I rarely agree with dKos about anything anymore – which I, at least, regret; his technical blogging skills are worthy of respect – but I have to agree with him that this Kerry kerfuffle seemed counterintuitive. The very short version: a Boston Globe reporter took up the Senator’s offer on MTP to make his medical records available, only to get shot down. So, of course this became a news item all its very own. The latest news is that certain of his records will be going up – medal citations and so forth (the Yahoo! story has links; Kerry’s blog as yet doesn’t, as far as I can tell); the next push will be undoubtedly for the evaluations made by his superiors to be also made public, assuming that Kerry doesn’t do it on his own.
And believe you me, now that this story is up and running he might as well do it on his own. It’ll just save time in the long run; then again, so would have doing this from the start. Kos has no idea why Kerry would have hesitated at all: frankly, neither do I. A scandal from his military service would have shown up by now, surely; I don’t believe that there’s anything particularly scandalous in the unreleased records at all. All that hesitating did him was to arouse suspicion – no, not in Republicans; we’re already deeply paranoid and pathologically suspicious already, remember? But go reread Kos’ comment section and note how many Democrats were assuming that this meant that This Was A Bad Sign Of Something – and since the Something was undefined, they turned right around and started to define it. And, of course, a undefined percentage of that group probably won’t accept the official explanation, either. You can buy shenanigans like that, but not cheaply.
As I said: silly of him.
UPDATE: The Instapundit is passing along the suggestion that this might be rope-a-dope. Doesn’t feel like the right take on this, but it’s possible.
ANOTHER UPDATE: For the true wonk, Kerry’s medical military* records are now online here. That’s right, kids, I can’t think of anything better to do with my day off than to blog updates to old posts. Guess that makes me a really, really true wonk?
*Oops; thanks to Constant Reader Fredrik Nyman for the correction.
Kerry’s releasing the works. Note the article’s by Kit Seelye.
“Note the article’s by Kit Seelye.”
HAH! See? Even the Secret Masters agree with me. 🙂
Medical records? Don’t you mean military records? (The promise on MTP was for the military records, but he is also supposed to release his medical records).
Oops.
And may I add that Kos rocks. He is the object of more envy in the blog world for simply doing a great job both technically and content-wise. Sorry, just tired of hearing such a great guy and great blog disparaged.
*snork*
Jeez, he sounds like a great guy.
elegant, as usual. and so poetic.