Nancy Scola: With Enemies Like These

August 4, 2004

With Enemies Like These

Oh goody. A thoughtful new book on John Kerry from John O'Neill. Love this guy -- I dug this up from my archives from the last time he was in the news:

John O'Neill is a Vietnam veteran and, as a recent CNN article tells us, "a man who served in the same Navy unit as Sen. John Kerry." O'Neill has been spending his time of late going around saying thoughtful things like: "[Kerry] couldn't tie the shoes of some of the people in Coastal Division 11." Keep on reading that same article, and you get to the description of O'Neill as "a Houston lawyer who joined the Navy's Coastal Division 11 two months after the future senator left Vietnam." Quick reread and, yes, two months after Kerry had left Vietnam. As a fellow veteran, O'Neill might be in a position to comment on Kerry's actions as something of a war protester after he was back in the States. But having not actually witness the man do one single thing for one single second in theater -- you know, saving lives, taking lives, during the actual, you know, war -- seems like it might make it difficult to come to the conclusion that "I saw some war heroes ... John Kerry is not a war hero." (From what I saw of the television coverage of this, I had thought the two served together. Either my bad or Matt Lauer's.) (April 22, 2004)

Starting in 1971 under the loving guidance of Nixon aid/former inmate Chuck Colson -- a man who has describes himself at that time as "incapable of humanitarian thought" -- this guy has been on a more than 30 year mission to bring down John Kerry. I'm not sure whose word I should take here -- that of O'Neill and this reputable Vets Against Kerry group or that of Max Cleland, John McCain, and the, oh, dozen or so men from Kerry's swift boat crew who stood with him on that stage in Boston. (Kos has more on who this O'Neill guy's friends are.)

7:06 PM |

August 4, 2004

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