Daydream Believing

Glenn Reynolds plays dumb:

So why didn’t [Kerry] release [his military records] earlier, given that this issue was extremely damaging to his campaign, and could have been easily addressed then — when it would have made a difference — instead of now, when no one cares except political obsessives and snarky bloggers?

Kos, alas, plays along:

Well, releasing those records would’ve exposed many of those lies and defused the story. By not releasing them, they gave the impression that they were trying to hide something, further fueling the Swift Boat fantasies.

I am agnostic about the question about whether, on balance, it would have been better for Kerry to release the records. But as TBogg
and August Pollak point out, the idea that releasing the records would have “defused” the Swift Boat controversy is just absurd. After all, even without the records, it was well-known that the Swift Boat Vets were led by a Nixon-trained hatchet man and a racist crank, and virtually all of their falsifiable claims were, in fact, false. Their smears were completely unsubstantiated, and people like Glenn Reynolds were breathlessly pimping them anyway. The reason is obvious: Glenn Reynolds and his ilk don’t really care about Kerry’s Vietnam record. They are Republican hacks who hate John Kerry. The Swift Boat smears were politically damaging to Kerry, and thus were politically useful; their falsehood was beside the point. To think that one more piece of evidence discrediting these claims would have caused them to back of is beyond belief; to anyone who followed the campaign, it should be obvious that this claim is painfully naive. Kos is letting his (defensible) dislike of Kerry as a candidate cloud his judgment here.