You can tell that the left is getting nervous about a scandal when they invoke the successful Swift Boat Veterans for the Truth campaign of 2004 against John Kerry.

As I noted on Saturday, Maria L. La Ganga at the Los Angeles Times did that as she described Planned Parenthood's attempts to fight back against the Center For Medical Progress's exposure of their baby body parts business. On Friday at the New York Times, in a story about how Hillary Clinton was "interrupting" her Martha's Vineyard vacation, Amy Chozick found a Clinton contributor who characterized her email and private server scandal as "somewhat of a tempest in a teapot," and also described it as "their (Republicans') Swift boat issue of 2015."

Andrea Mitchell had the chance to ask John Kerry, on live national TV, any question she wanted about the Iran deal. She could, for example, have confronted him over the lifting of the conventional arms and ballistic missile embargoes that were included as a nice little parting gift to Iran.

Instead, in a moment of media malpractice, Mitchell lobbed up the mushiest of softballs on today's Morning Joe, asking Kerry "what that moment meant to you" when at the final negotiation meeting, he reminisced about going to Vietnam as a 22-year old "and that you never wanted to go to war without having exhausted the diplomacy."  A shame Andrea and John weren't in the same room so they could have exchanged a heartfelt hug.

The Esquire pundit claims that “every militarized halftime show, every Concert for Valor, every local television anchor wearing a flag pin or a yellow ribbon, is testimony to how the Pentagon has transformed the country from a skeptical republic to a sentimental beer commercial.”

During the Pentagon Papers controversy over the release of Vietnam-related military and other documents in 1971, if a columnist had written that "the private companies that own newspapers, and their employees, should not have the final say over the release of government secrets, and a free pass to make them public with no legal consequences," and that "that decision must ultimately be made by the government," he or she would have been tagged in the press as a "(Richard) Nixon defender" and "an enemy of press freedom."

How ironic it thus is that Thursday, in his New York Times review of Glenn Greenwald's new book ("No Place to Hide"), current liberal Vanity Fair columnist and former CNN "Crossfire" host Michael Kinsley used that very language as he went after Greenwald, who has been NSA eavesdropping leaker Edward Snowden's go-between for the past year, with a vengeance. And yes, he did it at the Times, the very newspaper which was at the heart of the Pentagon Papers litigation that was ultimately decided in its favor.

Brickbats to Phillip Rawls and his layers of editors at the Associated Press.

Vietnam war hero and former Alabama Senator Jeremiah Denton died on Friday. He was an incredibly courageous and inspiring man who after his return from 7-1/2 years as a POW in North Vietnam became deeply troubled at where this nation was (and still is) headed. Unsurprisingly, he became a strong pro-life and family values advocate. Apparently following an unwritten rule at AP which dictates that a writer must take at least one parting shot at a conservative upon his or her death (see: Tony Snow), Rawls took two, twice describing Denton as "rigid" (includes video of a portion of his 1966 "torture" interview; bolds are mine):