submandave

Much has been made in the blogosphere of the Kerry/Cambodia stories and their refutation by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. A recent op-ed on The Command Post included yet another discussion of Kerry's statement about being in Cambodia during Christmas '68 and President Nixon denying the presence of troops and how that was impossible since Nixon wasn't sworn in until January 1969, to which I offered the following comment:

One Clintonesque parsing of the Cambobia/Nixon quote could hold that Kerry’s statement that he was in Cambodia and that Nixon had denied any troups were in that same country does not necessarilly require that the two events happened contemporaneously. For example, I can truthfully say “I vividly remember being in Japan in 1994. The irony of having a beer in the very same country which Douglas McArthur ran under the SCAP was not lost on me.” While in my case the statement is clearly understood due to the great difference in time between the events, I can find no logical reason for the temporal juxtiposition in Kerry’s but to obfuscate and implicate Nixon in his alleged incursion.

Last night's transcript for MSNBC's Scarborough Country contains this gem from Lawrence O‘Donnel, MSNBC Sr. Political Analyst and Kerry defender:

It doesn‘t precisely say that in Christmas of 1968, President Nixon sent me up there, because, as we all know, President Nixon was not yet President Nixon. He was president-elect Nixon at the time. And so that‘s an elision of the histories in way that makes semantic sense to me, rough semantic sense.

I believe the phrase "See I told you so" may be trademarled now, so I will refrain from too much crowing.