The Wall Street Journal editorial page criticizes Kerry’s Christmas fantasy from ‘68 in a piece by Robert Pollock (try bugmenot.com if the registration hassle bugs you). His comments on the fairy-tale Cambodian holiday itself are good, but it’s disappointing that he feels it necessary to trivialize the contentions of the Swifties (though to be fair, he attempts to dump Rasmussen and the other of Kerry’s hired “band” into the “doesn’t matter” bin with them). He writes:

Both sides strike me as sincere, but eyewitness accounts of fast-moving and stressful situations like combat are too unreliable for there to be much hope of getting at the “truth” here.

I have my own ideas about the two sides’ relevant sincerity, but his comments about eyewitness accounts of combat are true. And were they relevant to the most serious of the allegations in Unfit for Command, then I’d agree with him. But the (continuing) problem for those who wish to pretend that the book’s allegations are somehow beneath them is that they are not disputes over what happened in “fast-mosting and stressful situations like combat”, but rather accusations that stories of combat and stress were invented in order to (1) bolster a young radical power-seeker’s dossier for his planned political career, and (2) to get that same young anti-war radical a quick ticket back home to greener pastures.

In short, this ain’t about conflicting accounts of who shot who in the midst of a pitched battle; they’re very well-document allegations of cold-blooded fraud perpetrated over a period of months in a variety of eerily similar non-”situations”. And we can’t ignore that. You, me, everybody in the U.S., deserves an answer.

That griping aside, it’s still delightful to see the WSJ raise its hoary head and notice that the stench is becoming unbearable in Denmark (so to speak), and that its source seems to be the very heart of the Kerry campaign.