The gloves come off

Really it was inevitable. The candidate who frames every issue through the prism of Vietnam has decided to question the military record of President Bush. Memo to John Kerry: taking advice from Terry McAuliffe is the certain path to doom.

But if Dubya’s record in the Air National Guard is open for analysis, surely we can talk about John Kerry’s mental condition of post-traumatic stress syndrome. Here’s Teresa Heinz in June 2002 on her husband’s cold-sweat nightmares:

When Kerry is asked about the nightmares that haunted his sleep for years after he returned from Vietnam, he shrugs. "I don't think I've had a nightmare in a long time," he says. But then Heinz begins to mimic Kerry having a Vietnam nightmare.

"Down! Down, down!" she yells, patting her hands down on her auburn hair.

After 9/11, the “training” videos for Al-Qaeda surfaced with a smug Osama Bin Laden noting the lessons of Somalia and Bosnia: if you hit the Americans hard enough they will run away. Do we want to risk another president so battle fatigued by his life-defining experience, that he’s unwilling to strike back at our enemies for fear of creating another Vietnam? Would a President Kerry [shudder] have backed away from a war with the Taliban in Afghanistan? Would he ask for permission from France?

Now I’m starting to have nightmares.