I hate to do this, but.....

I've been thinking about this for a while. I despise attacking veterans. This whole Kerry affair irritates me to no end. It should not have to be this way. If Kerry had any honor at all, he would simply resign and enjoy his pampered private life. But Kerry is so despicable that not only will he "soldier on" despite the mounting evidence that he is a prevaricator of the highest order. He shamelessly uses Max Cleland to do his dirty work for him, playing on the sympathies of Americans, who love vets, especially those who have been horribly wounded in battle.

So it's with great pain in my heart that I feel compelled to set the record straight. I'm not going to go into great detail. Frontpage Magazine has already done that. You need to read the entire article to understand the depths to which Kerry will stoop. All I will say here, for those who won't bother to read the article, is that Max Cleland is not who the Democrats portray him to be.

John Kerry says that Cleland "is a guy who lost three limbs in Vietnam, left them on the battlefield."

That is a lie. Max Cleland lost two legs and an arm in Vietnam, but it wasn't on the battlefield. He was dismounting from a helicopter to go have some beer with his buddies when he spotted a hand grenade on the ground in front of him. Thinking it was his and he had dropped it, he reached down to pick it up. It went off, changing his life forever.

Cleland himself admits this in his autobiography.

In the 1986 edition of his autobiography "Strong at the Broken Places", Cleland wrote of his receiving the Soldier's Medal "for allegedly shielding my men from the grenade blast and the Silver Star for allegedly coming to the aid of wounded troops....."

"There were no heroics on which to base the Soldier's Medal," wrote Cleland on page 87. "And it had been my men who took care of the wounded during the rocket attack, not me. Some compassionate military men had obviously recommended me for the Silver Star, but I didn't deserve it." (Emphasis added.) Two pages later he added: "I was not entitled to the Purple Heart either, since I was not wounded by enemy action." (Emphasis added.)

Like many of the vets who support Kerry, Cleland is a carefully constructed fraud.

UPDATE: Ed Morrissey has much more to say about Cleland's behavior.