Joe Klein makes a great point that I completely missed in the less-than-logically-organized critique of the Swifties that I wrote about a week ago:

These are heartfelt gripes, perhaps, but wrong on the merits. Kerry's protest was not only honorable, it was accurate. The war in Vietnam was an unnecessary disaster, entered into under false pretenses—the fabricated Gulf of Tonkin incident—and fought because of a mistaken intellectual theory: that the Vietnamese national liberation movement was part of an international communist conspiracy to overwhelm Asia.