As his Vietnam service record is exposed as (at the very least) exaggerated, John Kerry is now calling for a debate on current events and policies.

Captain Ed brings it on, in a post about Kerry’s appalling support for a biased UMass-Boston/Joiner Center study of Vietnamese refugees, in which Vietnamese-Americans were passed over in favor of North Vietnamese Communists from the very regime that caused the refugee catastrophe.

A quote from the letter Kerry wrote to the director of the Joiner Center in September 2000:

I commend and extend my welcome and congratulations to the initial group of fellows selected. Choosing two established and accomplished scholars from Vietnam and two emerging scholars from the United States assures a diversity of views and combines fresh perspectives with time-tested observation. It is essential and critical that a project of this magnitude regarding a phenomenon as sweeping as the Vietnamese diaspora consider candidates from all countries, political backgrounds and cultural orientations to achieve free and unencumbered inquiry. Only through such a free and thorough inquiry and a generous sharing of findings will the cause of the Vietnamese people be advanced.

It’s hard to improve on the Captain’s analysis of Kerry’s mind-bogglingly naïve viewpoint:

…Looking at the actual reasoning behind this letter, one can safely state that John Kerry has no concept of totalitarianism; the intervening years between 1971 and 2000 taught him nothing. He presumes that Communist ‘scholars’ have academic freedom. Kerry lauds the diversity of views they bring to the research but fails to recognize the lock-step mentality of a single-party system, and one that caused the deaths of as many as 750,000 of its men, women, and children in concentration camps or on the run from its oppression. He repeats the same tired moral relativism he did in his radical days of 1971 when he presumes that the diversity of “political backgrounds and cultural orientations” will ensure that truth results from the inquiry, even though by 2000 the world understood that totalitarian regimes and truth coexist on rare and usually coincidental occasions.

Kerry’s reasoning reveals much more about his philosophy, and this isn’t just the radical youth that Kerry uses to excuse his activities at the end of the war. This letter was written less than four years ago. Kerry defended Communist nationals in the Senate in 1971, and 29 years later continued to do so (not to mention defending Bowen’s outsourcing of jobs to a country known for its sweatshops). This uncomprehending naivete does not befit the office of President even in times of peace and prosperity, and recalls the more ludicrous exploits of the Carter presidency. In a time of war against Islamofascist aggression, such unseriousness will get us killed.