Deny this

Drudge links to the Sunday Telegraph story on the Kerry bimbo eruption: “‘This won’t go away. What happened is much nastier than is being reported.'” The headline derives from the second paragraph of the story:

“This is not going to go away,” one American friend of Miss Polier said yesterday. “What actually happened is much nastier than is being reported.”

Drudge does not link to Mark Steyn’s Sunday Telegraph column on the subject: “So it has come to this – a choice of scandals.” Steyn writes:

[L]et’s consider the Kerry scandal: If you read the British newspapers, you’ll know all about it. It’s not about whether he was Absent Without Leave, but the more familiar political failing of being Absent Without Pants. It concerns a 24-year old woman – ie, 41 years younger than Mrs Kerry – and, with their usual efficiency, the Fleet Street lads have already interviewed her dad, who’s called Kerry a “sleazeball.” But if you read the US newspapers or watch the news shows there’s not a word about the Senator’s scandal. Though it seems to have a somewhat sounder factual basis, and at least one witness more relevant to this situation than the loose-lipped Gen Turniphead was to Mr Bush’s, it’s the media that’s gone Awol. In this case, it seems it would hurt to ask. So Mr Bush has been unable to do the John Kerry routine, declining to comment but adding that “it’s not my marital record that’s at issue.” We have two flimsy “scandals” tangentially related to character, but only one of them’s all over the networks.

Then Steyn cuts to the chase:

[T]he Kerry narrative is almost impenetrable. If Vietnam bitterly divided a nation, split communities, tore apart families, etc, etc, Sen Kerry somehow managed to wind up on both sides of the fence: in the 1960s, he was John Wayne taking out the gooks in ‘Nam; in the 1970s, he was Hanoi Jane Fonda, leading the protest movement; now, after two decades in Congress opposing every new weapons system for America’s military, he’s campaigning like Bob Hope on a USO tour flanked by wall-to-wall veterans. What story accounts for Senator Flip-Flop these past 40 years?
If character is the issue, Bush can relax. And, if doing your bit for national security is the issue, then John Kerry’s been Awol for two decades.

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