Before I launch into this critique of John Kerry and his appallingly bad campaign for the White House, let me say that the Bush/Rove attack on his Vietnam record is so grotesque and calculating that it’s almost enough, on its own, to win my vote in November.

That said, I have to say that Kerry has brought this mess on himself.

His major problem is that because his campaign stands for so little that about all he is telling voters is that they should vote for him because he won a bunch of medals in Vietnam. His Clintonian-style campaign, in which he offers himself as simply incrementally better than his opponent on a bunch of carefully cherry-picked wedge micro-issues, has made it inevitable that he would be challenged on his main selling point—his military record and his courage under fire.

His second problem is that once, way back in 1971, Kerry did have the courage to stand up in public and denounce not just the criminality and stupidity of America’s war against Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, but his own complicity in the crimes of that war. If he’d been smart, and if he’d kept the strength of his convictions and shown even an ounce of political courage, he would have made that part of his political resume a centerpiece of his campaign. He would have said that as president he would not be afraid to put a stop to a bad policy when he saw one, as he had once done at the height of the Indochina conflict.

People who still support that misbegotten war might fault him and call him a traitor, but they were people who were firmly in the Bush camp already. The undecided, and the Democrats who find Kerry’s populist credentials sadly lacking, however, would at least have applauded his willingness to take a stand on principle and to defend his past courageous mea culpa. After all, it was not the young men in uniform in Vietnam who were the war criminals, it was the generals in the Pentagon, and the suits in the White House and State Department—the ones who were setting the criminal policies--just as it is today.

Instead, Kerry on the campaign trail has acted for all the world as if his 1971 congressional testimony against the war had never happened. He has spent all his time talking about his allegedly heroic months on a swiftboat, not about his years afterwards as a war resister.

For the rest of this column, please go (at no charge) to This Can't Be Happening! .