If I was John Kerry's campaign manager

. . . This would be Kerry's next campaign ad: "George W. Bush . . . too much of a pussy to face the Cong; too much of a pussy to face a one-armed guy in a wheelchair."

Got to hear from one of Kerry's actual Swift-Boat crewmates, Skip Barker, at a fundraiser here in Mobile last night. And I wish I could introduce Skip to each and every one of these Bush Kool-Aid drinkers who are perfectly happy to just swallow every single thing the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" tell them. Skip spoke with such fire and sincerity about his time with Kerry in Vietnam and what kind of person he thinks John Kerry is that I found it downright laughable that anyone could willingly accept the SBVT's word(s) over his.

Someone asked Skip why he thought folks like George Elliott have been shifting their stories around so much, and Skip actually related a phone conversation he'd had with Elliott in the spring. Skip asked him point-blank why he was changing his story, and according to him, Elliott's response was that he had a reason, but he couldn't tell it to Skip right then. When Skip asked him why, Elliott replied that he didn't know.

Why wasn't he willing to say? "Because he's weak," Skip told us. Fightin' words if ever I heard them.

Look, it all comes down to this: You can trust folks like Skip or Jim Rassman, who have witnessed with their own two eyes what others have only heard about through multiple other people, Telephone-style. Or you can trust people like John O'Neill, who lied about Kerry's time in Cambodia (not to mention his own); George Elliott, who seems to be changing his story every five seconds; Adrian Lonsdale, who's doing the same thing; Louis Letson, who claims one of Kerry's Purple Heart wounds was bogus even though there's no record that Letson ever even treated him; and Larry Thurlow, who claims there was no enemy fire in the incident for which Kerry won a Bronze Star despite the fact that he won a Bronze Star for the very same incident.

Hey, I can understand why the Bushies want to believe these guys. If they succeed in tearing down Kerry's service, then the fact that Bush stayed home and played pool in Texas while others died doesn't seem quite so bad by comparison. But how stupid does one have to be to turn that want into actual belief? Surely even the Bushies are smarter than that, aren't they?

Aren't they? . . .