WHY ARE WE TALKING ABOUT VIETNAM? Because, as Matt Welch writes, Kerry’s war policy is all Vietnam and no Iraq:

Ever since the Democratic Convention in Boston last month, the John-John ticket has been grumbling about having to fend off accusations that would-be president John Kerry previously fudged vivid details of his war record in Vietnam and (most controversially) Cambodia. There is indeed considerable merit to the notion that a nation at war should be focusing on 2004 instead of 1968, but if Kerry’s convention performance was any guide, his go-to selling point for taking the reigns of the “war on terror” is the fact that he was piloting swift-boats up the Mekong back when Osama bin Laden was busy trying to grow his first beard. . . .

“How to handle Iraq is the most important question facing the president,” wrote a disappointed Matthew Yglesias of the liberal American Prospect magazine, just after Kerry finished, “and he just punted.”

But he was in Vietnam!