THE SMELL OF VICTORY

Wow. Sure looks like Tweety Matthews has his finger to the wind - and it's coming up Kerry. He was all over Michelle Malkin tonight, who slid a sly aside into the conversation about Kerry's Vietnam wounds being self-inflicted.

Tweety jumped on her. "Are you saying his wounds are self-inflicted? Based on what? No one's ever said that."

Malkin said one of the men in the "Unfit for Command" book said so. "Don't you want to know? Don't you wonder?" she said.

"No, I don't," Matthews spat.

Hmmm. There's talk of a big shakeup at MSNBC and rumor has it Matthews is worried about his job. Well, it can't hurt to be one of the rare liberals left on cable news...

For what's it worth, though, Tweety is wrong. They did accuse Kerry of self-inflicted wounds:

Hibbard: Yes, that was his whole point. He had this little piece of shrapnel in his hand. It was tiny. I was told later that Kerry had fired an M-79 grenade and that he had misjudged it. He fired it too close to the shore, and it exploded on a rock or something. He got hit by a piece of shrapnel from a grenade that he had fired himself.

The injury was self-inflicted, that's what made sense to me. I told Kerry to "forget it." There was no hostile fire, the injury was self-inflicted for all I knew. Besides, it was nothing really more than a scratch. Kerry wasn't getting any Purple Heart recommendation from me.

If I may clarify: The military makes a distinction between "self-inflicted" (i.e. something you did resulted in an injury to yourself) and intentionally self-inflicted.

It's a clever, nasty thing they're doing because most listeners don't know the difference.

So, while Tweety was wrong on the facts, he got the truth of it and reacted accordingly.
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