Birth…Vietnam…today

John Hawkins of Right Wing News kicks off his analysis of Kerry’s speech thusly: “As I turned off Adam Sandler's "50 First Dates"…”

In that movie, there’s a character named “Ten-second Tom” who has short-term memory loss. His life is spent in ten-second bursts where he continuously forgets what happened only moments ago. It occurred to me that even Ten-second Tom would never be without the knowledge that John Kerry served in Vietnam.

For those of us with normal memories, it’s somewhat more difficult to remember if John Kerry did anything else:

Then, after this long rendition of his childhood, he tells us at length what it was like to serve in Vietnam for the four months that he was there. So far, so good.

But then he spent only about one minute talking about what he has done since.

And here’s The New Republic in “Apocalypse Kerry”

Regarding his own Vietnam, as opposed to the Hollywood production staged around him, Kerry asked his audience "to judge me by my record." The question has been asked before, but Kerry did not answer it in his speech: If his Vietnam service offers proof that he is "decisive," then why is it that for two decades Kerry has been "only an average Senator," as pro-Kerry columnist Al Hunt wrote in yesterday's Wall Street Journal? If his wartime feats prove that Kerry is "strong" on national security, then why did he oppose virtually every stand-out weapons system in the U.S. arsenal today, speechify against the first Gulf War and refuse to fund the second? Why, indeed, unless no correlation exists between his biography and his record?

Here’s David Frum:

John Kerry last night presented himself as the survivor of some kind of freak accident: Like a man waking up from a coma, he doesn’t seem able to remember anything he did between 1969 and September 11, 2001.

Finally, Crush Kerry has the historical reference breakdown.