Bush, Kerry and Vietnam

So, I guess we have to talk about the "Swift Boats veteran's for truth" thing. Some republican tools who "served with John Kerry" i.e. they were somewhere in Vietnam the same time Kerry was, are putting out a bunch of lies such as Kerry didn't earn his medals and so on. The Sunday Morning talk shows were filled with this stuff. Now, I have been debating with friends as to whether this is really going to hurt Kerry and help Bush. After all, when the smoke clears most people will come away with the following facts:

Kerry = War Hero
Bush = Not so Much

So, a lot of people I talk to wonder if this is convincing anybody. I think we might not be understanding the tactic. This attack is more about reinforcing conservatives for Bush than convincing anybody. I got this via Political Animal a piece in the Weekly Standard.

Republicans have no such luck this time, and so they scramble to reassure themselves that they nevertheless are doing the right thing, voting against a war hero. The simplest way to do this is to convince themselves that the war hero isn't really a war hero. If sufficient doubt about Kerry's record can be raised, we can vote for Bush without remorse. But the calculations are transparently desperate. Reading some of the anti-Kerry attacks over the last several weeks, you might conclude that this is the new conservative position: A veteran who volunteered for combat duty, spent four months under fire in Vietnam, and then exaggerated a bit so he could go home early is the inferior, morally and otherwise, of a man who had his father pull strings so he wouldn't have to go to Vietnam in the first place.

Needless to say, the proposition will be a hard sell in those dim and tiny reaches of the electorate where voters have yet to make up their minds. Indeed, it's far more likely that moderates and fence-sitters will be disgusted by the lengths to which partisans will go to discredit a rival. But this anti-Kerry campaign is not designed to win undecided votes. It's designed to reassure uneasy minds.

Hard-core pro-military Republicans cannot vote against a war hero without their heads exploding. They need lies about Kerry in order to justify themselves. These guys are fueled by an undying rage. They have to hate Kerry, 'cause they will never love Bush.