I've got the WordPress version of this weblog set up and mostly ready to go.  I will be working on the new site over the next few days, and plan to stop posting here.  Please update your links to the new site, as follows:

Site: http://www.countrykeepers.com/wp
XML/RSS: http://www.countrykeepers.com/wp/wp-rss2.php

The new site is running under WordPress.  I still have some template tweaking to do, and a ton of links to import, but it is functional now.  See you on the other side.

Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, is one of my senators.  He's apparantely been designated one of John Kerry's attack dogs as he's taken just about every chance he can get to dump on President Bush and his administration.

Earlier this week, Vice-President Cheney was his target.  Here's what he had to say Tuesday.

"They're running scared because John Kerry has a war record and they don't," said Harkin. "What he (Cheney) is doing and what he is saying is cowardly. The actions are cowardly."

Okay, let's put this in perspective.  Senator Harkin flew airplanes in the Navy, from 1962 to 1967, according to CNN.  He was also in the Reserves after that, from 1968 to 1974.  So maybe he's got the background to go after Dick Cheney, who did not serve in the military.  This, from the CNN article, would seem to back that up.

He said Cheney has little standing to question the war record of Kerry, who was repeatedly wounded and decorated while serving as a swift boat commander in Vietnam.

Or maybe not.

It turns out his background is closer to that of John Kerry than you might think at first glance.  Glenn Reynolds did some fact checking yesterday and turned up little bit of Senator Harkin's history with respect to his service in the Navy.  This is from a Wall Street Journal article in 1991.

In 1979, Mr. Harkin, then a congressman, participated in a round-table discussion arranged by the Congressional Vietnam Veterans' Caucus. "I spent five years as a Navy pilot, starting in November of 1962," Mr. Harkin said at that meeting, in words that were later quoted in a book, Changing of the Guard, by Washington Post political writer David Broder. "One year was in Vietnam. I was flying F-4s and F-8s on combat air patrols and photo-reconnaisance support missions. I did no bombing."

That clearly is not an accurate picture of his Navy service. Though Mr. Harkin stresses he is proud of his Navy record -- "I put my ass on the line day after day" -- he concedes now he never flew combat air patrols in Vietnam. . . .

In other words, Senator Harkin lied about his military service in Vietnam.  Just like Senator Kerry.  So maybe he does have the perspective to attack the President.  Just not the perspective he'd like us to believe he has.

Update: No, my local newspaper, the Des Moines Register, hasn't had anything to say about this.  Then again, it is something unfavorable to John Kerry, so why should I expect that they would?

This, from author and talk show host Neal Boortz, sums up the differences in what George Bush and John Kerry are running on very nicely.

To make this scenario as clear as possible, I ask you to remember one basic difference between George Bush and John Kerry.  George Bush is not running on his record of military service during the Vietnam War.  John Kerry is.  John Kerry is not running on the basis of his recent service as an elected official.  George Bush is.

I'm linking to it here so I can remember where I heard this as much as anything.

Well, the Des Moines Register finally gave some coverage to the Kerry lied about Cambodia issue today.  The tone was decidedly more "those dirty Republicans are up to their old tricks again" than "a candidate for President said something that wasn't true - we should look into that" though.

One article was syndicated from Harry Levins of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.  He wrote mostly about the advertisement that a group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth has produced which rasies some of the charges against Senator Kerry.  In fact, he quotes a Kerry campaign charge that the group is "a front for the right-wing Texas Republicans" (4th paragraph) before noting any of the group's concerns (6th paragraph).

The article even dances around Kerry's apparant lying by saying only that "Kerry had later amended his speech to say that he had been near Cambodia, but not in Cambodia".  Seem slike he might have a bit more correcting to do.  Fellow swift boat commander John O'Neill says that Kerry repeated this statement 50 times.

David Yepsen, Register political columnist, opens an op-ed article by saying that Vietnam is "overshadowing more important things in a presidential campaign" then goes on to explain why he thinks we should all just ignore this talk and move on to other things.  He excused Kerry's lie (without ever calling it that, by the way) this way:

They did force Kerry's campaign to acknowledge their man was probably only "near" Cambodia and not "in" it, as he has said. The river borders were unclear.

There are no border markers in the middle of the MeKong River, to be sure, but that didn't stop Kerry from repeating his charge that he was in Cambodia, even though the American government was stating that there were no American troops there.  Remember, this is what he had to say while speaking in the Senate in 1986.

Mr. President, I remember Christmas of 1968 sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia. I remember what it was like to be shot at by Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge and Cambodians, and have the President of the United States telling the American people that I was not there; the troops were not in Cambodia.

I have that memory which is seared - seared - in me

This doesn't sound like someone confused about whether he was in Vietnam or Cambodia.  Especially given that Kerry has repeatedly spoken about this specific incident as being the seminal event in forming his views of the Vietnam war and America's involvement in it.

Yepsen closes with this attempt shift discussion away from something important:

The big problem with all this talk about Vietnam is that it's irrelevant to our future. It's history. It's now used as part of character attacks that crowd out other issues such as fighting terrorism or fixing the economy.

Vietnam is irrelevant to our future, at least insofar as picking a President.  But the issue isn't Vietnam, it is John Kerry.  The issue is the quality of Kerry's character.  The issue is the depth of his moral convictions.

And that's what I understand the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth are talking about.  Whether or not John Kerry is fit to lead the United States of America as its President.  Yepsen makes his viewpoint clear:

All this is a big deal? Does this prove Kerry lacks the character to be president? Of course not.

But he spent the rest of his column diverting attention from an examination of that belief.  That's what the Kerry campaign wants, I'm certain, so that's what Yepsen delivered.

Nothing like an objective media, eh?

Wow!

I don't know what more to say.

Donald Sensing, who writes the warblog One Hand Clapping, asks "Where do we get such women?" about Staff Sgt. Jessica Clements and links to her story from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune at Power Line.

She was serving with her Army Reserve unit in Iraq when injured by shrapnel from a roadside bomb.  Her story is long, but well worth the time to read and is a great example of what American men and women are going through on our behalf.

Please, please, go and read.

I realized yesterday that the article I had written wasn't published onto my weblog.  For some reason I do not understand, as I hadn't changed anything, Radio Userland, my weblog software, had stopped rendering and upstreaming.  When I write in Radio, it renders the articles into html and xml files then upstreams them to my website.  Neither task was happening, nor had it been since late Wednesday.

What is even more strange is that Radio seems to have fixed itself overnight.  Again, without me having changed anything.

Radio has become rather annoying that way.

So while it was not doing what it is supposed to do last night, I figured out what I need to do to import posts from this weblog into WordPress, the new weblogging software I've been playing with.  (WordPress is what we use on the SkyBox weblog, by the way.)  I may not do so today, but I will be moving from Radio to WordPress soon.

When that happens, there will be a URL change for this weblog and its RSS feed.  I'll be sure to give you plenty of warning on that.