Advantage Ed! Yesterday, we wrote about the Swift Boat vets and their book, Unfit For Command:

So if these guys are lying about what Kerry did in Vietnam, then Kerry himself had to have lied to Meet the Press and in his speech as a Naval Reserve officer to the Senate on April 22, 1971.

Otherwise, Kerry's own testimony tacitly backs them up. So either Kerry's a self-professed war criminal, or someone who lied to puff up his own radical chic credentials in the early 1970s and smear his fellow soldiers. In either case, what makes him think either of those make him electable?

John Kerry faces a basic problem in rebutting the new ads that question his Vietnam war record: the criticism in the ads sounds exactly like his own criticism from the 1970s, both his criticism of others (he had no problem smearing Vietnam veterans for political purposes in the 1970s) and the criticism he leveled at himself when asked in 1971 on Meet the Press if he had committed war atrocities.

"There are all kinds of atrocities, and I would have to say that, yes, yes, I committed the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers have committed in that I took part in shootings in free-fire zones. I conducted harassment and interdiction fire. I used .50 caliber machine guns, which we were granted and ordered to use, which were our only weapon against the people," Kerry said. "I took part in search and destroy missions, in the burning of villages…"

What do the new ads say that Kerry didn't say or imply in this statement?