Swift Boated Again

A week ago, Secretary of State John Kerry was a hero, and now he's a heel once again.

Navy veteran Kerry - whose presidential bid in 2004 failed when his command of a river-based swift boat in Vietnam was called into question - had helped negotiate a nuclear arms control deal with Iran that was (and is) to take effect this month.  President Obama was prepared to boast about it in his final State Of the Union address last night (which I was too busy and disinterested to see).  Then the Iranian military captured two American riverine vessels in the Persian Gulf for going into Iranian territorial waters and detained the ten crew members between them.

Oops!

So much for bragging about dealing with Iran. Right-wing Arkansas senator Tom Cotton, the Republican rising star who opposed the deal, was licking his chops on CNN last night, more or less saying, "See, I told you so."  A Democratic rising star on the same program, though, said . . . oh wait, there are no Democratic rising stars!  And even the old Democratic war horses - least of all Kerry - couldn't find a mitigating factor in all this.

The sailors were just freed, and the arms deal will go through, but Kerry, whom I chose as one of my winners of 2015, is already looking like a loser in 2016.  And for a Navy man, he sure has a lot of bad luck with small craft.  Hopefully this incident isn't a destroyer . . . of his career.