Nothing Gets Past Those Guys At Page Six

Wednesday's Page Six does its best to knock the Democratic presidential candidate by regurgitating whatever people who aren't associated with the Bush campaign hand them, even if it means dredging up 34-year-old clippings:

John Kerry was certainly not a draft dodger, but he was against the Vietnam War before he enlisted in the Navy. According to a story in the Harvard Crimson, which covered Kerry's run for a Boston congressional seat in 1970, Kerry "urged the U.S. to withdraw from Vietnam" in his Yale commencement speech in 1966. "When he approached his draft board for permission to study for a year in Paris, the draft boad refused and Kerry decided to enlist," the Crimson stated.

Actually, in all fairness, they might have gotten the story from the Crimson itself, where some intrepid editor must have noticed they were sitting on a Kerry interview from 1970. But it's interesting to note that instead of picking up on Kerry's youthful advocacy of giving the United Nations control of American military deployment or his desire to dismantle the CIA, the Post gang trumpets the revelation that Kerry was against the Vietnam War even before he enlisted in the Navy (and, also prior to enlisting, sought a one-year deferment for foreign study from his draft board).

No, really? Apparently Richard Johnson and his team never got around to reading Doug Brinkley's Tour of Duty, in which Kerry's internal struggle between his duty and his conscience is covered in painstaking detail. (See? There's your book-related content!) Or, hell, maybe they've just never read a single profile of John Kerry during his entire public life, including the 1970s. OK, the attempt to get a foreign study exemption might be news to some people, but is there anybody ought there, particularly those old enough to directly remember the Vietnam era, that was under the impression that Kerry went to 'Nam a hawk and came back a peacenik? And, for that matter, it's somewhat bad form to knock the guy for wanting to study in Paris for a year before entering the service when Dick Cheney completely refused to serve in the war, regardless of his support for it, because he had "other priorities" in his life...