MAGNIFICENT MARK STEYN on Kerry's troubles:

Nothing the "sleazoids" say about Kerry is as bad as what he said about them 33 years ago in his testimony to Congress, when he informed the world that his comrades – his "band of brothers" – had "personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads" etc, throughout their time in Vietnam.

Unlike John O'Neill's book, he didn't bother to give specifics: the US Army in general was rife with ear-severers. If you want to know why Paul Galanti is appearing in an anti-Kerry ad, it's because he first heard about this speech from his Viet Cong captors who cited it to try to persuade him and his fellow prisoners that resistance was now futile and they might as well cross over to the other side.

I said a couple of weeks back that John Kerry was too strange to be President, and a week or two earlier that he was too stuck-up to be President. Since I'm on an alliterative roll, let me add that he's too stupid to be President. What sort of idiot would make the centrepiece of his presidential campaign four months of proud service in a war he's best known for opposing?

I wouldn't stand for Parliament on a family values platform because I know someone's bound to bring up the 123 gay porn movies I had a bit part in back in Amsterdam in the 1970s.

How cocooned from reality do you have to be to think you can transform one of the most divisive periods in American history – in which you were largely responsible for much of the divisiveness – into a sappy, happy-clappy, soft-focus patriotic blur without anybody objecting? Most Vietnam veterans of my acquaintance loathe John Kerry, and, if he wasn't aware of that, he's too out of it to be President.

And the icing on the cake, the final touch:

If this campaign were any more inept, Michael Moore would be making a documentary claiming Kerry's a Republican plant secretly controlled by Karl Rove and the House of Saud.

Heh, as you-know-who would say.