Posted on 08/06/2004 9:41:04 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
A group of Vietnam veterans launched an assault on Senator John Kerry's war record yesterday as the fight for the presidency turned ugly.
Thirteen men from the naval patrol squadron in which Mr Kerry served, calling themselves "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth", appeared in a television advertisement accusing him of claiming falsely to be a hero.
They said he lied to win his gallantry medals and alleged that he committed abuses against civilians in the Mekong Delta.
Mr Kerry's campaign team retorted that none of the veterans had served in Mr Kerry's patrol boats.
Mr Kerry has faced criticism for years within the fractious world of Vietnam veterans. Many have never forgiven him for his role as a leading anti-war activist who said his fellow American soldiers committed war crimes.
But the new allegations are among the gravest he has faced and his public accusers now include the admiral who was in charge of his unit.
Mr Kerry's war record is a cornerstone of the Democratic campaign, which has worked to make stars of the five surviving men who served on Mr Kerry's boats, calling them his "band of brothers".
They appeared on stage before his key acceptance speech to the recent Democratic convention. One, Gene Thorson, told reporters: "These assertions are garbage. These people weren't there with John Kerry."
Mr Kerry received backing yesterday from his friend Senator John McCain, who faced similar attacks over his Vietnam war record during his bitterly fought 2000 primary fight against George W Bush for the Republican presidential nomination.
Mr McCain, who spent five years being tortured in a Hanoi prison camp, said the attacks on Mr Kerry were "dishonest and dishonourable" and urged the Bush campaign to condemn them.
"It was the same kind of deal that was pulled on me," said Mr McCain, referring to the rumours spread against him by Vietnam veterans and Bush supporters in 2000.
Mr McCain and Mr Kerry are hated by some veterans for chairing a Senate investigation which rejected long-standing claims that there are still American prisoners of war hidden in Vietnam by the communist authorities.
The "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" said in their new advertisement "John Kerry is no war hero" and "John Kerry cannot be trusted."
The advertisement is to run in a handful of closely tied "swing states".
A book, Unfit for Command, to be published next week, alleges that Mr Kerry lied to win his Silver Star for gallantry, stating: "Kerry earned his Silver Star by killing a lone, fleeing, teenage Viet Cong in a loincloth."
It also alleges that Mr Kerry used a Zippo lighter to burn a village to the ground and ordered farm animals to be shot.
I'm afraid that one by one, these people will start dropping out like flies thanks to the strong arm tactics of the Kerry campaign.
The information is now out there. If Americans refuse to accept these truths, we are the worse for it.
Mr Kerry has faced criticism for years within the fractious world of Vietnam veterans. Many have never forgiven him for his role as a leading anti-war activist who said his fellow American soldiers committed war crimes.
Mr McCain, who spent five years being tortured in a Hanoi prison camp, said the attacks on Mr Kerry were "dishonest and dishonourable" and urged the Bush campaign to condemn them.
It's good it's in a British paper and getting covered.
"My name is Steve Gardner. I served in 1966 and 1967 on my first tour of duty in Vietnam on Swift boats, and I did my second tour in '68 and '69, involved with John Kerry in the last 2 1/2 months of my tour. The John Kerry that I know is not the John Kerry that everybody else is portraying. I served alongside him and behind him, five feet away from him in a gun tub, and watched as he made indecisive moves with our boat, put our boats in jeopardy, put our crews in jeopardy... if a man like that can't handle that 6-man crew boat, how can you expect him to be our Commander-in-Chief?"
-- Steven Gardner
The above quote was from a press conference given at the National Press Club in Washington on May 4, 2004. You may view Steven’s comments at the following web site. Just scroll down to Steven’s picture and click on it.
http://swift1.he.net/~swiftvet/index.php?topic=SwiftVetQuotes
Searching through that web site, you will find 250 men who served on Swift boats, including the entire chain of command above Lt. Kerry, agree with Steven Gardner that Kerry is not fit to be Commander-in-Chief. That compares to the 13 crew members who support his candidacy.
Ping!
McCain needs to come to grips with the fact that he lost South Carolina becuase nobody cared about his # 1 issue : Campaign Finance Reform. Bush's #1 issue was tax cuts, which everyone cared about.
Personally, McCain had high positives and low negatives in South Carolina. This notion that he was victimized by a smear campaign is demonstrably bogus.
Considering the first drop-out, I fear your prediction may be accurate. However, there will still be the freelance satirists sniping at Herr Kerry.
Mark Twain once observed that only dead men can tell the whole truth in this world. As a corollary, I'd say that only the humorists can tell the whole truth in such a way that the Demoncrats won't notice until it's too late. >B)
August 6, 2004
Below the belt
Simon Jeffery on dirty tricks in US politics
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/comment/story/0,14259,1278021,00.html
This time last week, John Kerry was pictured in a salute on the front of US newspapers, telling the nation that he was "reporting for duty".
Today, his political opponents are hoping to take the shine off his military record with allegations that he won his five medals by lies and subterfuge.
An advertisement broadcast last night in the swing states of Wisconsin, Ohio and West Virginia - where a few votes could make all the difference - featured veterans such as Larry Thurlow telling voters: "When the chips were down, you could not count on John Kerry."
Mr Thurlow was in Vietnam at the same time as the presidential candidate, but he was not one of the men who had served on his Mekong delta swiftboat. Mr Kerry describes them as his "band of brothers", and they portray him as a courageous fighter and hero.
Mr Kerry's supporters, who have made much of his service in contrast to that of George Bush - who was excused Vietnam duty to serve in the Texas National Air Guard - are alleging dirty tricks.
The advert is part of a coordinated campaign. A week on Sunday, a book called Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry, will be published, co-authored by former swiftboat commander John O'Neill.
It alleges that the wounds Mr Kerry won his three purple heart medals for were not worthy of the awards and, in at least two cases, had been self-inflicted in order to get him off the battlefield.
It argues that for him to run for president with such a record while faulting his opponent's would "represent unbelievable hypocrisy and the truly bottom rung of human conduct".
The Republican senator John McCain, a Vietnam veteran, spoke out after the advert's screening to "deplore" the tactics. When he ran against Mr Bush for the Republican nomination in 2000, he had to fight off allegations that being a captive (he was held in solitary confinement for three years) was not as heroic as actively attacking the enemy. Yesterday, he called on the White House to condemn the "dishonest and dishonourable" commercial.
Mr Bush's spokesman, Scott McCellan, did not denounce the advert but the money that paid for it - so-called "soft money", which is collected by independent political funds known as 527s. These are not counted as the Bush or Kerry campaigns so long as they do not actively call on voters to elect either man. Criticising a candidate's record is, however, fair game.
Therefore, neither of the parties behind the advert are part of the Republican party or the Bush campaign. Swift Boat Veterans for Truth is a 527, and Regnery Press is a commercial (although politically committed) publishing company. However, a look at the people who connect the enterprises reveals them to be part of a rich partisan tapestry.
Mr O'Neill is the link between them. As well as being the book's co-author, he is a member of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth steering committee. The group was set up with the help of Merrie Spaeth, the widow of Tex Lezar, who was Republican candidate for lieutenant governor of Texas in the same year that Mr Bush ran for governor. He was a partner of Mr O'Neill's at their Houston law firm.
Regnery, meanwhile, proclaims itself to be the leading conservative publisher in the US. Acquired by Republican donor Thomas Philips in 1993, it is a subsidiary of Eagle Publishing, which is using its flagship Human Events magazine to promote Unfit for Command and build up its subscription base and mailing lists.
Regnery publishes on any number of topics (from threats to marriage to a defence of assault rifles), but scored a number of hits in the Clinton years with titles such as the conservative columnist Ann Coulter's High Crimes and Misdemeanors: the case against Bill Clinton.
The most notorious - Gary Aldrich's Unlimited Access: an FBI agent inside the Clinton White House - depicted the executive mansion as a den of debauchery, drug-taking and gay sex. One section claimed the president was smuggled out under a rug for trysts with a female celebrity in a nearby hotel. Mr Aldrich admitted in the book that many of his allegations were, at best, second-hand.
On top of this, the O'Neill/Regnery axis has links going back to Richard Nixon. Also a swift boat commander in Vietnam, Mr O'Neill was hired by presidential aide Charles Colson in 1971 to discredit the recently returned Mr Kerry's campaign against the war. Mr Kerry reputedly beat him in a nationally televised debate on the Dick Cavett Show.
Sidney Blumenthal, a Guardian columnist and former adviser to Mr Clinton, said he saw nothing new in Mr O'Neill's book and the campaign mounted by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. "It reeks of partisan dirty tricks, and the facts simply don't hold up at all. The intent is simply to dirty Kerry," he said. "They have been trying to do this for a long time. Regardless of whether it is false, they will put it out to see if it will hurt."
The truth of the allegations is disputed by the Kerry campaign, and contradicts the most authoritative account of his time in Vietnam, Douglas Brinkley's Tour of Duty. The author is director of the Eisenhower Centre for American Studies at New Orleans university, which specialises in military history.
But the truth does not matter - to confuse the issue of Mr Kerry's military service, which he has made such a strong part of his campaign, is enough to occupy the candidate, distract him and muddy his record.
It is not the first time dirty tricks have surfaced in the 2004 campaign. The Drudge Report (which has served as a conduit for the allegations over Mr Kerry's Vietnam service, including allegations that he slaughtered livestock and burned down a village with a Zippo lighter) ran reports in February that the Massachusetts senator had an affair with an intern. There was no truth in it.
Later, a photograph emerged of Mr Kerry at a rally with Jane Fonda, the actress who visited Hanoi during the war and, to some, will forever be known as Hanoi Jane. It was proven to be a fake.
"In all this campaign, attacking Kerry on his Vietnam heroism has always backfired," Mr Blumenthal commented.
"It is particularly ironic and dangerous, given the fact that Bush is withholding national service records that that show he did not show up for duty in the Alabama national guard, and that he has still not come clean about why he was suspended from flying in the Texas air national guard after refusing to take a physical."
Of course, Democrats are not the only victims of dirty tricks. The emergence of documents detailing Mr Bush's arrest for drink-driving a few days before the last presidential election was blamed in some quarters for the closeness of the result and his failure to win the popular vote.
Around the time of the Kerry intern allegations, the Republican national committee chairman, Ed Gillespie, expressed outrage that the musician Moby, a Kerry supporter, had told the New York Daily News it would be possible to spread anti-Bush gossip on the internet to bring down his support among, for example, anti-abortionists.
He then turned it into a pre-emptive rebuttal of a rumour that did not even exist, opening up the interesting question of whether allegations of dirty tricks constituted a form of dirty campaigning.
"We know now that, some time this fall, Kerry campaign operatives intend to go into pro-life chatrooms on the internet to spread a scurrilous story that President Bush drove a former girlfriend to an abortion clinic and paid for her abortion," Mr Gillespie told the Washington Times.
Dirty campaigning is nothing new in US politics: in 1800, Thomas Jefferson was accused of favouring the teaching of "murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest".
One of Mr Nixon's operatives, Donald Segretti, was imprisoned for illegal campaign material, including faked letters alleging that a senator had fathered an illegitimate child with a 17-year-old.
The 2004 race for the White House is close, and we should not be surprised to see more dirty campaigning between now and November.
Thread http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1186374/posts where you can get the DD form 180 for Kerry to sign to release his records.
I agree. He is like a moth to the flame. He has to be in the limelight and feels he, and he alone, has the right to speak on these issues. He turned into a bore with a constant need to put himself in the news.
What is really disgusting is the Kerry-support media, who are obviously now going after the guy who (reason unknown but its clear) did recant his statement, BUT THEY ARE NOT AT ALL SEEKING THE OTHER MEN WHO PROVIDED DAMNING TESTIMONY ABOUT KERRY!!!! Oh, that must just be a coincidence, RIGHT? :-)
Yes, the leftist media will be doing everything it can to support any statements or issues that would in any way, discount these Vet's statements. They will have a tough time -- How do you discredit REAL decorated war heros??? You really can't and the media is just beside themselves that they can't - and niether can the Kerry mob. But they can, and will, try to discredit those who support these men.
I hope the book, UNFIT FOR COMMAND, stays on the best-seller list for a long time, and that Kerry gets what this charlatan deserves from it. More negative points, than he already has, which is hard to realize but....
But....but, there is no bias in the media.
Has McCain undergon a lobotomy since 1973?
" But McCain had harsh words for his future senate colleague in 1973 when he wrote an article for the U.S. News & World Report. McCain said that the communist captors who held him at the infamous Hanoi Hilton for five years tried to demoralize him with the public statements of Kerry and other Democrats including Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA) who talked of war crimes committed by U.S. soldiers.
McCain said, "All through this period [they] were bombarding us with anti-war quotes from people in high places back in Washington. This was the most effective propaganda they had to use against us."
Just which side of your mouth is McCain speaking out of now?
Above quote from here
Bump!!
The hilarious thing is now the Bush White House is the only one putting this issue in terms of Campaign Finance Reform. "You're right! This is dispicible! We must end the 527 loophole right now!"
The Dems, McCain and the lapdog media were harping on Campain Finance Reform endlessly throughout the entire 2000 campaign. Anyone who predicted that McCain-Feingold would turn out like this was accused of running a smear campaign from Bob Jones University.
WATCH THIS VIDEO!
http://www.rjwest.com/blog/video1.wmv
(How do you save a target so that it can be clicked on, anyway?)
"Mr Kerry received backing yesterday from his friend Senator John McCain, who faced similar attacks over his Vietnam war record during his bitterly fought 2000 primary fight against George W Bush for the Republican presidential nomination.
Mr McCain, who spent five years being tortured in a Hanoi prison camp, said the attacks on Mr Kerry were "dishonest and dishonourable" and urged the Bush campaign to condemn them."
Has McCain undergone a lobotomy since 1973?
" But McCain had harsh words for his future senate colleague in 1973 when he wrote an article for the U.S. News & World Report. McCain said that the communist captors who held him at the infamous Hanoi Hilton for five years tried to demoralize him with the public statements of Kerry and other Democrats including Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA) who talked of war crimes committed by U.S. soldiers.
McCain said, "All through this period [they] were bombarding us with anti-war quotes from people in high places back in Washington. This was the most effective propaganda they had to use against us."
Just which side of his mouth is McCain speaking out of now?
Above quote from here
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