Murtha and Swiftboats

Normally I hate the term "Swiftboating" because liberals use it to mean a baseless attack on a candidate. In Rep. Murtha's case I will accept it because the head of the Swiftboat Veterans is actually involved. O'Neal did some research and found that, like Kerry, Murtha received his Purple Hearts for superficial wounds. That isn't the interesting part.

What is interesting is how the story has spread. If you are like me, you read about it in a column somewhere denouncing Republicans for daring to attack heroes. A search of Google News showed dozens of columns defending Murtha.

So far I have only seen one conservative column making the charges. No one on the right seems to care but the left has circled wagons and waged a major defense.

Are the charges true? Possibly. No one has bothered to actually produce research to the contrary. They are too busy condemning Republicans. Oliver North has written that is was too easy for officers to earn medals during Viet Nam and too difficult for enlisted men.

The thing is, it doesn't matter to conservatives. We don't care what Murtha's background is. All we care about is that he is suggesting the wrong course now.

Liberals take the opposite course. Moral authority seems more important than anything else. Look at how often anti-war people refer to the Bush administration as "chicken hawks". That's why they nominated Kerry in the first place. That's why they attacked Bush's record in the National Guard.

It doesn't matter if the only way to leave a functioning Iraq is to have a slow draw-down accompanied by building a strong, elected government backed by a native army and police force. If someone served in Viet Nam or lost a son in Iraq then that person has the moral authority to insist on a surrender and retreat.

That's why Murtha's past matters so little to the right and so much to the left.

Speaking of which, I was looking at Mary Mapes book, Truth and Duty on the mark-down counter. She never understood anything about fonts or typesetting. Early in the book she complains that bloggers were looking at second-generation faxes instead of the high-quality copy that she had and that many subtle details were lost in the faxing process. To prove this, she reproduced the original and the faxed copy in an appendix. What she fails to realize is that the original looks even less like a document typed on an early 1970s typewriter than the fax. No unbiased person familiar with typewriters could ever mistake this document for one that was typed.

Mapes really wanted the story to be true. As I said above, liberals are convinced that Viet Nam era service is the main qualification for commander in chief. Except for Bill Clinton who joined the ROTC in order to dodge the draft.

Mapes will probably go down in textbooks as the reporter whose story was too good to check.