Steyn Boils It Down

In this Chicago Sun Times piece:

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.

i love that Halliburton analogy. And this too:

Thirty-five years on, having no appealing campaign themes, the senator decides to run for president on his biography. But for the last 20 years he's been a legislative non-entity. Before that, he was accusing his brave band of brothers of mutilation, rape and torture. He spent his early life at Swiss finishing school and his later life living off his wife's inheritance from her first husband. So, biography-wise, that leaves four months in Vietnam, which he talks about non-stop. That 1986 Senate speech is typical: It was supposed to be about Reagan policy in Central America, but like so many Kerry speeches and interviews somehow it winds up with yet another self-aggrandizing trip down memory lane.

Kerry's four brilliant months, so carefully crafted by him over the course of thirty-five years, are now disintegrating into his own "four more [months] of hell."

Re: Kerry as a "legislative non-entity," allow me to recycle an old post of mine, about Clinton's regard for that great senator from Massachussetts, John Kerry. Bill didn't have much to say, in fact.

Link via Mark at The Scrolldown.