Richie Cohen Joins Kerry Campaign's Pall Bearers

Another lib pundit has jumped ship on the Boston Balker.

If it takes an apology [for libeling all Vietnam vets as “war criminals” before the Senate in 1971], if it takes saying he was once an angry young man who saw blood spilled in a dubious cause - then that's what he should say," writes Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen.

Otherwise Vietnam and its immediate aftermath will stick to him as has his complicated and too-nuanced position on the Iraq war.

This is a moment for Kerry to speak plainly, to embrace all Vietnam veterans and say that any suggestion that they were war criminals does not represent how he feels now and how he felt then," Cohen urges Lurch. "And if he gave the opposite impression, he's sorry.

Cohen says if Kerry fails to delivers a Vietnam apology soon, he risks becoming trapped in the kind of “rhetorical molasses’ that has hamstrung him on the Iraq war.

Hamstrung in the past…hamstrung in the present. And nowhere to go.

It’d take a big man to fess up to something like this. A man big enough to be president.

Now we’ll see just how much John Kerry wants it.