Democrats peddle their own unique truth

August 15, 2004

BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST





'My truth is that I am a gay American,'' announced Gov. James McGreevey to
the people of New Jersey last Thursday.



That's such an exquisitely contemporary formulation: ''my'' truth. Once upon
a time, there was only ''the'' truth. Now everyone gets his own -- or, as
the governor put it, ''One has to look deeply into the mirror of one's soul
and decide one's unique truth in the world.'' For Jim McGreevey, his truth
is that he's a gay American; for others in the Garden State, the truth about
McGreevey is that he's a corrupt sexual harasser who put his lover on the
state payroll in a critical homeland security post, and whose I-am-what-I-am
confessional is a tactical feint that distracts the media sob sisters from
the fact that, as his final service to the Democratic Party, he's resigned
in such a way as to deny the people an early vote on his successor.

We'll see whose truth prevails in the fullness of time.

In politics, it's helpful if whatever ''unique truth'' the consultants have
run past the focus groups bears at least a passing relationship to the real,
actual truth -- not the whole truth, but at least a grain of it. That was
what was so ingenious about Bill Clinton's ''60 Minutes'' appearance in
1992. He didn't come clean -- he was, as usual, full of it -- but he set in
motion his designated ''unique truth'' -- flawed but human. It was designed
to get him past Gennifer, but it wound up also getting him past Paula,
Monica, Kathleen, Juanita. . . . Whatever goods you got on him, it fit ''his
truth'' as he sold it to us on CBS that day. As his attorney Cheryl Mills
put it during the impeachment trial, Bill Clinton, along with Jefferson,
Kennedy and Martin Luther King, ''made human errors, but they struggled to
do humanity good . . .''

Which brings us to John Kerry. What is his unique truth? In 1986, on the
floor of the United States Senate, he said:

''I remember Christmas of 1968, sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia. I remember
what it was like to be shot at by the Vietnamese and the Khmer Rouge and
Cambodians, and the president of the United States telling the American
people that I was not there, the troops were not in Cambodia. I have that
memory, which is seared -- seared -- in me.''

Though the seared senator peddled this searing memory for a quarter-century,
it had evidently been seared into him pretty haphazardly. It turns out at
Christmas 1968 he wasn't in Cambodia but was instead 55 miles away at Sa
Dec, South Vietnam. So the Kerry campaign's begun riffling hurriedly through
its Sears Rowback catalog for more or less watertight back-pedaling of the
story: They now say that ''many times he was on or near the Cambodian
border,'' which is true in the sense that 80 percent of Canadians live on or
near the American border. But most folks in Vancouver don't claim to be
living in the Greater Seattle area.

Earlier, senior Kerry spokesman Michael Meehan told ABC News: ''The Mekong
Delta consists of the border between Cambodia and Vietnam, so on Christmas
Eve in 1968, he was in fact on patrol ... in the Mekong Delta between
Cambodia and Vietnam.'' For a crowd of ostentatious multilateralists, they
can't seem to hold the map the right way up: The Mekong River isn't the
border between Cambodia and Vietnam; it cuts through the heart of Cambodia
and then runs through Vietnam to the sea.

But this question isn't about geographical degrees of latitude so much as
psychological ones. Here's the real reason Lt. Kerry wasn't spending Dec.
24, 1968, on a secret mission in Cambodia: On the previous day, Dec. 23, the
U.S. government finally secured the release, after a five-month diplomatic
stand-off, of 11 Americans whose U.S. Army utility landing craft had made a
navigational error and strayed into Cambodian waters. Prince Sihanouk had
rejected U.S. apologies and threatened to try the men under Cambodian law.
It's unlikely, 24 hours after their release, anyone in Washington was
thinking, ''Hey, we need to send that hotshot Kerry in there.''

So what are we to make of Sen. Kerry's self-seared 30-year-old false memory
of Christmas in Cambodia with its vast accumulation of precise details? Of
being shot at by the Khmer Rouge (unlikely in 1968) and of South Vietnamese
troops drunkenly celebrating Christmas (as only devout Buddhists know how)?

It's not about dates and places. For Kerry, his Yuletide mission was an
epiphany: the moment when he realized his government was lying to the people
about what was going on. This is the turning point, the moment that set the
young Kerry on the path from brave young war volunteer to fierce anti-war
activist.

And it turns out it's total bunk.

Thirty-five years on, having no appealing campaign themes, the senator
decides to run for president on his biography. But for the last 20 years
he's been a legislative non-entity. Before that, he was accusing his brave
band of brothers of mutilation, rape and torture. He spent his early life at
Swiss finishing school and his later life living off his wife's inheritance
from her first husband. So, biography-wise, that leaves four months in
Vietnam, which he talks about non-stop. That 1986 Senate speech is typical:
It was supposed to be about Reagan policy in Central America, but like so
many Kerry speeches and interviews somehow it winds up with yet another
self-aggrandizing trip down memory lane.

A handful of Kerry's ''band of brothers'' are traveling around with his
campaign. Most of the rest, including a majority of his fellow swift boat
commanders and 254 swiftees from Kerry's Coastal Squadron One, are opposed
to his candidacy. That is an amazing ratio and, if snot-nosed American media
grandees don't think there's a story there, maybe they ought to consider
another line of work. To put it in terms they can understand, imagine if
Dick Cheney campaigned for the presidency on the basis of his time at
Halliburton, and a majority of the Halliburton board and 80 percent of the
stockholders declared he was unfit for office. More to the point, on the
swift vets' first major allegation -- Christmas in Cambodia -- the Kerry
campaign has caved.

Who is John Kerry? What is his ''unique truth?'' Consider this vignette from
New Hampshire primary season as retailed in a recent 8,000-word yawneroo
puff piece in the New Yorker:

'' 'He'll often thrash around in the night,' the filmmaker George Butler,
who is one of Kerry's oldest friends, told me. 'He smashed up a lamp in my
house in New Hampshire, in the bedroom where he was staying. Most Vietnam
veterans go through this.'''

''Most?'' Whether or not John Kerry ever entered Cambodia, he seems unable,
psychologically, to exit it.




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