I’LL BE ON HUGH HEWITT’S SHOW shortly. Listen live online here.
UPDATE: Something I said there that bears repeating — the reason why the Christmas-in-Cambodia story is getting the media cold-shoulder, and why what SwiftVet coverage there is focuses on the medals, etc., is that the Christmas-in-Cambodia story is clear, and has already been proven false. It’s easy to understand, and that makes it much more devastating for Kerry.
The medal stuff is complex, and can be spun in a way that makes people’s eyes glaze over. So that’s what we’ll mostly get, along with “political” stories that will treat the SwiftVets stuff as partisan hackery in a way that Michael Moore never gets treated by the same outlets.
ANOTHER UPDATE: And here’s an example, in the “budget” from the New York Times, advising affiliate papers of what’s coming:
ANTI-KERRY-ADS (Undated) – The story of how swift boat veterans with a grievance were found by Republicans looking to tarnish Kerry’s image, and soon came to be running ads, writing books and blanketing cable television in a modern day tale of the creation of a political attack machine. But some of the veterans have recanted their stories or made charges that military records prove untrue. A look at how the veterans were organized and what they claim. By Kate Zernike and Jim Rutenberg.
With photos and a graphic.
Editors, will move in both full and abridged forms.
Will it say that the Cambodia story has already panned out? I doubt it.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Paul Shelton emails:
Looks like two weeks after having “fled the scene” of the swiftboat vets story, the big media is finally returning to pull Kerry out of the water. O’Neill was on CNN’s Lou Dobbs show and then on Newshour with Jim Lehrer. I guess Kerry’s apublic acknowledgement of the story today in front of the firefighters gave the coded signal for the big media to finally return to the scene to save him.
Heh. Anybody know if Lehrer mentioned Cambodia?
And maybe someone should look into the Kerry reminiscences from the crewmembers of the U.S.S. Gridley too. (Note — I haven’t personally verified the authenticity of these, and my lunch hour is over. I suppose that would be easy for bigshot journalists, though — but according to the page, at least, there have been interviews but not much coverage.)