Bill Kristol is cruel enough to reprint John Kerry’s 1971 testimony in its entirety.

I suspect that the reason Kerry decided to confront the Swift boat vets head-on was because he preferred a fight with them about his service record to a fight about what he said after he got out of the Navy.

I’ve been wondering about this since the morning the plane went down. There’s conflicting evidence and it’s unclear what the truth is, but it is worrisome.

This would, perhaps, be an excellent time to remind readers that we are in no way affiliated with The Weekly Standard, News Corporation, or Rupert Murdoch.

Remember your mother’s advice to “courtesy flush”? No doubt 19-year-old Jesse Huffman, a student at Montana State University-Bozeman, is wishing he’d heeded that advice. According to the Great Falls Tribune, after Huffman and four friends returned from a trip to Alberta, border officials at the Port of Sweet Grass (on the U.S. side) ordered a random search of the car, resulting in an illegal possession of alcohol charge for the driver. But while this was happening, Huffman asked to use the port’s bathroom. When he finished, officers discovered their toilet was clogged. And apparently there isn’t a plunger within 40 miles. Fuming, the port authority officials charged Huffman with a misdemeanor crime–for allegedly deliberately stopping up a toilet–that could lead to a revoking of Huffman’s federal college loans, $1,000 in fines, and six months in jail. Huffman insists his clogging was unintentional, that he suffers Irritable Bowel Syndrome, and that he used, “at most,” a fifth of a roll of toilet paper.

Could the port authorities be straining their case? If the officers go to trial and push for heavy fines and jail time, won’t that only clog a legal system already flush with litigation? But if Huffman wins, it will most certainly be his crowning moment.

Soxblog takes Howell Raines to task for his Washington Post op-ed this morning and, although Soxblog scores a number of points, he fails to note how cruel is was for the Post editors to put Raines and Charles Krauthammer on the same page, writing about almost the same subject.

The thought which occured to me was: Boy, the Posties sure are sticking it to the Times today.

If you haven’t yet checked out the 1971 Dick Cavett show debate between John Kerry and John O’Neill, you’re too late. C-Span no longer has it on their website and viewer services says they’re not airing it again.

Which is too bad. O’Neill, whom of course gets little respect in Douglas Brinkley’s telling in Tour of Duty, did a very good job debating the more curtain-ready Kerry. Only 25 at the time (Kerry himself was only 28), O’Neill went at the future presidential nominee like gangbusters. And scored a lot of points, the most important of which was that Kerry had elected himself spokesperson of veterans even as he slandered the American soldier and command in Vietnam as war criminals.

Kerry played defense most of the time, but missed few opportunities to turn the table on O’Neill whenever he tried to generalize about American veterans himself. Kerry also proved himself capable of real showstoppers. O’Neill correctly seized on the Vietnam Veterans Against the War’s Winter Soldier hearings to point out that these so-called witnesses to war crimes were refusing to submit themselves for depositions so that justice could be done if, indeed, war crimes had been committed. Kerry masterfully announced that he’d brought a winter soldier to the show with him that night who was prepared to give a deposition on live television right now. (How do you like them apples?)

Pure theater, sure, but good theater, and an early indicator of the grand confident gestures of which Kerry is capable. To his credit, O’Neill was little flapped ridiculous suggestion.

Watching the debate, you also have to be amazed by the poise of these two twentysomethings, who are on national television, fighting hard and long for about an hour total. This kind of programming is a thing of the past, which is too bad. Instead of light touches like Dick Cavett, we have, well, the usual cable-news head-banging, which is sometimes intelligent, but rarely graceful.

Dog. Alligator. Man with a pocket knife. It’s on!

Ever wonder what’s wrong in Hollywood? Read this post on the script that’s circulating for Jurassic Park 4.

Two words: Dinosaur commandos.

UPDATE: My brother, who is part of the vast Hollywood machine, writes in: “Jurassic Park 4 could work, if they only had 4 dinosaur commandos instead of 5; if they were ninjas–because ninjas are sweet; and if they changed the names to, I don’t know, let’s say . . . Renaissance artists. And then they also genetically change the leader guy–who also needs to be a ninja–into something like a giant rat.”