The frying pan begins to sizzle, and Sen. Kerry's getting seared, seared

In Monday's Wall Street Journal, readers will find Robert L. Pollock's op-ed entitled "Holiday in Cambodia:  The most damning testimony on John Kerry in Vietnam has come from John Kerry."  Mr. Pollock declines to weigh in on most of the disputes between the SwiftVets and the Kerry camp:

Both sides strike me as sincere, but eyewitness accounts of fast-moving and stressful situations like combat are too unreliable for there to be much hope of getting at the "truth" here.

With this, I simply disagree.  One can and indeed should make allowances for differences in recollections, and one must admit that even were there agreement on all of the underlying facts and circumstances, men and women of good faith and good intentions could still reach contrary opinions.

But the process of gathering information — not just subjective and old recollections, but documents — is far from over.  And with due respect to Mr. Pollock, he's behind the learning curve, I suspect, as to just how much evidence has in fact already been gathered.  He doesn't mention, for example, whether he's read John O'Neill's just released book, Unfit for Command.  I haven't read it yet either — still waiting on Amazon.com, like so many others — but I think I'd like to give it a close look before throwing up my hands and saying, "Eh, who can tell?"

Still, Mr. Pollock must be commended for grasping — and relating clearly and briefly, in a mainstream media publication — the huge significance of the Christmas in Cambodia story, on which the Kerry camp is in clear retreat, and is likely to have to retreat farther:

[T]he political uses to which Mr. Kerry would later put his Vietnam experience are certainly fair game for criticism. Which brings up Mr. Kerry's claim — repeated in at least three different decades, and on the floor of the Senate —that he spent Christmas Eve of 1968 not in Vietnam but in Cambodia. He obviously considered it a point of some significance, since he used it to impugn the integrity of those who waged the Vietnam War.

This is how he described it to the Boston Herald in 1979: "I remember spending Christmas Eve of 1968 five miles across the Cambodian border being shot at by our South Vietnamese allies....  The absurdity of almost being killed by our own allies in a country in which President Nixon claimed there were no American troops was very real."

In 1986 Mr. Kerry argued on the Senate floor against U.S. support for the Nicaraguan contras, again citing the 1968 Christmas in Cambodia and "the president of the United States telling the American people I was not there; the troops were not in Cambodia. I have that memory which is seared — seared — in me." In a 1992 interview with the Associated Press the story came back: "By Christmas 1968, part of Kerry's patrol extended across the border of South Vietnam into Cambodia."

Trouble is, the person who appears to have been wrong here about Mr. Kerry's location was not the president — who was Lyndon Johnson, not Nixon, by the way — but Mr. Kerry himself. His commanding officers all testify to this fact, as do men who were on his boat at the time. And so now, reluctantly, does the Kerry campaign.

Even if the whole kerfluffle were to magically disappear right now — and it won't — the Christmas in Cambodia story is going to change some votes.  The effect will not be among the committed Angry Left, the dedicated Anybody-but-Bush crowd, but among some Gore 2000 voters — and some probably also some disillusioned Bush 2000 voters — who still remember 9/11 and who aren't quite sure whether Kerry's got the right stuff to lead the Global War on Terrorists.  The very same voters whom all that patriotism schtick at the Democratic National Convention was intended to influence are the same ones who are going to be muttering to themselves, "Wow.  That's really weird.  'Seared,' he said?  Twice?"  And some of those folks are going to conclude, "I don't think I can bring myself to vote for this drama queen to be Commander in Chief."

Captain Ed at Captain's Quarters and the good fellows at Power Line are continuing to gather and publish information on this controversy.  And PrestoPundit has a good aggregation of the latest news coverage as the ripples spread.  N.Z. Bear blogs about another major step toward mainstream media recognition of the Christmas in Cambodia story via Scott Canon's syndicated article for the Knight Ridder Newspapers chain.  McQ at QandO has a meaty review of Unfit for Command, and with his co-bloggers is also following media coverage of the controversy.  All of these blogs have multiple posts up, and they're updating frequently, so I highly recommend that if you follow my links to them, you also click up a level to their main pages for related posts.

I'm still betting on WaPo to be the first to swallow hard and dig in on the Christmas in Cambodia story, with NYT and LAT to trail them by a day or so.  This is going to be an interesting week.

Update (Mon Aug 16 @ 8:30am):  Jim Wooten of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution — himself a Vietnam veteran — has a similar op ed (registration req'd) today that runs through the Christmas in Cambodia story and then makes a broader comment about the SwiftVets' claims regarding Kerry:

Does it matter? It does to those he accused of committing atrocities.

The nation may be done with Vietnam, content to treat the era as a campaign backdrop, with no further interest in whether the atrocities Kerry alleges were commonplace.

But the two groups — the swift-boat veterans and other Vietnam veterans who feel wronged by his characterizations — have earned the right not to be dismissed as cranks and partisans, at least until they are fully heard.

(Hat-tip to InstaPundit).  Of course, they can't be "fully heard" until the mainstream media airs their contentions.  But Mr. Wooten's op-ed is yet another step in that direction.