Questions of character

The unraveling of a presidential campaign? Or the destruction of the last obstacle to politically successful lying? Last week the key election story changed from a debate about 35-year-old minutiae to whether a potential president imbeds in his brain a fantasy life.

When Unfit for Command, a searing indictment of John Kerry's Vietnam service, hit bookstores in mid-August and also became the top-selling book at both Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com, Kerry staffers back-peddled. One of the book's charges is that Sen. Kerry's frequent claim to have spent a fighting Christmas in Cambodia in 1968 is a lie, even though he said in 1986, "I have that memory which is seared—seared—in me."

In interviews and speeches over the years, Sen. Kerry added intriguing (but apparently fantasy) details involving a CIA agent and delivering weapons to anti-Communist forces. Unfit says the "seared" memory is all smoke. Kerry crewmates denied ever going to Cambodia. His commanding officer said the trip never happened. Internet journalists jumped on the discrepancies, tracking down different Kerry iterations of the incident. Hugh Hewitt, Powerlineblog, and Instapundit advanced the story. The story, and the Kerry campaign's acknowledgment that the Christmas Eve memory was mistaken, did not make newspapers at first, but columnists Michael Barone and Robert Novak picked it up. Editorials appeared in The Wall Street Journal, the Rocky Mountain News, and the Houston Chronicle. The Chronicle noted, "The same news media that demanded George W. Bush release his National Guard records—and went over them with a microscope—have shown an appalling lack of interest in John Kerry's military service."