* If we know anything at all, it is that the puzzle of when and under what circumstances John Kerry was discharged from the Navy will never incite the curiosity of any newspaper more elite than the little known New York Sun. BeldarBlog seems to have all of the necessary data, but I have yet to see an explanation that makes sense. Lieutenant Kerry’s Navy Reserve commitment ended in 1972. In the normal course of events, he would have received his discharge then. Instead, it came in 1978 under a procedure used for involuntary separations, and the panel that disposed of the matter was convened by an (apparently highly unusual) Presidential order.
I can account for most of the facts. Suppose that Kerry asked for a discharge in 1972 and was informed that, on account of conduct unbecoming an officer (such as meetings with enemy officials in Paris and false war crimes accusations), he would be mustered out under other than honorable conditions. He could then have withdrawn his request and remained in the Inactive Reserve until and unless the Navy took action to force him out. That would account for his remaining nominally on the rolls for six additional years. Why, though, when President Carter, presumptively friendly to war resisters (his first official action was amnesty for draft dodgers) took office, didn’t Lieutenant Kerry just resubmit his discharge request and exit in the normal way? There is probably a mundane, bureaucratic reason. Learning it isn’t vastly important, but (you’ve heard this before) can’t reporters who pore over every scrap of paper, genuine or forged, relating to George W. Bush in the National Guard bring themselves once in a while to ask questions about the anomalies in the Democratic candidate’s career?
* Happy Birthday to Margaret Thatcher, 79 years old today.
* On a sad note, military historian David Chandler died last Sunday at age 70. His magisterial The Campaigns of Napoleon is the one book that everybody with a serious interest in the Napoleonic Wars has read.
* The Daily Telegraph reports that the murdered children of Beslan have a fitting memorial:
One of Russia’s leading icon artists has painted a 3ft-high rendering of the children who died in the Beslan school siege last month.
Mikhail Osipenko, who lives and works in St Petersburg, painted the icon as part of a commemoration to coincide with the end of the traditional Orthodox 40-day mourningperiod. . . .
The icon is based on the Babes of Bethlehem which commemorates the slaughter of the innocents, King Herod’s murder of the children after Christ was born. It depicts white-robed children, black devils and a crying Virgin Mary. The Caucasus mountains can be seen in the background.
The icon will be kept in a local monastery until the completion of a church which is to be built in time for the first anniversary of the gun battle that left more than 300 dead, half of them children.
May the Lord God remember them in His Kingdom.
* The debate? Oh, that. I suppose that “victory” is in the eye of the beholder in these affairs. The media will do all that they can to cover all eyes with a pink gauze, just as they did after each of the other encounters. They’ve always succeeded in shaping a perception that the President did worse, and his opponent better, than was evident to my vision. I won’t waste my pixels grumbling and will second the Kerry Spot’s verdict:
John Kerry came across as an old, tired, worn out, stretched-out Leftist Tree Spirit belched forth by the fiery pits of Massachusetts liberalism. Despite citing Ronald Reagan so frequently that one might think he had a nervous tic, his answers made clear that a President Kerry would chart the country on a course further to the left than Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, and LBJ. We know what we’ve got in George W. Bush. Conservative most of the time, moderate when he doesn’t have the votes; a guy who may make mistakes, but you’ll always know where he stands.
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