Well, it now turns out that it wasn't really about the medals after all. As report after report after report after report, ad infinitum, have discredited the recovered memories of the "Swift Boat Veterans", the bloggers who had previously put their reputations on the line in backing their accounts are now starting to acknowledge that the truthfulness of the Vets wasn't the issue, nor whether the Bushies were giving them covert backing; it was whether Kerry was inside the Cambodian border on Christmas Eve, 1968. Not whether he was ever inside Cambodia, or whether he was inside Cambodia a few weeks later during the Tet Festival, but whether his memory of an event that was then 15 years in the distance (now 35 years) was completely accurate. Oh, and also that Kerry has been forced to address the issue. It's nice of them to narrow the critical issues down for the rest of us.

If the exposure of Trent Lott symbolizes the best of what blogging is capable of doing in shaping the national agenda, this story represents its nadir, an example of how the tactics of Joseph McCarthy and Josef Goebbels can be used to hype a partisan agenda, combining rumors, innuendo and out-and-out falsehoods in an effort to discredit a public figure. Only in the blogosphere, it seems, can a trivial mistake in the memory of a person can lead to one being called a term that in any other circumstance would be the most morally devastating thing you can say about someone: liar.

Unlike Atrios, I have been reticent about calling the "Swift Boat Vets" liars. Recalling events that took place thirty-five years ago can be difficult for anyone to remember, and any memory has to be considered in the context of its possessor's biography. In the case of the SBVs, who almost to a man violently disapproved of John Kerry's anti-war activities after he came home from Southeast Asia, to have seen him boast of his battlefield courage last month in Boston must have been particularly grating. Combine that with the fact that Kerry sometimes rubs people the wrong way in personal situations, and you have a recipe for anecdotes based more on wish than fact. It would not surprise me if each of the SBVs honestly believes that his account is truthful, but that is not the same thing as saying something is true, just as a false memory is not the same thing as a lie, no matter how seared it seems. So even though I don't believe them, I'm willing to give men who honorably served their country a break when it comes to that label.

For practicing lawyers, the tricks memories play on witnesses, especially after the passage of time, is a matter that comes up repeatedly in court. Around the time I first took the bar, a septuagenarian from Cleveland named John Demjanjuk was being tried for war crimes in Israel. Witness after witness took the stand, testifying to very vivid and horrifying memories that Demjanjuk in fact was the infamous, "Ivan the Terrible", a particularly sadistic prison guard at Treblinka. The problem, of course, was that Demjanjuk wasn't at that camp, although he was a guard elsewhere. He was a war criminal, just not the one that the witnesses had remembered. But if you believe Prof. Reynolds or Roger Simon, each of those Holocaust survivors who testified under oath that he was Ivan the Terrible was lying, and should have been prosecuted for perjury. Contemporaneous accounts and documentation are almost always more reliable, and tell a more accurate story, than the memories of witnesses years after the fact.

Thus, the fact that so many of the bloggers who hyped these accounts are attorneys, quite frankly, is an embarrassment to my profession. As officers of the court, we are charged with ensuring that the truth will out, within the context of an adversarial system. We don't swear an oath to tell the truth when we appear before the bench, since it is assumed that everything we say must be true. A lawyer who presents false evidence, or makes a reckless allegation in presenting his case, not only dimishes the regard that the society as a whole views our profession, he also runs the risk of being sanctioned or disbarred.

That is, I believe, the real reason the public acted with such outrage at Johnny Cochran and F.Lee Bailey after the OJ trial, and why people have been so utterly disdainful of the Kobe Bryant prosecution. It should be our job to present a case without passion or prejudice, not to unfairly malign or persecute to obtain an advantage in court, or to exaggerated the shortcomings of our rivals.

And those ethical considerations are not simply limited to what we say in court. A lawyer who slimes his adversaries, deceives his opponents, and misstates the truth in the course of representing a client deserves nothing but opprobrium from the public. When Clinton was impeached for lying about his affair with Ms. Lewinsky, I fought that tooth and nail; a President who can be removed from office for the most trivial mistake in his private life does violence to democracy. When he was disbarred after his Presidency, I sadly approved, even though the conduct itself did not arise from his representation of a client. My profession should no more tolerate those who lie to the public than the priesthood should tolerate pederasts.

And in my opinion, the lawyers who have blogged this story, and who have made the most extreme charges against Kerry, are, ethically speaking, somewhere beneath your run-of-the-mill ambulance chaser.