A SLEAZEMONGER'S TEARS

Steve Dunleavy in the New York Post today (lead story with tearjerking cover photo):

I WANT MY GI SON TO SERVE UNDER BUSH

...In the next few days, there will be a person reporting for duty in Iraq. His name is Army Capt. Peter J. Dunleavy....

He is special to me, as are all the thousands of boys and girls who serve this country, because he looks at fear as a headache and duty as the ultimate.

And yet, John Kerry makes it look like those guys and gals are just victims -- wrong war, wrong time, wrong place.

How dare he say that to our brave boys and girls? How dare he whisper it -- let alone shout it to the whole world?

In my book, Kerry is giving comfort and succor to the enemy...

When John Kerry says wrong war, wrong time, wrong place he undermines not my boy, but our boys. He embarrasses the United States abroad and he saps morale....

Steve Dunleavy in the New York Post, March 24, 1999:

WE'RE SACRIFICING OUR KIDS FOR KOSO-WHAT?

...I do not know more than two human beings who know where Kosovo is...

Why are we beating war drums over a place where nobody knows where it is.

In 1968, when there were considerable body parts left in paddy fields in Vietnam only 5 percent of college students could tell you where Vietnam was.

Charming.

...if, we are going to Kosovo for humanitarian purposes, that is fair. The Serbs have had an awful lot of time to make Kosovo a mass grave.

But if we are going into a civil war, where we don't only know how to get into, how to get out of, but we don't even know where it is.

Well, partner, think again.

(For more on Dunleavy's background as a checkbook journalist, self-mythologizing aging adolescent, and proud drunk -- no that's not slander, it's fact -- go here, here, here and here. He wrote this literary masterpiece and is actually angry that he doesn't get credit for his wife's work on this book.)