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John Kerry's soldier-smearing
Townhall.com ^ | 8/25/04 | Brent Bozell

Posted on 08/25/2004 3:28:05 AM PDT by Dane

John Kerry's soldier-smearing
Brent Bozell

August 25, 2004 | Print | Send

It's late August, and someone in America decided it's time to scrutinize John Kerry's life story on television. For a week in Boston, John F. Kerry wrapped himself around a war effort he had spent decades denouncing, and Dan, Peter and Tom sat around and nodded. No one even considered the possibility that Kerry could be -- should be -- challenged on any point of his self-serving history.

Then the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth came along and shattered that mythology. Without their TV ads, the pro-Kerry media would have spent the entire election year with their collective fingers in their ears avoiding any criticism about the life story of the man who would be president.

While reporters breathlessly pass on the Kerry protests that he's the victim of an unproven "smear," from January to August, and on a smaller scale stretching back to the Vietnam War itself, our "prestige press" has been spreading around John Kerry's unsubstantiated war-hero stories without any troublesome fact-checking, or even a simple request to Kerry for confirmation. John Kerry has refused to release his records, refused to debate his fellow veterans and refused to ask his personal biographer Doug Brinkley to release his vaunted wartime journals, and yet nobody in the liberal "news" media cares.

Now, in a second ad, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth have raised the issue of John Kerry's scabrous testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee in April, 1971. If you rely on the conventional news media, you are unfamiliar with this testimony, except, perhaps, for the often-quoted Kerry line, "How can you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

That's gripping rhetoric, but not the substance of the smear. The meat of the testimony, as featured in the new Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ad, is when young Kerry starts repeating the claims of alleged fellow veterans that "on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command," American soldiers "raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies (sic), randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks and generally ravaged the countryside" of South Vietnam.

He did not excuse his Swift Boat brothers in his declaration of collective military guilt: "We rationalized destroying villages in order to save them."

How many times have our most "reliable" hard news outlets passed along this passage of monstrous American evil that so inflames the veterans against John Kerry? A Nexis search reveals a list of some of the national outlets that had never relayed a quote of these words before the second Swift Vet ad was released: CBS, NBC, National Public Radio, Time, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, the Los Angeles Times and USA Today. Here are the major newspapers who've captured this testimony exactly once : The Washington Post and The New York Times, buried inside their papers on Saturdays in late February. ABC repeated one snippet of the paragraph, the "Genghis Khan" snippet, in four stories surrounding the anniversary of the testimony in April. Kerry said then: "I'm sorry that they're offended by that, but that's what happened."

Liberal reporters must wonder why they should have to focus on this paragraph. To them, there was nothing outrageous in asserting in 1971 that we were there to kill communism, but "we found instead that we were killing women and children." Or that America's achievement in Vietnam to that date was creating "a nation of refugees, bomb craters, amputees, orphans, widows and prostitutes." (Those lines are from Kerry, too, from his book, "The New Soldier.")

Reporters are supposed to be our best and brightest creators of the first draft of history, but it somehow befuddles them that Vietnam veterans take this wild testimony about daily commander-sanctioned atrocities by U.S. fighting men as a dramatic smear on their reputations.

One would think that newspaper men and women, more than anyone else, would be skeptical of unverified allegations, especially, as the Washington Post's Paul Farhi acknowledged in February, when "many of the alleged atrocities have never been verified, and some have been disproved." Why has Kerry not been pressed on the veracity of his own testimony?

The sad thing is that young Kerry was completely celebrated at that time by the "objective" news media, including a laudatory profile on "60 Minutes" asking if he would be president some day. Did no one care about the veracity of these scattershot smears, or did the press just despise the war so much that any lie that hastened its end was a good lie? Is that good lie the only thing that matters to our media today?


TOPICS: Editorial; News/Current Events; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: bozell; kerry; swiftboatveterans
Jim Quinn, Warroom.com is saying there are rumors that kerry is trying to get a another puff piece 60 Minutes interview, ala Clinton.
1 posted on 08/25/2004 3:28:06 AM PDT by Dane
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To: Dane

thank you, very illuminating. :))


2 posted on 08/25/2004 3:49:29 AM PDT by skinkinthegrass (Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they aren't out to get you :)
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To: Dane

did the press just despise the war so much that any lie that hastened its end was a good lie? Is that good lie the only thing that matters to our media today?



%%%%%%


Yes, of course. Look at the extremely biased reporting about the Abu Ghraib scandal, and refusal to cover the atrocities commited by Iraqis against Americans.


3 posted on 08/25/2004 3:59:02 AM PDT by maica (BIG Media is not mainstream. We are right. They are left, not center.)
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To: Dane

Bump


4 posted on 08/25/2004 4:02:44 AM PDT by The Mayor (God gives grace for this life and glory in the life to come.)
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To: Dane

LOVE that site.
Thank you.
This caught my attention:

http://www.warroom.com/2004highlights/mysticiraq.htm

I have been saying this all along.
The towns where most of the "guilty" soldiers come from are Dem-worshipping.

*Who* -paid- for this "scandal"?


5 posted on 08/25/2004 4:28:30 AM PDT by Salamander (Is my schadenfreudian slip showing?)
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To: maica

Read this:

http://www.warroom.com/2004highlights/mysticiraq.htm

With all my heart, I believe that the "scandal" was planned and executed intentionally to influence the election.


6 posted on 08/25/2004 4:30:57 AM PDT by Salamander (Is my schadenfreudian slip showing?)
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To: Dane

Not having a strong third party candidate in the race such as a Ross Perot has allowed the public to focus their attention on two candidates. This has not been good for John Kerry. For every vote Nader takes away, if he had been a significant force in this contest, it might have kept the Swift Boat Vets from making such deep inroads. Kerry has fought to keep Nader off the front pages and that, in the long run, may hurt more than help.


7 posted on 08/25/2004 4:47:57 AM PDT by Jack Bull
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To: Dane

8 posted on 08/25/2004 4:54:28 AM PDT by wolicy_ponk (Kerry, follow me no closer than 1000 yards, or I'll teach you what a real purple heart is. -T.Peck)
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To: Dane
This represents one of the ways the liberals are making use of their willing accomplices in the media. The test case was Hillary... she was able to conduct her entire campaign without exposing herself to a single hostile interview. At the same time, the press submits every Republican ad to extensive scrutiny, airing every outraged complaint from the other side, focussing on the motivations of those who made the ad and those who funded them.

It looks like Kerry was fully expecting to run the Hillary press playbook, but something went wrong. The swift-boat vets were just a symptom of a larger problem though. I don't think a President Hillary campaign will go pretty much like the Senator Hillary campaign went. Kerry's basic problem is not the Swifties, its that the left isn't really that happy with him. We shouldn't expect this dynamic with Hillary in 2008.

(steely)

9 posted on 08/25/2004 5:16:49 AM PDT by Steely Tom
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To: wolicy_ponk
Love your graphic!! Listen to what Freeper N. Theknow says:
"It’s faster than a checkbook, more powerful than a Democratic demagogue, able to lay waste to a liar Kerry with the single click of a mouse. It's a little bird of truth, it's plain to see Kerry's unfit... it's... it's...SuperFReep!

Want to join in the fun?
Click the logo to donate to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth!

10 posted on 08/25/2004 6:09:39 AM PDT by Chieftain (Support the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and expose Hanoi John's FRAUD!)
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I just got this EXPOSE KERRY'S FRAUD SWIFT BOAT VETERANS FOR TRUTH sticker on my truck yesterday afternoon.

Made by fellow FReeper disabled vet who has a bone to pick with Kerry, like we all do!
Large $20 (24" Wide 12" Tall) like mine
Small $10 (12" Wide 6" Tall)
Profits go to SwiftVets.com

FReep mail for details.

11 posted on 08/25/2004 6:10:10 AM PDT by Chieftain (Support the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and expose Hanoi John's FRAUD!)
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To: Salamander

I also believe that this scandal was instigated. The antiwar protestors of the human shield variety -

Ramsay Clark
Brian Becker
Medea Benjamin
etc

went very silent after the fighting started last spring.

I am sure they did not stop plotting against President Bush and the administration.just because they stayed out of the news.

I have also read quotes of Michael Moore saying the he had cameras in Baghdad.

I have no doubt that the dimwits of Abu Ghraib were tools of antiAmericans.


12 posted on 08/25/2004 6:46:08 AM PDT by maica (BIG Media is not mainstream. We are right. They are left, not center.)
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