Of course. We can't lock down every school.

The people who did this are not just "separatists" - they are affiliates of Al Qaeda, working to turn Chenya into a fundimentalist Islamic state. They fought alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan, and they were probably working with Al Qaeda on this very operation - half of the attackers are reported to be Arabs.

This is what our enemies do. And they are planning more just like it, right now.

You're not seeing the hundred or so kids that are already dead.

These images are not exploitive; their emotional impact does not obscure the truth. This is the truth.

The bad guys don't fuck around. Neither should we.

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Get your very own Souvenir Navy SEAL Cap:

[Click to buy - $10.99]

Impress the girls, tell tall tales, maybe even win a few votes while you're at it. (Note: This is identical to our Souvenir CIA Guy Cap).

Don't have ten bucks? Just grab a copy of the logo. It's free.

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I'll go way out on a limb and call this one: Bush is going to win this election, and it's not even going to be close.

Why? Four reasons:

1) The Bounce

As I said before, there were two ways to look at the non-existent Kerry bounce after the democrat convention - it's either that nobody gets a bounce this year because the electorate is already polarized, or because Kerry is dead. I said you'd know the answer when the Republican convention is over and the first polls come out.

Have a look at these graphs:

Bush/Kerry

John Kerry To Be Elected United States President

There's going to be a bounce, all right, and Kerry is never going to catch up. Last week was the high water mark of his campaign.

2) The Invisible Secret-Agent Friend

As PoliPundit pointed out, Kerry has not had a serious press interview since the Swiftvet ads came out. He simply can't answer the questions he knows he is going to be asked; this is a crippling problem for him.

He's also lost a good fraction of the military vote - one poll I saw (sorry, lost the link) showed his share of veteran's families dropping from almost 50% to somewhere in the mid thirties.

Lost of Kerry supporters don't care about this Vietnam stuff, but military families do. They wield millions of votes.

3) The Hollow Core

The Anybody-But-Bush people are diehard stalwarts this time around, but the Enthusiastic Kerry Supporters Of American could hold their national convention in a Hotel Six.

When the democrats lose the MTV vote, it's over.

4) The Crucial Basics

Despite the crap the media is selling, the important things are all looking up. The economy is in good shape, and getting better (1 2 3). Iraq has been an astonishing success - never is history has an effort of this scale gone remotely as well, with this little bloodshed and this rapid an advance towards social stability and democratic reform.

This election is all about 9/11, as it should be. Back then, nobody would have looked ahead at these three years and foreseen the decisive rout of the Taliban, the lightning overthrow of Saddam, and our remarkable success in protecting our own people over all this time. We could get hit tomorrow, and hit hard, and we would still have done an incredibly good job.

This matters, because the danger is still out there. I still have a knot in my stomach because I expect our enemies to do something ugly, right now, in the very heart of my country. My concerns are quite realistic and well founded, and I'm sure everybody shares them to some degree.

The guy with the nuance and the invisible secret-agent friend just isn't going to cut it. It's over.

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One of my proudest achievements in life is that I hold the number-one spot on Google for the word "feces". Every now and again I have to check it, just to make sure it hasn't all slipped away.

Check out the auto-generated ad on the right. It's true, you know:

You can find great shit on Ebay.

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As anybody over the age of six can tell you, the internet is a great place to buy stuff. If you know where to look you can find new stuff at wholesale prices, and hard-to-find used stuff on auction or offered for sale in specialist newsgroups.

You can buy guns this way, too, but there's a catch. Sellers can only ship guns to people who hold federal licenses that identify them as gun dealers, or, in limited cases, as licensed gun collectors. It's not insurmountable of course, but it does make it impossible to just pick up the phone or fire off an email to order what you want. Everything takes days instead of minutes, and the added cost of the dealer's fees can be significant.

I'm one of the lucky ones.

I live just a few miles from one of the best local dealers I've ever done business with, and if you live anywhere near Ithaca, NY, you do, too. James Rolfe at Jim's Guns works hard to make it easy. He already has his license on file with some of the big dealers, which allows you to just phone your order in; you pay for your gun on your own credit card and just ask that they ship it to Jim's place. If you buy something on auction or from a private seller in your favorite newsgroup, just email Jim with the details and he'll send the paperwork right out for you. It's actually easier than having a license yourself (trust me on that one).

The cost? Just $15 for long guns and $20 for most handguns, regardless of price.

I'd only began to appreciate how good I'd had it when Jim had to close up his shop for a year (that National Guard stuff can really eat up your time). All my alternatives were uniformly more expensive and less convenient. I practically stopped buying guns the whole time, and believe me, that's just no way for a man to live.

Now Jim's back, and so am I. Last week I scoured the internet and found exactly the rifle I wanted, purchased it from a total stranger on AR15.com, and had it in my hands for hundreds of dollars less than I could have had it anywhere else.

It's nice - almost too nice - to be able to visit websites like this and this and just order what you want over the phone. Then, if you have any cash left over, just go here, dial in the amount you want to spend, and have at it.

You'll be broke, but happy. And very well armed.

And that's the important thing.

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Until now, the only criticisms I've heard against the Swiftvets were ad hominum attacks on their credibility. Nobody had actually addressed the factual basis of their claims.

Finally, we have something real that casts some legitmate doubt on their story. It's a good point, too, and it's worth a closer look.

First, a little background. John Kerry earned both his Bronze Star and third Purple Heart during the incident where he rescued a fallen soldier from the water after a nearby boat had been damaged by an underwater mine. Kerry's version of the story is that he was wounded by the blast of the mine, that the boats ran a three-mile gauntlet of fire on the way home, and most importantly, they were being shot at while the rescue took place. It's important because Kerry's rescue of the man "under fire" is the basis for his decoration. (You ordinarily don't get rewarded for fishing a guy out of the water after he's fallen off your own boat, and in fact, you'd probably face court-martial if you didn't).

The Swiftvets dispute Kerry's version. They point out that Kerry was not hurt by the mine, but had accidentally wounded himself hours earlier; that the boats were not fired on for miles on the way home, and that they were not even under fire at the time of the rescue.

This third point is now in doubt. The surviving witnesses have always disagreed about it, some insisting they were fired upon, others certain that they were not. Now, a document emerges that may help to settle this point.

Larry Thurlow, a Swiftvet and vocal Kerry critic, also earned a Bronze Star that day. Thurlow's citation has surfaced, and it, too, claims that Thurlow was under enemy fire at the time.

[These documents...] contain several references to "enemy small arms and automatic weapons fire" directed at "all units" of the five-boat flotilla. Thurlow won his own Bronze Star that day, and the citation praises him for providing assistance to a damaged Swift boat "despite enemy bullets flying about him."

Thurlow continues to insist that nobody was shooting at him.

Thurlow said he would consider his award "fraudulent" if coming under enemy fire was the basis for it. "I am here to state that we weren't under fire," he said.

I have not seen a link to any of these documents.

There are several ways to interpret this. Kerry supporters will certainly say that this proves Thurlow to be a liar and a fraud, and they we should doubt everything he has said; they are entitled to this view, too, at least with respect to this part of the story. Swiftvet supporters will point out that Thurlow insists didn't write the citation, and that it may have been based upon Kerry's report of the events.

I have read conflicting accounts of Thurlow's actions, but my impression is that he boarded the crippled Swiftboat, rescued a crewman who was trapped under the twin 50s, and led the effort to save the boat from sinking. I mention this because it bears directly on Thurlow's assertion that his award did not depend on the presence of enemy fire. I am no expert here, but I find this assertion credible.

I am less comfortable with the idea that Thurlow did not know his own citation conflicted with his version of events. This does cast doubt on his veracity, and I will be watching this story closely as it develops.

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I'd been convinced all along (correctly, as it turns out) that Kerry did not spend Christmas in Cambodia like he'd said. However, I've been willing to keep an open mind about the rest of it, acknowledging the possibility that Kerry might have actually gone into Cambodia with a CIA operative at another time. All the evidence suggests that this it was quite unlikely, but possible. Maybe the only exaggeration here was the date, and that's not the end of the world.

Now we find out that the Kerry campaign is reporting - get this - that yes, Kerry did go into Cambodia, but this time he was with the Navy Seals. Seals, CIA guys, what's the difference, right?

He's lying. There is no fucking way that story holds up. Every cheap-ass military fraud in the world has a story about the time he went on a secret mission with the Navy Seals.

Kerry is the worst sort of poseur. He's been caught dead to rights, and he's still lying about it, right now. I bet he still has that fucking hat with him, too.

I'm no vet, but I'm confident that military people won't look kindly on this sort of thing. They can smell a guy like this a mile off.

Veterans, and their families, are going to judge him very harshly for this, and rightly so. This election is close enough that these folks will make a decisive difference.

Up until now, John Kerry was just a man who was second-best for the job. Now, he's a slimeball. I hope he gets crucified for this.

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Anybody remember this?

New York Post, August 10, 2004

WASHINGTON - John Kerry's claim that he was ordered to conduct an illegal combat mission in Cambodia on Christmas Day in 1968 is made up, Navy vets charge in a new book.

The veterans say Kerry "would have been seriously disciplined or court-martialed had he gone there."

Three of the vets quoted in the book were part of the five-member crew that served on Kerry's own boat: Bill Zaldonis, Steven Hatch and Steve Gardner.

They deny they or their boat were ever in Cambodia.

Turns out they were right. Kerry did lie, repeatedly, about spending Christmas in Camboida. The Kerry campaign now admits it, on the record:

JOHNSON: John Kerry has said on the record that he had a mistaken recollection earlier. He talked about a combat situation on Christmas Eve 1968 which at one point he said occurred in Cambodia. He has since corrected the recorded to say it was some place on a river near Cambodia and he is certain that at some point subsequent to that he was in Cambodia. My understanding is that he is not certain about that date.

[Note: The word "near" in this case means fifty-eight miles away!]

I'd like to be clear; I am using the words "lie" and "repeatedly" very carefully. In each case, his presence in Cambodia - not near it - was the central point of the story. See for yourself:

Congessional Record, March 27 1986

Mr. President, I remember Christmas of 1968 sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia. I remember what it was like to be shot at by Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge and Cambodians, and have the President of the United States telling the people that I was not there; the tropps were not in Cambodia.

I have that memory which seared - seared in me.

--

States News Service, June 24, 1992:

Kerry, who served in Vietnam on a gunboat in the Mekong Delta from 1968 to 1969, said he was involved in a "black mission" near Cambodia. "On Christmas Eve of 1968, I was on a gunboat in a firefight that wasn't supposed to be taking place," Kerry recalled. "I thought, if I'm killed here, what will my family be told?"

--

Boston Herald, October 14, 1979

On more than one occasion, I, like Martin Sheen in "Apocalypse Now," took my patrol boat into Cambodia

In fact, I remember spending Christmas Day of 1968 five miles across the Cambodian border being shot at by our South Vietnamese Allies who were drunk and celebrating Christmas. The absurdity of almost being killed by our own allies in a country in which President Nixon claimed there were no American troops was very real. But nowhere in "Apocalypse Now" did I sense that kind of absurdity.

It gets better.

The story about his imaginary secret agent friend who gave him his lucky hat is still in play. Kerry has never said when his secret missions actually occured, but he has now specified that it was after Christmas '68. That's important, because that places him on Swift Boat 94, with the guys who claim that he never went to Cambodia at all.

Two of his five crewmates won't discuss it.

The remaining three say he's lying.

His entire surviving chain of command says he's lying.

The only guy saying that John Kerry went to Cambodia is John Kerry, and we've already caught him lying about it once.

Why not tell us when it happened? Why won't he release his records and clear the whole thing up?

I think we all know the answer to that question.

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About a year ago, The Washington Post ran a very favorable piece on Kerry, then campaigning for the nomination. It ends with this:

A close associate hints: There's a secret compartment in Kerry's briefcase. He carries the black attache everywhere. Asked about it on several occasions, Kerry brushed it aside. Finally, trapped in an interview, he exhaled and clicked open his case.

"Who told you?" he demanded as he reached inside. "My friends don't know about this."

The hat was a little mildewy. The green camouflage was fading, the seams fraying.

"My good luck hat," Kerry said, happy to see it. "Given to me by a CIA guy as we went in for a special mission in Cambodia."

Kerry put on the hat, pulling the brim over his forehead. His blue button-down shirt and tie clashed with the camouflage. He pointed his finger and raised his thumb, creating an imaginary gun. He looked silly, yet suddenly his campaign message was clear: Citizen-soldier. Linking patriotism to public service. It wasn't complex after all; it was Kerry.

He smiled and aimed his finger: "Pow."

Here's the kicker - Kerry was only there for four months, and most of his shipmates say he was never in Cambodia at all:

Three of the vets quoted in the book were part of the five-member crew that served on Kerry's own boat: Bill Zaldonis, Steven Hatch and Steve Gardner.

They deny they or their boat were ever in Cambodia. The other two crewmen declined to be interviewed for the book, "Unfit for Command," which raises questions about Kerry's military service.

If it turns out that Kerry was never in Cambodia at all, he is in very serious trouble. Carrying around a good luck hat from an imaginary secret-agent friend would just be too much.

Seriously, this is the kind of thing that can finish him.

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[Note: The links were bad, sorry. All fixed now]

I haven't said much about Kerry in Vietnam, because, quite frankly, it was thirty fucking years ago and I don't really care. It's what he says and does now that matters most to me.

That changed this morning.

Kerry claims that he spent Christmas 1968 in Cambodia, getting shot at while the president was "telling the American people that I was not there". This is "memory which is seared -- seared -- in me" and helped form his "deep mistrust of U.S. government pronouncements". He even told this story on the floor of the United States Senate.

It turns out that Kerry wasn't there. He made the whole story up!

The proof is right here, plain as day. I just don't see any way to spin something like this. It's reprehensible.

I could let it go if he's only told these stories in private conversation, or if it was just a matter of exaggerating his experience, but this clearly crosses the line into outright fraud. A man who publicly lies about a combat experience that never happened and tells you how it changed his whole life is lower than whale shit.

As recently as July 7, 2004, Michael Kranish of the Boston Globe repeated Kerry's Christmas in Cambodia story on FOX News Channel's Hannity & Colmes, indicating that it was a critical turning point in Kerry's life. Kranish had no knowledge, even after his extensive study of Kerry, that he was simply repeating a total fabrication by Kerry.

It's worse than offensive. It's pathetic.

Maybe he can somehow prove he really was there... if he can, I'll not only apologize publicly and profusely, I'll even vote for him myself out of sheer contrition. But somehow, I don't think that's going to happen.

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