Hugh Hewitt is replaying the show from Tuesday

when he aired Kerry's testimony from 1971 to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which one of his leftie callers dubbed the "Gettysburg Address" for the Vietnam War.

It's interesting that this tape has so much more impact than just reading a transcript. There is such earnestness in his voice, such contempt and bitterness that it's hard to imagine it being just a stunt. This is a person, like Bill Clinton, who's basic impulse will be to minimize acts of war, to deny threats to our homeland, who believes that our troops were and are depraved and degraded by their service.

I wrote to Hugh:

As I listen to him, I feel that it doesn't matter much that 33 years have gone by. His campaign right now reveals the same kind of shallowness. The kid on this tape is a boob, an effete Ivy Leaguer who thinks his privileges just materialized out of thin air. If this were the Revolutionary War, Kerry would be demanding that the Congress in Philadephia be rounded up as traitors.

He mentions a story I've heard, about an American Indian who he says told him that he used to watch westerns on TV and cheer for the Cavalry, and then equated it with what we were doing to the Vietnamese. It's a powerful trope, but it doesn't hold up. We know now that pulling out and leaving the South Vietnamese to the tender mercies of the Communists did horrendous damage to tens of thousands of people who had trusted us. We know now what Pol Pot was like.

And we know now what living under Saddam was like.

Hearing Kerry denouncing our troops and complaining that it wasn't worth the fight, fills me with a cold revulsion for this creep. He is so full of selfrighteous indignation, I have to wonder whether he was being dishonest when he voted against driving Saddam out of Kuwait, or when he voted for war one year ago. He can't have it both ways, and he can't hide his yellow wizened soul behind all the medals there are in the world. Nobody who sees this country the way he describes it is fit to hold any office whatsoever, let alone Senator and, heaven forbid, President.