John Kerry had just pumped up a huge crowd in downtown West Palm Beach, promising to make the state a battleground for his quest to oust President Bush, when a local television journalist posed the question that any candidate with Florida ambitions should expect:

What will you do about Cuba?

As the presumptive Democratic nominee, Kerry was ready with the bravado appropriate for a challenger who knows that every answer carries magnified importance in the state that put President Bush into office by just 537 votes.

''I'm pretty tough on Castro, because I think he's running one of the last vestiges of a Stalinist secret police government in the world,'' Kerry told WPLG-ABC 10 reporter Michael Putney in an interview to be aired at 11:30 this morning.

Then, reaching back eight years to one of the more significant efforts to toughen sanctions on the communist island, Kerry volunteered: ``And I voted for the Helms-Burton legislation to be tough on companies that deal with him.''

It seemed the correct answer in a year in which Democratic strategists think they can make a play for at least a portion of the important Cuban-American vote -- as they did in 1996 when more than three in 10 backed President Clinton's reelection after he signed the sanctions measure written by Sen. Jesse Helms and Rep. Dan Burton.

There is only one problem: Kerry voted against it.

Asked Friday to explain the discrepancy, Kerry aides said the senator cast one of the 22 nays that day in 1996 because he disagreed with some of the final technical aspects. But, said spokesman David Wade, Kerry supported the legislation in its purer form -- and voted for it months earlier.

Campaign finance reform has accomplished a good deal in forcing the parties to rely on relatively modest individual donations. But thanks to the F.E.C., the nation's Potemkin political watchdog, the big soft money donations have found another channel. They go to "527" advocacy groups, named for a section of the tax law under which they are supposedly beyond the F.E.C.'s reach. To really qualify under that law, groups would have to be totally independent from the political campaigns that are running George Bush and John Kerry for president. This abuse of common sense came to the public's attention graphically in the Swift boat attack ads against Senator Kerry's war record, run by a shadow group with clear ties to the Republican Party. [emphasis added]

Terrorism did not start on September 11, 2001. It had been festering for many years.

And the world had created a response to it that allowed it to succeed. The attack on the Israeli team at the Munich Olympics was in 1972. And the pattern had already begun.

The three surviving terrorists were arrested and within two months released by the German government.

Action like this became the rule, not the exception.

Terrorists came to learn they could attack and often not face consequences.

In 1985, terrorists attacked the Achille Lauro and murdered an American citizen who was in a wheelchair, Leon Klinghoffer.

They marked him for murder solely because he was Jewish.

Some of those terrorist were released and some of the remaining terrorists allowed to escape by the Italian government because of fear of reprisals.

So terrorists learned they could intimidate the world community and too often the response, particularly in Europe, was "accommodation, appeasement and compromise."

And worse the terrorists also learned that their cause would be taken more seriously, almost in direct proportion to the barbarity of the attack.

Terrorist acts became a ticket to the international bargaining table.

How else to explain Yasser Arafat winning the Nobel Peace Prize when he was supporting a terrorist plague in the Middle East that undermined any chance of peace?

Before September 11, we were living with an unrealistic view of the world much like our observing

Europe appease Hitler or trying to accommodate ourselves to peaceful co-existence with the Soviet Union through mutually assured destruction.

In a televised statement, Chirac demanded that the militants free the journalists, who have been missing for more than a week, and announced he had dispatched his foreign minister to the Middle East to seek their release.

KURTZ: I mention MoveOn, because there are a lot of liberal groups, as you know, Debra Saunders, these 527s -- have there been a double standard in the media in not trying to make Kerry denounce the liberal ads, while reporters ask the president every day, why won't you disassociate yourself from the swift boat ads?

SAUNDERS: I've never seen a voter say to John Kerry, but couldn't you just denounce the ad? Or they say that Bush is whatever. They don't ask him that question. But how many reporters would look at Bush and say, can't you just denounce this one ad? I think that we get used in this. And I think the other thing that I find so...

KURTZ: You're suggesting a double standard?

SAUNDERS: I am suggesting a double standard.

KURTZ: Why do you think that is?

SAUNDERS: I think that most journalists support John Kerry.

KURTZ: You really think that that's the reason?

SAUNDERS: Yes, I do. I work for "The San Francisco Chronicle."

I would like to talk, representing all those veterans, and say that several months ago in Detroit, we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.

...

They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, tape 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 fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the country side 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.

What's your plan for parenting & educating all the unwanted children you people want to bring into the world? Who will pay for policing our streets & maintaining the prisons needed to contain them when you, their parents & the system fail them? Oh, sorry. All that money has been earmarked to pay off the Bush deficit. Give me a frigging break, will you?

Bush's former counselor Karen Hughes, in her awkwardly named book "Ten Minutes From Normal," assures us that what "Bush does best of all" is "ask questions that bore to the heart of the matter." She says that during the 2000 campaign she and a "brilliant" issues staff "never once succeeded" in anticipating all of Bush's penetrating questions. "He has a laser-like ability," Hughes writes, "to reduce an issue to its core."

In regard to Iraq and the war on terror, though, there's little evidence in the public record of such Bush interventions. We have been told instead that George Tenet, then director of central intelligence, successfully misled Bush by assuring him that the evidence on Saddam Hussein's possession of weapons of mass destruction was "a slam-dunk."

Does this mean that the American way is wrong, and that we should switch to a Canadian-style single-payer system? Well, yes.

A smart economist can come up with theoretical justifications for either argument. The evidence suggests, however, that the Kerry position is much closer to the truth.

The fact is that the mainly private U.S. health care system spends far more than the mainly public health care systems of other advanced countries, but gets worse results. In 2001, we spent $4,887 on health care per capita, compared with $2,792 in Canada and $2,561 in France. Yet the U.S. does worse than either country by any measure of health care success you care to name - life expectancy, infant mortality, whatever. (At its best, U.S. health care is the best in the world. But the ranks of Americans who can't afford the best, and may have no insurance at all, are large and growing.)

And the U.S. system does have very high overhead: private insurers and H.M.O.'s spend much more on administrative expenses, as opposed to actual medical treatment, than public agencies at home or abroad.

[A] front-page article on Aug. 4 about evidence that Islamic groups are training fighters in Pakistan and sending them into Afghanistan misstated the nature of a 1998 American air strike on a militant training camp in Afghanistan. It was carried out with cruise missiles fired from ships in the Arabian Sea, not bombs dropped by American planes.

"Generally speaking, criteria for revocation include public safety risk, or national security threat," DHS spokesman Dean Boyd said.

Another professor filled in for (Tariq) Ramadan on Tuesday on the first day of his scheduled class on Islamic ethics.

But in that article there was this paragraph:

A damage report to Mr. Thurlow's boat shows that it received three bullet holes, suggesting enemy fire, and later intelligence reports indicate that one Vietcong was killed in action and five others wounded, reaffirming the presence of an enemy. Mr. Thurlow said the boat was hit the day before. He also received a Bronze Star for the day, a fact left out of "Unfit for Command."

Before that time, I had never heard it suggested that there was a report in which a claim of 1 VC being KIA and 5 being WIA. It wasn't until today, when Jon sent me a link, that I found the source of the NYT claims.

They're contained in The Coastal Division Eleven Command History "Chronology of Highlights". I'm not sure how I managed to miss it up to now, but I have.

Anyway to the point at hand which will demonstrate two things:

A) The NYT deliberately left out some of the report.
B) The NYT writers who used the report had no idea about the meaning of what they were reading.

First the report (you'll find it on page 8 of the pdf):

March 13, 1969: PCF's 3, 51, 43, 93 and 94 with MSF RF/PF troops conducted SEA LORDS operations in Bay Hop river and Dong Cong canal. A mine detonated under PCF 3 and units were taken under small arms fire several times during the operation. Friendly casualties were 8 USN WIA and 1 MSF KIA. Units destroyed 30 sampans and 5 structures and captured 16 booby trap grenades. Later intelligence reports indicated 1 VC KIA and 5 VC WIA.

Once I read this, I understood why the NYT had screwed up this part of the story so badly.

Let me translate it for you. Those 5 boats hauled some Mike Strike Force (MSF) Regional Forces/Popular Forces (RF/PF) on a Sea Lords operation. The Ruff Puffs apparently assaulted a village, killed 1 VC and wounded 5 VC, but that final total wasn't clear at the time. During their assault they (and possibly the PCFs) were under enemy small arms fire (stands to reason, wouldn't you say and might also explain the 3 holes in Thurlow's boat). They, the Mike Force and PCFs, destroyed 30 sampans, 5 structures and captured 16 grenades while losing 1 MSF KIA (a booby trap). The Mike Strike Force stayed there at the village site (and thus became the source for the "later intelligence").

On the way back, sans the Ruff Puffs (who are still at the village), PCF 3 hit a mine.

END OF STORY.

There was no reported small arms fire around the mine. There was no reported VC KIA or WIA at that time. Those all took place in the previous Mike Force operation, not the mine detonation.

Which explains why the PCFs were able to spend 90 minutes on site, saving the 3 boat and its crew before towing it in and not suffering one single solitary casualty from small arms or any other type of fire.

[T]here is the fog of war and then there is the fog of cable.

Over the last few weeks, 24-hour news networks have done little to find out what John Kerry did in Vietnam, but they have provided a different kind of public service: their examination of his war record in Vietnam illustrates once again just how perfunctory and confusing cable news coverage can be. Facts, half-truths and passionately tendentious opinions get tumbled together on screen like laundry in an industrial dryer - without the softeners of fact-checking or reflection.