Er, not those old tricks - the Angolan pepper pot might cut him off without a dime! I mean his all time favorite trick of lying about his Vietnam service and subsequent disservice, now with the help of some goofy organization called "the Patriot Project" and brown noser Kate Zernike at the NY Times. Thomas Lipscomb applies the clue bat in The Truth, John Kerry, and The New York Times:
Kate Zernike's story on the front page of the Memorial Day Sunday New York Times, "Kerry Pressing Swift Boat Case Long After Loss," is an unfortunate reminder of the Times's embarrassingly poor coverage of Kerry in the face of the Swift Boat Veterans' for Truth charges in the 2004 election. Now as then, the Times acts as if the issues involved were between Kerry's latest representations of his record and the "unsubstantiated" charges of the Swift Boat group. The Times used the term "unsubstantiated" more than twenty times during its election coverage and continues to make no discernable effort to examine any of the charges in detail.If ole Kate is buying the magic hat story, one can't help but wonder how many New York bridges she owns, but follow the link and you'll be certain that she's the biggest owner of real estate in New York City. Sticking with the hat, though:
But there was plenty of evidence in the work of other news organizations that some of the charges, and the Kerry military records themselves, were worth examining seriously. I found numerous problems with Kerry's records on his website in my own reporting for the Chicago Sun-Times: a Silver Star with a V for valor listed that the Navy stated it had never awarded in the history of the US Navy, three separate medal citations with some heavy revisions in Kerry's favor signed by former Navy Secretary John Lehman who denied ever signing them, to name two.
Additionally I found by examining the message traffic with experts that when the Swift Boat Vets charged that Kerry had written the Bay Hap after action report, by which he received his bronze star and the third purple heart that was his ticket out of Vietnam, the evidence showed that it was indeed probably written by Kerry himself. Zernike seems to have totally missed this in her reporting. Zernike is content to refer to Kerry's claim that "original reports pulled from the naval archives contradict the charge that he drafted his own accounts of various incidents," none of which she cites, provides, or analyzes.
Zernike appears to have made no effort to look at any record besides listing Kerry's latest assertions with obligatory quotes from the usual Swiftie suspects to provide "balance." She doesn't appear to be aware of the hilarious inconsistency of the Kerry hat story she recites dutifully as if this was the very first time the hat had appeared in print.
It is time we all got to see a picture of the famous Kerry "lucky hat," rather than another account by the latest star-struck journalist.I'm curious about that too and wonder why a snap of the this marvel hasn't surfaced yet. I'm guessing that it looks like this fetching number offered by Communists for Kerry:
Update: There's more at Power Line.
