The American Thinker reprints an essay it ran in May, long before Christmas in Cambodia became a household phrase in the Blogosphere. This is a riot:

Thomas Wright was one of John F. Kerry's fellow Swift boat officers in Vietnam. Since Wright outranked Kerry, he was Kerry's sometime boat group Officer-in-Charge, so Wright had occasion to observe Kerry’s behavior and attitudes, and the circumstances surrounding his early departure from the war zone. The intervening years have not dimmed his memories.

When the Swift boats of Coastal Division 11 sailed into harm’s way from their Phu Quoc Island base of An Thoi, for missions along the rivers of Vietnam’s southwesternmost Kien Giang and An Xuyen provinces, they communicated by radio. When they did, boat captains adopted distinctive, often humorous call signs for identification purposes. Eldon Thompson was “Mary Poppins,” William Schachte was “Baccardi Charlie,” James T. Grace was “Twiggy,” and Tom Wright was “Dudley Do-Right.” When John Kerry radioed another Swift boat, he used the call sign, “Boston Strangler.”

* * *

Working with call sign “Boston Strangler” became problematical. “I had a lot of trouble getting him to follow orders,” recalls Wright. “He had a different view of leadership and operations. Those of us with direct experience working with Kerry found him difficult and oriented towards his personal, rather than unit goals and objectives. I believed that overall responsibility rested squarely on the shoulders of the OIC or OTC in a free-fire zone. You had to be right (before opening fire). Kerry seemed to believe there were no rules in a free-fire zone and you were supposed to kill anyone. I didn’t see it that way.”

In Wright’s view, it was important that the enemy understood that Swift boats were a competent, effective force that could dominate his location. To do that, you also had to control the people and their actions; to have them accept Swift boat crews and their authority. You couldn’t achieve that by indiscriminate use of weapons in free fire zones.

It got to a point where Wright told his divisional commander he no longer wanted Kerry in his boat group, so he was re-assigned to another one. “I had an idea of his actions but didn’t have to be responsible for him.” Then Wright and like-minded boat officers took matters into their own hands. “When he got his third Purple Heart, three of us told him to leave. We knew how the system worked and we didn’t want him in Coastal Division 11. Kerry didn’t manipulate the system, we did.”

How long did the press spend hounding President Bush over his service records? And how would they have reacted if Bush's callsign as a pilot was anything as crazed sounding as "The Boston Stranger"? You'd have Dr. Strangelove-style riffs into the ionosphere.

There's a kid who lives with his parents a few blocks from my house with a "What Would Jesus Bomb?" bumpersticker on his pickup. And in all likelihood, he's going to be voting for...The Boston Strangler. I wonder if he knows.

No I don't.

Update: Neal Boortz compares and contrasts how the media handled the Bush AWOL story with how they've covered the soldiers who wrote Unfit For Command and concludes that "the mask is off" when it comes to the bias of the media.

And how.