“[Kerrey] said his squad was fired upon at night, that it returned fire and that children and women died. At the same time, he conceded that their bodies were found grouped together in the middle of the tiny village of Thanh Phong in a manner suggestive of an execution… Asked if the grouping of the bodies contradicted his account of a firefight with an enemy force, Kerrey, a former candidate for the 1992 presidential nomination, nodded. “I can’t explain,” he said. “I do not have an explanation for that.”” – The Washington Post. Do we really need to know anything more?
HIMSELF: The extraordinary ordinariness of George W. Bush. See the new TRB, posted opposite.
TRUTH PATROL II: “It’s not the drug cocktails that are going to enable us to overcome this major, major social problem,” says Dr. Fred Sai, Ghana’s top AIDS expert. “It can only be done by education, preventive health measures and creating better living standards. I am afraid that the big U.N. conference on AIDS in June is going to get hijacked by this clamor for drugs, drugs, drugs, when the answer is prevention and building better societies.” – from Tom Friedman’s excellent column on Africa’s AIDS crisis, the first piece of common sense on the subject yet to appear in that increasingly ideological newspaper.
BEGALA AWARD WINNER: This week it goes to the editorial board of the New York Times for the following ludicrous sentence about the Bob Kerrey scandal: “It is a story that – with its conflicting evidence, undeniable carnage and tragic aftermath – sums up the American experience in Vietnam and the madness of a war that then, as now, seemed to lack any rationale except the wrecking of as many lives as possible on both sides.” As Mickey Kaus pointed out, even opponents of the Vietnam War might concede that those who favored it were not simply seeking “to wreck as many lives as possible.” The regime that accomplished that was the Hanoi dictatorship that prevailed. Ask the boat-people.
The Dish 