Posted on 05/25/2009 9:30:25 AM PDT by Interesting Times
Five years ago, a group of Vietnam veterans came forward at the National Press Club in Washington to dispute the "war hero" stories that formed the basis of candidate John Kerry's presidential campaign, and to challenge the claims of rampant US war crimes Kerry had used to launch his political career 33 years earlier -- false accusations, they said, that helped to poison the reputations of a generation of American troops. The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth included Kerry's entire former chain of command from Vietnam and dozens of eyewitnesses to his actions there. Kerry, the veterans said, was not fit to be America's Commander-in-Chief
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Swift vets ping.
BTTT
It says a lot about how much a majority of voters in Massachusetts must hate this country that they continue to send in scumbags like Ted Kennedy and John Kerry to the US Senate.
Ha, you can stop after the first 4 words. It isn't news that the MSM is lying, about anything. I wouldn't trust them if they said the sky were blue - I'd still go outside and look.
The majority of the cud chewers will think of “Swift Boating” as an unfair attack because the lies keep getting repeated.
...Kerry’s own words about taking his boat out of action and heading to Saigon unbeknownst to his commanders. He should have been kicked out of the Navy.
Because they are leftist shills who don’t have writing talent or a brain - whenever they want the REAL story they go to moveon.org. Brainless twits They only have their jobs because they keep spewing what their massas tell them.
Absolutely agree.
The Swift Boat Veterans have been smeared by consistently calling them liars and co-opting the term “swiftboating” to mean something disreputable.
It is a shame this was allowed to happen, just as many actions of Bush/Cheney have been.
We can only hope that the lack of denial in the short term will be balanced by the long lens of history.
Has this piece of crap released his military records, YET?
Sliver here, Purple Heat, Purple Heart.
Lying ? Surely not “the Cambodian Kid”
As a Vietnam Veteran I only need to know one thing. He got 3 purple hearts with no time lost on duty (no hospitalization or convalescence). The three purple hearts earned him an early release from Vietnam. if that isn’t fishy as hell, nothing is.
Excellent article S!
Same thing happened to Nixon.
Who can protect that abysmal clod Kerry except the “New England” elites who consider themselves superior to we outlanders.
There’s rumors that he was...
I think he WAS kicked out of the Navy. If you look at the timeline from the day he joined the Navy Reserve until the day he got his “Honorable Discharge”, he would have had to re-enlist somewhere along the line.
I think the reason he won’t allow his record to be released is because it will show a less than honorable discharge, followed by a pardon by Jimmmy Carter when he declared an amnesty for Viet Nam war draft dodgers.
John Kerry, prove me wrong.
I trained with the Navy on inshore operations with PBR boats and served with the Army in the RVN. At that time it was Navy policy to return anyone that earned a purple heart be returned to the fleet...reason being that they have done their duty for God and country.
As a consequence many Navy guys refused a purple heart and was grateful to be returned to duty with the brown water Navy...they had their reasons for not wanting to be part of the fleet Navy, mostly they welcomed the opportunity for direct action.
They took shrapnel over and over to be with their brothers...Kerry was a political whore. He insisted on purple hearts to enhance his career.
Stands to reason he’s a phony and fits hand in glove with his gigoloness.
What a piece of human garbage.
The liberal media takes great pleasure in stigmatizing the Swift Boat vets. Sure, there is a lot of “he-said, he-said” stuff about what Kerry did at 10 am on a distant Vietnam river four decades ago. But both sides should be heard.
By trying to shout down the Swift Boaters, the media ignores the most important accomplishment of the advertisements. After the war, Kerry tossed away his supposed war medals (that’s another story)and said horrible things about his comrades on the battle field. The Swift Boaters brought Kerry’s reprehensible anti-war deeds to the attention of the public after the media had long ignored them.
That’s what sank the campaign boat of the not-so-swift John Francois Kerry. The Swift Boaters told the world not just about what Kerry did during the war but after it.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000%5C000%5C004%5C481yyfvo.asp?pg=2
Kerry served in Vietnam from November 1968 to March 1969, and he related Coppola’s movie to his own experience. “On more than one occasion,” he went on, “I, like Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now, took my patrol boat into Cambodia.” Kerry continued: “In fact I remember spending Christmas Eve of 1968 five miles across the Cambodian border being shot at by our South Vietnamese allies who were drunk and celebrating Christmas. The absurdity of almost being killed by our own allies in a country in which President Nixon claimed there were no American troops was very real.” It was that same absurdity which Coppola failed to capture in the film, Kerry said.
Kerry’s criticism was biting, but his implied chronology was off. President Nixon didn’t claim there were no American troops in Cambodia in December 1968. Indeed, he couldn’t have. He wasn’t president until January 20, 1969. Nevertheless, Kerry continued to recount his Christmas Eve adventure in the waters of Cambodia after he was elected to the Senate in 1984.
For example, on March 27, 1986, Kerry took to the floor of the Senate to protest President Reagan’s funding of the anti-Communist contras in Nicaragua. Like many Kerry speeches, this one warned against American intervention abroad by resurrecting the specter of the U.S. defeat in Vietnam: “Mr. President, I remember Christmas of 1968 sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia,” Kerry began. “I remember what it was like to be shot at by Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge and Cambodians, and have the president of the United States telling the American people that I was not there; the troops were not in Cambodia.”
I saved the Swiftboat Vet’s TV advertisements. They are by far the most effective political advertising I have ever seen, and by a long margin.
The emotional intensity of the ads is still overwhelming, of the few voices who spoke for an entire generation of Vietnam Veterans, who had remained silent through 30 years of slander and libel. The intense pain, the feelings of betrayal by a Democrat congress, the loneliness and despair of returning to a nation a broad section of which had been turned against them in their time.
How they have had to live all these years, as a honey-tongued scoundrel-traitor was first elevated to Senator, then dreamed of becoming president.
John Kerry was a traitor. And like Benedict Arnold before him, he will never be free of that stigma, a hundred years after he is moldering in the ground. He had and has no shame about being a traitor, but at least, good people denied him his hearts’ desire. Small justice, but justice none the less.
What the Swift Vets had to say went far beyond "he said, she said" disagreements. Their testimony about Kerry's actions was carefully validated, cross-checked, and backed by legal affidavits. See Chapter 10 of To Set The Record Straight for an example of just how devastating those accounts could be.
Also telling is the fact that Kerry didn’t mention being “illegally ordered to fight in Cambodia” at any time before Apocalypse Now came out, ten years after he left Vietnam. During his two hours of 1971 Senate testimony representing the VVAW, a radical group that had vowed to “shut down America’s cities” if the US expanded the war into Laos (to go after the Ho Chi Minh Trail), Kerry never offered a word about the subject.
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Wow potlatch -
Lots of those complex banners I once made -
I cannot believe how many animations I included in the NYT’s banner
Yep, clear back in ‘05. You made neat things and posted to a crowd!!
Eyewitness acounts can be notoriously unreliable, whether yesterday or forty years ago. Even smart, well-meaning people can make mistakes.
That said, I’d give the benefit of the doubt to the Swift Boaters. Kerry seems like a pompous glory-hungry blowhard. His three Purple Hearts seem highly dubious, to say the least. But battlefield exaggerations are hard to prove or disprove. Crazy things can happen in war, and I think most people understand that.
The public (particularly non-aligned veterans) was most upset by what with they saw with their own eyes — the disgraceful Congressional testimony and throwing away the medals. For resurrecting those long forgotten television images, the Swift Boaters deserve the highest commendation. They can proudly count themselves among the greatest veterans in history.
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I almost forgot some of them
The Hillary bannner with the Rose (Law Firm) popping up was a funny touch
Lots of experimenting at ImageMagick
That was a nice presentation of the facts.
Thanks for the ping. I’m glad I was able to read it.
Thanks also for the continued admirable devotion to this subject.
We the people ought to demand that we see his military combat record, and his chain of command needs to man up to the charges, he is a typical AH
BUMP!
Nice work, Scott.
Follow-up — I reread your post. It is indeed interesting, as you say, that the Swifters saw Kerry’s post-war comments as the biggest target of the ads.
That was very smart and timely. The media certainly downplayed what young Kerry did after he came home. They were too busy swooning and bedazzling over the fact that he actually saluted the Democratic convention at the start of his acceptance speech.
Good grief, I forgot the meaning of the rose!
You used to love doing them and they are too good to ever lose, so I save them.
I have been convinced that he has gotten away with concealing the truth of his discharge ever since Tom Lipscomb published this article a few days before the 2004 election. (And the MSM covered it up).
http://www.nysun.com/national/kerrys-discharge-is-questioned-by-an-ex-jag/4040/
Someone from the Harvard admissions committee revealed that the real reason he wasnt admitted to Harvard Law School was concern that he would be ineligible to practice law because of his less than honorable discharge from the Navy.
You didn’t bother to read the chapter I linked, did you?
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I used a lot of subliminal imagery in those banners
It was a challenge to see what I could do in many of them
I doubt that I could duplicate most of them - I had to write detaile notes and parameters and often back up and upload early partial versions so I could develop other themes later
Kerry had a paper and audio trail
Obama had mostly a hidden trail and self-invented history
An empty canvas they painted with HOPE & CHANGE
No. I appreciate you providing the link.
Over the years, I’ve learned enough about war and the unreliability of eyewitnesses to make a judgment on this particular question.
[I used a lot of subliminal imagery in those banners]
Yes and people often miss it, I have myself or I’ve forgotten. But when we are creating we know what we are putting in and the meaning of it.
Kerry, and his “Christmas in Cambodia” and his Purple Hearts for a scratch on the arm, rice in the butt....how can we ever forget his deceptions?
Excellent article! Thanks. Yes, the leftist propaganda must be endlessly opposed. This is what President George W. Bush and his administration should have done every day.
It sure doesn't show. I'd be a little more humble if I were you.
Didn’t John McCain publically scoff at the Swift Boat Vets during the 2004 campaign? Am I remembering that correctly?
(I know Kerry scoffed at them)
He did indeed, to his lasting discredit.
Absolutely. Cheney is finally making a powerful and effective case for Bush's wartime policies, but the Bush Administration allowed attack after attack by the DNC Media (Katrina, yellowcake, WMDs, "war crimes," and on and on) to go unanswered.
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How does your .gif look at 980x735 potlatch?
Betty Boop is always popping up somewhere!
“To Set The Record Straight” is a fantastic book, far more than just a recounting of the Swiftboat Vets episode during the Kerry Campaign. It really tells the entire history of MSM complicity with the radical left against the American military, from Vietnam until today.
It looks fine devolve, the width is good.
Lol, not YOUR Betty Boop!
If I recall a few years ago, she once ‘booped’ too far, lol!
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