UPDATE! Kerry On The Killing Fields...AGAIN!!

UPDATE!!

Well? It "IS" settled. John Kerry is actually dumber than a box of turtle turds. All that "D" education gone to waste.

As brought to you previously in this post, here is the continuation...in full. I would LOVE to rant on but the ranting in the following is so much more eloquent. It berates and chastises in such a way that the one being ranted upon would thank the rantee...

One more thing...when one quotes figures and facts, it isn't really a good idea to quote facts and figures compiled by our enemies...is it?

Just curious.


Answering Kerry--II
Our Monday item about John Kerry's Saturday letter about our July 26 op-ed about Kerry's claim that a bloodbath "didn't happen" after America's retreat from Vietnam brought this follow-up from reader R.T. Barber:

I just got around to reading Kerry's attempt to extract himself from his latest verbal quagmire and was stunned at his statement that "450,000 civilians and 1.1 million soldiers were killed" in the eight years preceding the U.S. withdrawal. One of your readers, Betty Tolsma from Shertz, Texas (home to many airmen serving at Randolph Air Force Base), wrote that "Mr. Kerry needs to give academic sources for the civilian (450,000) and military (1.1 million) war deaths which he cites in his response to James Taranto's account of the post-Vietnam debacle."

The Department of Defense figures on U.S. Vietnam War casualties show 47,424 "total hostile deaths" and 58,209 "total in-theater deaths." So from where was the 1.1 million figure derived?

I suspected that South Vietnamese military casualties exceeded U.S. military casualties, but the U.S. Army reported that "South Vietnamese military deaths exceeded 200,000," which if added to U.S. casualties falls far short of the senator's number. A May 2004 report on the differences and similarities between the Vietnamese and Iraq conflicts published by the U.S. Army War College includes the following passage on page 13:

In April 1995 the government in Hanoi announced that Communist forces during the "American period" of the Vietnam War had sustained a loss of 1,100,000 dead, a figure that presumably included the Communists' 300,000 missing in action. (Hanoi also estimated 2,000,000 civilian dead.) This passage includes a citation for the Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War (Spencer C. Tucker, ed., New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

I'm sure Senator Kerry isn't purposely reciting Communist propaganda in support of his argument.

Hmm, we're actually not so sure. But even if we assume Hanoi's numbers are accurate, consider what Kerry is claiming: that it was worth sacrificing the lives and freedom of the South Vietnamese--our ally--in order to prevent casualties on the enemy side. Imagine what the world would look like if we'd taken that approach during World War II--or, for that matter, what it will look like if we take it with Muslim terrorists.

Any questions? Isn't it a good thing that John Effing Moron and Fraud Kerry never made it to the White House?