The Number Game

Mark Steyn hardly qualifies as a blockade runner - he's usually good - but under the existing conditions, I'm amazed this piece got printed in the Sun-Times.

Money quote:

A handful of Kerry's ''band of brothers'' are traveling around with his campaign. Most of the rest, including a majority of his fellow swift boat commanders and 254 swiftees from Kerry's Coastal Squadron One, are opposed to his candidacy. That is an amazing ratio and, if snot-nosed American media grandees don't think there's a story there, maybe they ought to consider another line of work. To put it in terms they can understand, imagine if Dick Cheney campaigned for the presidency on the basis of his time at Halliburton, and a majority of the Halliburton board and 80 percent of the stockholders declared he was unfit for office. More to the point, on the swift vets' first major allegation -- Christmas in Cambodia -- the Kerry campaign has caved.

There are, of course, three more major allegations, according to the Telegraph:

• Potential lies about at least one of his purple hearts
• Lies about the action that got him his Bronze and Silver Stars.

As Hugh Hewitt constantly reiterates, those of us who've been civilians our whole lives aren't the ones to quibble about things like that.

But the Swifties were there - in every case I'm aware of, they were there much longer than Kerry was. They are the ones to quibble.

And they're one for one so far.

Posted by Mitch at August 16, 2004 06:17 AM | TrackBack