James Taranto in Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal.com:

Our item yesterday on John Kerry*, his military records and his Yale transcript prompted this criticism from a reader:

Your failure to acknowledge that John Kerry's Navy records contained praise from (future) members of the Swift Boats outfit demonstrates your lack of integrity and your fundamental dishonesty. You are a shill. Congratulations.

"The Swift Boats outfit," of course, is the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, and sure enough, yesterday's Boston Globe did say this:

The records, which the Navy Personnel Command provided to the Globe, are mostly a duplication of what Kerry released during his 2004 campaign for president, including numerous commendations from commanding officers who later criticized Kerry's Vietnam service. . . . An earlier release of the full record might have helped his campaign because it contains a number of reports lauding his service.

OK, so we goofed. We should have noted this yesterday. The reason we didn't is that we remembered reading in the paper that the Swift Boat guys were a bunch of liars, so we assumed their praise was not to be trusted.

The usually snide and snarky Taranto never ceases to amaze. How can anyone read this and not perceive the gamed idiocy he attempts to pull off? Okay, so many of these Swift Boat vets offer praise in military records from decades ago, and yet what Taranto wants us to believe is that they're telling the truth now. So they were lying during, or right around, the war, yet many, many years later is when they're not likely compromised or have agendas and therefore see the light and tell the truth. Well now that we're all conjecturing, oh yeah, that sounds highly plausible.

Of course, the day before, Taranto pointed out the brilliant reason that Kerry didn't release his records: because it would've disclosed his Yale grades which matched Bush's. Oh yes, that's it, as opposed to releasing the records then to negate the Swift Boat smears with the disclosed praise. Ah, the bracing mind of Jimmy boy.

This guy is the most revoltingly-bad rightwing columnist on the scene right now. Smug, snarky, not as bright as he projects -- just your classic "Doug Neidermeyer" a-hole.