Damn! What a great OpEd. He takes to task the Republican’s campaign and W, while noting that Kerry has unwittingly walked right into the traps laid for him. As Jon Stewart has said about the Rove Slime Machine^tm^ on The Daily Show, “Damn, they are so good at it!”

Some choice bits follow:

Only in an election year ruled by fiction could a sissy who used Daddy’s connections to escape Vietnam turn an actual war hero into a girlie-man.

[..]

The flaw in Mr. Kerry is not, as Washington wisdom has it, that he asked for trouble from the [Swift Boat Veterans for Truth] by bringing up Vietnam in the first place. Both his Vietnam service and Vietnam itself are entirely relevant to a campaign set against an unpopular and ineptly executed war in Iraq that was spawned by the executive branch in similarly cloudy circumstances. But having brought Vietnam up against the backdrop of our 2004 war, Mr. Kerry has nothing to say about it except that his service proves he’s more manly than Mr. Bush. Well, nearly anyone is more manly than a president who didn’t have the guts to visit with the 9/11 commission unaccompanied by a chaperone. [emphasis mine]

Go and read the whole OpEd here.