Graham Hilliard has an excellent article in the Washington Examiner about “Military rot”, but his timeline is off. We know about the rot. It’s glaring and in our faces. I think this rot goes back much further. We look at Korea and Vietnam and know that the top down rot was there. Can it be stopped?

Hilliard’s article begins:

It is difficult, 20 years on, to say which is more unlikely: that flip-flopping, wind-surfing, “Jinjis” Khan-pronouncing John Kerry came within an Ohio whisper of the White House or that Kerry’s rebuke proceeded in large part from a bevy of cheesed-off veterans. Politics change in two decades, of course, and my guess is that the presidential nomination process has produced its last patrician Bay Stater for some time. Yet the real development since 2004 is the sheer improbability now of what Kerry’s onetime comrades in arms pulled off.

With a series of devastatingly well-made television ads, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth won the battle over the Massachusetts senator’s war record, moral fiber, and fitness for office. But they have lost the ideological war.

Five presidential election cycles later, we have moved to Kerry’s side of the vessel.

In case you have forgotten, or are too young, here is one of the ads: