Hugh Hewitt writes:

John Kerry's candidacy could have tried to avoid rekindling the old debate --it might not have worked, because of the anger now on display-- but the only way to have managed such a campaign successfully would have required both an apology for the things he said and a disciplined refusal to trade on his time in Vietnam, time marked both by bravery but also by very unusual circumstances and stories.

The rest of us don't have to be so circumspect about criticizing the CIC or the SecDef or the brass who ran the war in Vietnam. The more I learn about it, the more I think that it was LBJ's effort to fight a "sensitive" war, not allowing our troops to take it to the North where all the arms were coming from, that made it a quagmire, and our media served us very badly by allowing the myth that our troops were all depraved drug abusers and war criminals to spread so pervasively, but the fault was not in honoring our treaty obligations. It was in trying to fight a "limited" war without winning. We, both our people and our government, let our troops down, but Kerry when he came home became part of the problem, and he shouldn't be allowed to skip that part of his record. The Bush campaign is trying to focus on what Kerry's has done for the past 35 years, but it should know that it's a losing cause with the news media so rabidly against Bush.

I think that there's a lot of guilt behind all this anger, along with a lot of self-righteous hubris, and the press needs to be reminded that its job is to report not indoctrinate.