MICKEY KAUS has much more on the SwiftVets story, and reports: “Respectable big-time journalist friends who met with the anti-Kerry vets recently found them a lot more credible than expected.”

And he has this to say about the New York Times:

I do know that if freedom of speech means anything it means that a group of citizens can get together to bring up this sort of charge against a presidential candidate, subject to the laws of libel. But read this New York Times editorial. . . . The Times thinks the ad should be stopped because you just shouldn’t be able to make such “outlandish” independent charges in a campaign. They’re against the speech, not the financing. Like Kerry, they’re trying to come up with a “process” reason that avoids the inconveniently messy issue of truth. But their process reason–an attack on “independent” criticism per se–seems particularly dangerous.

Indeed. But that “inconveniently messy issue of truth” is getting harder to avoid.