John O’Neill says that the latest modified, limited hangout from Kerry doesn’t answer the mail:

We called for Kerry to execute a form which would permit anyone to examine his full and unexpulgated military records at the Navy Department and the National Personnel Records Center. Instead he executed a form permitting his hometown paper to obtain the records currently at the Navy Department. The Navy Department previously indicated its records did not include various materials. This is hardly what we called for. If he did execute a complete release of all records we could then answer questions such as (1)Did he ever receive orders to Cambodia or file any report of such a mission (whether at Christmas or otherwise); (2) What was his discharge status between 1970 and 1978 (when he received a discharge) and was it affected by his meetings in 1970 and 1971 with the North Vietnamese? (3)why did he receive much later citations for medals purportedly signed by Secretary Lehman who said he did not know of them; (4) Are there Hostile Fire and Personnel Injured by Hostile Fire Reports for Kerry’s Dec. 1968 Purple Heart (when the officer in charge of the boat Admiral Schacte, the treating Surgeon Louis Letson, and Kerry’s Division Commander deny there was hostile fire causing a scratch) awarded three months later under unknown circumstances.

As Hugh Hewitt points out:

Imagine if in response to the TANG controversy of last year, the president had authorized the Texas National Guard to provide his records to the Dallas Morning News and only the News. Would the furor over their release have subsided?

Of course not, and that’s why the Kerry SF 180 lies have been so interesting to follow in the media –a sort of perfect example of MSM bias in real time. The bias continues, of course, as is evident in the handling of the story today.

[Update a few minutes later]

I’ve always been stupefied at the notion that Kerry was so brilliant, as his campaign attempted to portray him. He always seemed to me to be a subpar intellect, with speechifying that would only appeal to people who mistook ponderous bellowing that never quite gets to the point with oratory “nuance.” In a post appropriately titled “Not Too Swift,” Roger Simon agrees:

Kerry was clearly not the brightest bulb, but we knew that. One of the more interesting obfuscations (deliberate and otherwise) that went on… and continues to go on to some extent… about the last presidential campaign is that Bush was the dumb one. In actuality, I always thought one of the reasons for Kerry’s famous flip-flopping, possibly the key reason, was that the Senator didn’t really understand the issues. I know this sounds rash and almost vicious, but he seemed to have some kind of cognitive disorder. There may be a lot of that in politics. After all, rational discourse is not often rewarded. Talking endlessly around a subject is.

I continue to be amazed that he got as many votes as he did (many more than I expected him to, last summer). It can only be attributable to irrational Bush hatred.