:

In 1972, The New Yorker's movie critic, Pauline Kael, won herself a place in political lore by expressing astonishment at the Republicans' 49-state landslide victory. "How could that be?" she demanded. "I don't know a single person who voted for Nixon."

(To be fair, Kael could be extremely perceptive when she wanted to be--she was among the first to expose Michael Moore's fictions in Roger & Me.)

Flashforward to today, where ABC's The Note political blog--which wisely declared its own bias earlier this year--has this classic:

we still can't find a single American who voted for Al Gore in 2000 who is planning to vote for George Bush in 2004. (If you are that elusive figure, e-mail us and tell us who you are and why: politicalunit@abcnews.com.)

As Will Collier of VodkaPundit writes:

Time to get out of that newsroom, Noters. Does the name Zell Miller ring any bells? How about Roger L. Simon? Ed Koch...James Woods, Gary Oldman, Dennis Miller, and Dennis Hopper; I'd be surprised if Ron Silver didn't vote for Gore as well. But hey, nobody's ever heard of them, right?

NRO's "Kerry Spot" has some thoughts and a stuffed inbox of converted Gore 2000 voters, and another name: Ron Kessler, an author who voted for Gore before writing a recently released analysis of President Bush.

Update: Charles Johnson (whom I wouldn't be at suprised to hear was a Gore voter himself in 2000) is inviting his nearly one million monthly visitors to email The Note. It will be fun to see if they run any sort of apology or just bury the story.

As Andrew Sullivan wrote in January, somehow, the left seems to think that 9/11 didn't happen--or they think it wasn't that big a deal. And a post like this by The Note just confirms it.

Brent Bozell asks a good question:

The John Kerry candidacy was built on an audacious rewrite of history. The man who roundly condemned the war effort, accusing his fellow soldiers of unspeakable acts of barbarism, would run as a hero of that war, surrounded by his "Band of Brothers." How could any self-respecting journalist covering this charade remain silent?

Evan Thomas and Tim Graham have good answers.

Graham writes:

It all seems so familiar now. In their overt desire to reject a second term for a President Bush, the liberal media elite allows the Democratic candidate to create a legend around himself and his past. Whatever inconvenient holes or weaknesses there are in his personal history are whitewashed out. When the Democrat's critics challenge these legends, only then is it time to travel beyond the mythology and launch into investigative journalism — but only to expose the cynical conspiracies of the partisan plotters against the Democrat.

This entire cycle, which recalls 1992 and then repeats in every other year of the Clinton era, is now coming around again with the ad and book campaign of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. In Clinton-era terms, it could echo the Paula Jones case. Like Jones, the vets held a press conference (at the National Press Club in early May) that most national media outlets strenuously ignored. So months later, they created another splash to draw the media out, only to be sharply criticized.

But the better Clinton-era comparison for the swift-boat veterans are the Arkansas state troopers. Obviously, Vietnam was no walk through a Little Rock nightclub. But these men know Kerry, as the troopers knew Clinton. They say they are eyewitnesses to some moments that do not match the much-seen flattering filmstrips of his wartime experiences. It is the very possibility of their persuasive power that causes Democratic-media apparatchiks to decide they must be discredited. Their motives for lying were the primary focus, and reporters rarely sought to confirm the negative stories, preferring to leave them unsubstantiated and uncirculated.

Fortunately, things have changed a little since 1996.

But you do, since you're reading this. The John Kerry/Martin Sheen connection draws ever closer. And Jeff Taylor is beginning to sound more than a little prescient with his quip.

(God, I just had a terrible thought--is there a brown book with Glenn's name on it??)

Cal Thomas looks at the divergence between reality and rhetoric that is John Kerry, International Man of Mystery.

It's going to be a long season for the Eagles this year?

Remember--you heard it here (almost) first.

John Hawkins has a brief list of his least favorite movies of all time. His readers have added to it in the comments.

Mine's easy: 1998's Buffalo 66.

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Newsday reports that Mike Wallace was arrested by two Taxi & Limousine Commission inspectors when he lunged at one during a parking dispute on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

Curious that a guy who thinks the media shouldn't interfere when US soldiers are under fire tries to interfere with the NYC TLC.

The Village Voice has done some corporate downsizing (corporate? The Village Voice?--Ed Well, I guess it's a business!) and cut its longtime editor, Richard Goldstein in the process.

"Allah" has a pretty good replacement for him in mind.

Irwin Savodnik, writing in Tech Central Station has an interesting look at the current state of psychiatry in Russia, and in the US, and finds some interesting parallels.

President Bush has gotten Senator Kerry to publicly state that he'd also have gone into Iraq, even knowing, as do today, that their capacity to produce WMDs was much more limited than we know now.

One of the commenters on the Brothers Judd Blog makes a great point: Kerry is now in a box. This is one opinion that he can't flip-flop on, because if he does, President Bush can call him on it, via the Bully Pulpit--and the press, which has to cover the President of the United States, has to report it, no matter how much they loathe the man. And as Jim Geraghty wrote, "Somewhere, some Republican operative is emailing that statement to every anti-war voter he can find. Or perhaps the Nader campaign is."

The chief reason that so many on the left would vote for Kerry--that he would have avoided Iraq, is now off the table. There's still oodles of Bush hatred and who knows, that may be enough to win in November. But as Steven Den Beste predicted last month, the Republicans are quietly laying the groundwork to take many--perhaps all--of Kerry's issues away from him.

Like tracer fire over the ink black December skies of Cambodia, Mark Steyn takes aim and fires on John Kerry's Christmas in Cambodia story.

(Via Hugh Hewitt, who's been all over this story, since practically breaking it. Also stop by Power Line and Instapundit for lots more on Apocalypse Kerry.)

Update: Break out the brown books! The Clinton-esque smearing of the authors of Unfit For Command has officially begun.

Insta-Update: More dirty tricks here.

A Thought: Assuming the Blogosphere and opinion writers like Steyn keep applying pressure, I'm not sure if the Kerry camp can make the Christmas in Cambodia story go away simply through dirty tricks campaigns. Kerry himself has been quoted too many times--including in Congressional records. And I'm not sure if saying that a sailor has used salty language is going to deter the Swift Boat vets. These men had to know this stuff was coming (just ask Linda Tripp), and if they can survive the Vietcong, they can survive the DNC.

Francis Ford Update: "This is end, beautiful friend, the end..."

James Lileks--happy birthday, by the way!--is suffering from SBHFS: Sudden Bush Hatred Fatigue Syndrome, the flipside to what Charles Krauthammer dubbed earlier this year as "Bush Derangement Syndrome".

And I can't say I blame him:

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Michelle Malkin runs roughshod over "underperformin'" Norman Mineta.

And boy, does he deserve it.

Betsy Newmark writes, "USA Today allows Kerry to write an editorial pretending to have a plan in Iraq and then they write an editorial saying how empty his plan is. Shazam."

On the other hand, this could explain Kerry's love of Nixonian Secret Plans.

Scott W. Johnson of Power Line looks at "the honor accorded Al Sharpton and other notorious anti-Semites" in the modern Democratic Party:

The Democratic Party has long foregone the reckoning that it is due with [Jesse] Jackson. But Jackson is ancient history; Sharpton and [Cynthia] McKinney are the future of the party. Since her triumph in the recent Democratic primary, McKinney now stands poised to retake her congressional seat.

Read the whole thing, and the article that Scott links to, which makes this important point:

Outside of the Islamic world, the anti-Semitic upsurge of recent years is mainly a left-wing phenomenon. It is therefore not surprising that it should have brought the Democratic Party, more swiftly than the Republicans, to that dark and bloody crossroads where politics and conscience collide.

(Emphasis mine.)

The "dark and bloody crossroads where politics and conscience collide" is getting even darker in Europe, where 50 Jewish university students from Israel, the U.S. and Poland were recently attacked--at Auschwitz.

Update: I've been meaning to post Suzanne Fields' essay on Senator Kerry's flip-flops on Israel, and this seems like a good place to do it, along with devastating contrast to the senator from a follow-up post at Power Line. In September of last year, President Bush spoke to Rabbi Jonathan Ginsburg and select members of St. Paul, Minnesota's Temple of Aaron. Rabbi Ginsburg is quoted as saying:

I told [President Bush] a story that I told over Rosh Hashanah about an elderly volunteer for an Israel organization who said that his passion for volunteering for Israel was driven by the fact that he had been part of a l iberating group at at one of the concentration camps. An inmate came up to him and saw his name tag and saw that he was Jewish, and said, 'Are you Jewish?' in Yiddish. Expecting a hug from this recently freed inmate, the soldier said, 'Yes.' Instead of a hug, he got a slap, and the former inmate said 'You're too late.'

"The President looked at me in the eye and said, 'Part of my job is to make sure we'll never be too late.'

Obviously, read the whole thing.

John Hinderaker of Power Line has a brief post tonight:

This headline from Australia's The Age exemplifies the uphill battle the Swift Boat Vets are fighting against the home team, as viewed by the foreign press and, to only a slightly lesser degree, the American press:

Anti-Kerry ad mars presidential campaign

Michael Kinsley once famously said that the definition of a gaffe is when a politician tells the truth--more and more, the same can be said of what James Lileks recently dubbed the dinosaur media.

Considering what happened today with the Boston Globe and the swift boat vets, and the response President Bush received from the "objective" journalists at the Unity Conference, I'd say both foreign and domestic media are in a tie this year to demonstrate how deeply in the tank they are for the left.

Louisiana Congressman Rodney Alexander decided to run as a Republican this fall.

Stories like this make it obvious why Nancy Pelosi introduced a House minority "Bill of Rights" back in June: she expects to be in that position for a while.

Teresa Heinz Kerry told Chris Matthews on July 25th her opinion of how the president handled being informed that a plane had crashed into 9/11:

I think the president behaved correctly in terms of being quiet amidst stunning news like that in a classroom of kids. You know, what can you do? It takes you a couple of minutes to digest what you have just heard. And then he was not not his—not in his White House and in his office with all of his people. He was in the school in Florida.

I guess Teresa didn't know what the party line was when she said that. It's a strange world when Teresa and Rudy Giuliani are on the same page--disagreeing with Michael Moore...and John Kerry.

In a post very approiately titled "Dirty Pool At The Boston Globe", Will Collier of Vodkapundit looks at Mike Kranish, the Boston Globe journalist who's simultaneously written the introduction to the official Kerry-Edwards campaign book and written a hit piece for the Globe stating that one of the Swift Boat vets has recanted his attack on John Kerry.

Only...he hasn't.

Oh, and as Will notes, the Globe is owned by the New York Times. Say, is the The Times a liberal newspaper? Let's ask its ombudsman!

If this story pans out, it has the potential to be damning for the Globe, the Times, and much of what up to recently was called "the mainstream media" as well. (Not to mention Kerry himself.)

Update: Hugh Hewitt has a different take.

Advantage Ed! Yesterday, we wrote about the Swift Boat vets and their book, Unfit For Command:

So if these guys are lying about what Kerry did in Vietnam, then Kerry himself had to have lied to Meet the Press and in his speech as a Naval Reserve officer to the Senate on April 22, 1971.

Otherwise, Kerry's own testimony tacitly backs them up. So either Kerry's a self-professed war criminal, or someone who lied to puff up his own radical chic credentials in the early 1970s and smear his fellow soldiers. In either case, what makes him think either of those make him electable?

Today, George Neumayr of The American Spectator echoes my point:

John Kerry faces a basic problem in rebutting the new ads that question his Vietnam war record: the criticism in the ads sounds exactly like his own criticism from the 1970s, both his criticism of others (he had no problem smearing Vietnam veterans for political purposes in the 1970s) and the criticism he leveled at himself when asked in 1971 on Meet the Press if he had committed war atrocities.

"There are all kinds of atrocities, and I would have to say that, yes, yes, I committed the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers have committed in that I took part in shootings in free-fire zones. I conducted harassment and interdiction fire. I used .50 caliber machine guns, which we were granted and ordered to use, which were our only weapon against the people," Kerry said. "I took part in search and destroy missions, in the burning of villages…"

What do the new ads say that Kerry didn't say or imply in this statement?

Read the whole thing.