2004 Democratic Presidential nominee John Kerry has been accused of having questionable judgment on certain matters. But if the following piece from The New York Post’s Page Six of November 18 is true, this would take the cake in the bad judgment department:

LIBERAL loser John Kerry might be planning to strike back at John O’Neill, the “Unfit for Command” author who claims some of the credit for Kerry’s defeat, sources say.
In the book, published by Regnery not long before the election, O’Neill ? who, like Kerry, commanded swift boats in Vietnam ? attacked Kerry’s war record and branded him a traitor.
O’Neill sold over 800,000 copies and his group, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, raised $25 million to battle the Kerry campaign and ran TV ads trashing the candidate. Former Sen. Bob Dole endorsed the group.
O’Neill says he wrote the book because Kerry called his fellow Vietnam vets monsters, terrorists and war criminals, for which he has never apologized. Kerry has called O’Neill’s charges lies, though he made some of the comments in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971.
“I will leave it to the professionals to decide whether we played a crucial role in defeating Kerry, but I am very satisfied,” O’Neill crowed to the London Sunday Telegraph days after George W. Bush’s victory.
The paper reported Kerry was “furious” at staffers who advised him not to fight back against O’Neill and noted that the nominee was “enraged” over the book.
Now, “the Kerry camp is thinking about filing a libel lawsuit against Regnery and O’Neill,” a source close to the candidate’s inner circle tells PAGE SIX. “I don’t know if they will actually go forward, but consideration is serious. If Kerry plans on running again in 2008 ? and I’m hearing he will ? it would make sense that he’d file the suit.”
Kerry’s rep, David Wade, said he hadn’t heard about any proposed lawsuit, but promised to look into it.
“It would be a lot smarter of Kerry to just apologize,” O’Neill told PAGE SIX. “No lawsuits are going to change the testimony he gave and the impact it had on POWs.”

This defamation lawsuit idea was actually trotted out during the Presidential campaign. “Noted” legal scholar, John Dean — the convicted felon who somehow crafted his legacy of testifying to Congress against his client (former President Richard M. Nixon) into a job as an expert legal commentator — wrote this article opining that Senator Kerry would have a pretty good defamation claim against Mr. O’Neill, who is a longtime and well-regarded Houston attorney.
An unsolicited piece of advice for Senator Kerry — if you thought that the Swift Boat Vets’ accusations were bad and things could not get any worse, then go ahead and sue John O’Neill. That will likely generate a nightmare of Biblical proportions for you. Mr. O’Neill was reasonably effective as an advocate against you during the campaign even though he was out of his element on the public stage. However, Mr. O’Neill is quite comfortable and completely in his element inside a courtroom. Trust me on that one.