Kerri Dunn was found guilty today of attempted insurance fraud and filing a false police report. Dunn, you may remember, was a visiting professor of psychology at Claremont-McKenna College when her car was vandalized. She was later accused of causing the damage herself.
Her attorney will appeal, apparently on the grounds that she may not have filed an insurance claim at all.
LA Times story (registration required)
One of the things that really disturbs me about Kerry is what I will just call his "dumb lies." We had an administrator at my college who had a bad habit of telling dumb lies. She once told two inconsistent stories about the same events, one to me, one to my wife (then-girlfriend). Apparently she didn't expect that we would compare notes and catch her out in the lie.
And John Kerry does the same thing.
First is the Christmas in Cambodia thing. Kerry read into the Congressional Record in 1986 that he spent Christmas of 1968 in Cambodia. But there is no corroborating evidence for this claim, and the Kerry campaign issued a sort-of retraction. ("Perhaps it wasn't Christmas 1968 that he was in Cambodia"). (UPDATE: see this later post)
One barely-plausible explanation is that Kerry was in Cambodia on a mission so secret that none of the other people who usually whould have known about it (e.g., other swift boat commanders, the overall commander of swift boat operations, etc.) knew. But in that case, if the mission was so secret, why was Kerry blabbing about it in 1986?
Second is his attendance at the Kansas City VVAW meeting, where Scott Camil proposed assassinating certain pro-war senators. Did Kerry go or didn't he? Originally he claimed to have resigned beforehand, but subsequently a different story came out:
according to six eyewitnesses interviewed by the Sun, the plan was discussed and voted down, with Mr. Kerry speaking out against it, although there is disagreement about how narrow the margin of defeat was. On the third day of the meeting, Mr. Kerry and three other people resigned from their posts as national coordinators of VVAW. Historian Douglas Brinkley says Mr. Kerry told him he quit because of "personality conflicts and differences in political philosophy."I'm not sixty-one like John Kerry, but I distinctly remember the circumstances of my leaving every organization I've left -- especially when there was anything heated going on. I'm sure I would remember if I quit over my disagreement with a proposed assassination attempt, even thirty years later.
So what concerns me is that Kerry seems to want to tell a good story, and that desire overpowers his caution and leads him to say things that can be refuted by the record. Why doesn't he keep his mouth shut?