It’s Friday, and that means (cue dramatic sting) … VDH: The Coming of Nemesis.

Irony, paradox, hubris, and nemesis are all Greek words. They reflect an early Western fascination with natural, immutable laws of destiny, perhaps akin to something like the eastern idea of karma — that excess and haughtiness can set off a chain of events that are neither predicable nor welcome.

Take the recent controversy about President Bush’s military record. Heretofore, Mr. Kerry had wisely decided to let the sleeping dogs of Vietnam lie, perhaps cognizant of how the “bloody shirt” had once tainted and polluted 50 years of late-19th-century American presidential campaigns. Besides, the Republicans had not looked good in questioning the fine character of Max Cleland, whose service to his country deserved better. In the primaries, the genuinely war-heroic Mr. Kerry seemed to realize that it was not wise to question Howard Dean’s skiing in Aspen under the aegis of a medical deferment. After all, most Americans were more interested in talking about winning the present war rather than crying over losing the past one — and Vietnam was a morass that tarred everyone who lumbered in.

In 1992, Mr. Kerry had, quite soberly, called for an end to recriminations about Mr. Clinton’s draft record. And that was wise. From time to time he had gone on record to emphasize how tumultuous the late 1960s and 1970s were — and that what was said and done then was often a result of passion rather than reason. Kerry seemed to remember — and for that reason he was rightly cautious — that many Vietnam veterans against the war at the time had left a paper trail of greater respect for the resisters and draft-evaders who chose not to participate in an “immoral” war than for some of their fellow warriors who went over to serve and “kill.” Indeed, up until about 1980, the popular mythology for millions was that a Vietnam veteran deserved less respect than a draft-resister. Of course, we forget that absurdity now in the days of the bloody shirt, but it was nevertheless true and explains the near inexplicable contortions and subsequent reinventions of that generation that we witness today.

So Mr. Kerry rightly sensed that, while his own combat record was beyond reproach, his subsequent strident antiwar activities surely were not — ranging from confessionals about war crimes to throwing away someone else’s medals before the cameras. And Kerry was even wiser in appreciating that while a sort of mytho-history had emerged, asserting that Vietnam-era protesters once attacked the government only, never the soldiers themselves, most Americans of the era remembered a very different reality: Veterans in fact routinely and unfairly were accused of atrocities, and were slandered. Returning GIs were sometimes divided between those who felt that their service was honorable, and those who sought exculpation or popular acceptance from the protest generation by maligning fellow soldiers as agents of immorality.

Thus it was prudent to let all this alone, and not take the bait of thinking a decorated veteran who opposed the war could score points against a supporter of it who did not serve. But the Democrats were not content.

Instead, they floated old accusations that a twenty-something George Bush, who strapped himself into something as dangerous as an obsolete, fire-belching, and occasionally explosive F-102, was somehow near treasonous. Young Bush may have been impetuous and he apparently missed some roll calls, but anyone who rides the stratosphere a few inches above a jet engine is neither a coward nor a man who shirks either danger or responsibility.

Now the Democrats who thought up this low hit on the president will reap what they have sown — as Kerry’s entire (and ever-expanding) record of ancient slips and slurs will unnecessarily go under full scrutiny, the sometimes shameful words of a rash and mixed-up youth unfairly gaining as much attention as once brave deeds. By August the American people will be sick to death of Kerry’s pandering to veterans — or perhaps as indifferent to his medals as they were to the equally stellar record of sometimes-failed candidates like Bob Dole, Bob Kerry, John McCain, or Gray Davis.

The whole thing is excellent. Read it, won’t you?