Sen. John Kerry is still fighting battles he lost long ago. In today's New York Times, there is what can only be described as a puff piece on Kerry's continuing efforts to lose Vietnam in 1971 and win the presidency in 2004.

There's no immediate news hook on which to base today's article. The story describes how Kerry and his supporters have spent the past couple of years attempting to gather evidence to refute the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth's brief against him. None of Kerry's evidence is quite ready for primetime, but today's article should start the left wing fever swamps salivating.

I'm not surprised that the Times would run a piece like this. It was the Times back during the 2004 campaign that ran a more than 100-inch piece drawing a nexus between the Swift Boat Vets and the Bush campaign, with hardly any mention of the substance of their claims.

There are a few things about today's story that really demonstrate how shoddy a piece of work it is. The one thing that was made clear long ago, a fact that the Times' August 20, 2004 piece acknowledges is that John Kerry didn't spend Christmas 1968 inserting Navy Seals into Cambodia, and Richard Nixon certainly didn't send him into Cambodia because Nixon was still only president-elect.

Keeping those two facts in mind, these parts of the Times article are inaccurate and/or misleading.

John Kerry starts by showing the entry in a log he kept from 1969: "Feb 12: 0800 run to Cambodia."

This is the first sentence of the story. It's a good lede, but it also ignores the fact that John Kerry had been saying for decades that he spent Christmas in Cambodia. Maybe he meant the orthodox Christmas -- but I think that's in January. Kerry must be the only Roman Catholic who celebrates Christmas on Feb. 12.

So they have returned, for instance, to the question of Cambodia and whether Mr. Kerry was ever ordered to transport Navy Seals across the border, an experience that he said made him view government officials, who had declared that the country was not part of the war, as deceptive.

Here's another opportunity to set the record straight, and the Times again demonstrates that it's perfectly willing to act as Kerry's stenographer.

And then there's the graphic that goes along with the story, which contains this bit:

Swift Boat Veterans for Truth accused Mr. Kerry of falsely claiming to have been on missions to Cambodia, in particular on Christmas Eve in 1968. The group said Mr. Kerry got no further than Sa Dec, about 55 miles from the Cambodian border. And it said Mr. Kerry had no proof that he had ever gone to Cambodia with Navy Seals.

Mr. Kerry says coordinates for his boat in archived reports show it closer to Cambodia than Sa Dec, around the area of Cao Lanh, 35 miles from the border, on Christmas Eve. Coordinates from February 1969 show the boat running missions along the Cambodian border, north of Ha Tien, and a report indicates that Mr. Kerry's boat "inserted Seals."

As the editors of the American Federalist Journal point out on their blog, this is an interesting argument:

You see, some records indicating that his boat went toward Cambodia at some point prove he was in Cambodia at Christmas-time in 1968.

One time, we drove from Los Angeles north towards Sacramento. This proves we were in Oregon in 1968.

Further reading:
John in Carolina
New England Republican
QandO
Outside the Beltway