John Kerry has been able to convince about 13 men who served on Swift boats in the Mekong Delta to support him, 7 or 8 of whom were at various times crew members on his own 6-man boat.
That "wiggle room" between "7 or 8" does not bode well for swiftvets' arguments. It means that they do not know.
www.swiftvets.com makes this statement in the very first line at their website:
Senator John Kerry has made his 4-month combat tour in Vietnam the centerpiece of his bid for the Presidency.
That statement is also not accurate. Senator Kerry has not made his combat tour the centerpiece. His combat tour is a key ingredient, but it is not the centerpiece of John Kerry's campaign.
His campaign is philanthropic bigwig limousine-liberal largesse, a government of issue-reactionaries, that is, at the behest of the trial-lawyer directorate a.k.a. socialist government by judiciary.
He proposes collegial consensus, that is, success is measured by "the dialog" and how much of it there is, but not how productive nor actually decisive.
He proposes no direction other than the the secret 5-year plan that Democrats are loathe to talk about publicly, but toward which, the public is herded by selections taken in response to "the politics of the moment," from the liberals' socialist thesarus of adjectives:
what we are told by the Democrats, the public must fear.
The centerpiece of the Kerry/Edwards campaign for the Presidency, is to make enemies of the state:
people who think critically,
people who are self-determined,
people who dare to show initiative without union bosses' sanctions, and
people who live by standards of decency not set by the nationalizing socialist directorate a.k.a. Democrat Party.
Kerry's problem is not that he overstates his case.
Kerry's problem is that he is wreckless when he is scared; he finds security in the sound of gunfire; he thinks that the measure of a person's success, on up to the White House, is the appearance of success.
He grew up among financially-conservative liberals, and he noted the appearance of their sucesses, and he modeled himself after those appearances, and he has been adjusting the rudder ever since.
His failure is not that so much that he has puffed up his own sails.
His failure is that he has not much of a basis in living as a producer of either goods or services and hence, knowing the burdens and consequences of what life is like at the top of a 5-store hardware chain spanning two States, keeping 74 employees on the job, paying taxes and replying to the federal leviathan's regulations of, ever-more, everything.
The secret, unfortunately, for his success, is that there is no secret. Rather, there is the appearance of their being a secret.
He grew up surrounded by the appearances of accomplishment(s), and so he sought to reproduce the same, in order to be accomplished.
That, is his campaign.
He's not a bad guy; he's really, still, just the new guy, because he never stuck around where he would have to live with his decisions as a leader or as a follower.
If he had, he might know why we have a Constitution and are supposed to make laws by way of, and due process of, our legislative bodies --- because he would have some understanding of construction, as distinguished from concocting stories.
Management is not all pressing the flesh.
High-strength bolts from the foundary must meet technical requirements. Every day. Without interruption.
The federal government is now, almost all about, interruption of productivity and interruption of economic growth, and interruption to the point of utter dictation about how people are supposed to press the flesh in the workplace.
Where it is getting uncomfortable enough that more and more people spend more and more time on seeking consensus, because they are not getting along well, under the burdens imposed upon their productivity.
The once simple act of using a de-burring knife to clean up a metal part, is now a Supreme Court case, because lawyers are stripping the federal government of the boundaries imposed upon it, by our Constitution, and the same lawyers are building up boundaries around the people.
Which might sink in, if you put down the iPod and step away from your reality, and try moving forward, toward the preservation of liberty and its foundations.
That gave us originally, our Constitution that was written as a testament of man's diversity, before the modern pop-diversity was marketed to give the appearance of individuality for the socialist "like-minded."
As a young man, John Kerry observed what was marketed as being successful, among high-up liberals, and his life's work has been to convince them that he is like-minded.
For as much as some people are focused on his military record, that unknown quantity, what he will really do, is as unknown among his political party's followers.
President Bush learned a hard lesson when the (Iraq) prison scandel blew up in his face; he learned that he must also be the IGl; he learned that he needed to do more, to learn "what happened on the plant floor."
Well, Bush is a failure alright, but that is because his failures are not a secret.
That, is becoming the secret of his success.
Keating thought, with wistful bitterness, of how conscientiously they had worked, he and the seven other architects, designing those buildings. It was true that he had pushed himself forward and hogged the publicity, but he certainly had not done that as far as designing was concerned. They had worked in harmony, through conference after conference, each giving in to the others, in true collective spirit, none trying to impose his personal prejudices or selfish ideas...
While I was looking for that quote, I found this one on the previous page:
"A complicated piece of machinery, such as our society... and by pressing your little finger against one spot... the center of all its gravity... you can make the thing crumble into a worthless heap of scrap iron..."