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Posted on 08/29/2004 8:39:24 AM PDT by Pikamax
Sunday, Aug. 29, 2004 What the Swifties Cost Us Campaign 2004 gets mired in the Mekong Delta By JOE KLEIN
On the day that the swift boat controversy reached a rabid apogee—that would be the day a Bush campaign lawyer resigned because of his ties to the Swifties, and Max Cleland made the stagy delivery of a protest letter to the Bush ranch—a woman named Elba Nieves stood at a town meeting in Philadelphia and told John Kerry that she had recently been laid off. The candidate proceeded to ask her a series of questions. She answered with quiet dignity. She had worked in a ribbon factory for four years.
She said the company was having trouble keeping up with foreign competitors and was forced to close when it was refused a new bank loan. She was given no notice of termination, no severance package. Her shift—about 300 people—was simply called together at the end of a workday and dismissed. "They were changing the locks even before we left," she added. The audience, composed mostly of trade unionists, gasped and groaned.
I called Nieves the next day to check the details of her story, and, as it happened, there were some complicating factors. First, she admitted that her question had been precooked—her union had asked her to come to the event and tell the story. Kerry turned to Nieves immediately; her question was the first.
This, in itself, isn't a terrible thing: George Bush constantly manages to "find" small-business people at his town meetings whose companies are booming because of his tax cuts. But Nieves went on to tell me that she recently had been called back to work at the ribbon factory and refused to return, on the advice of her union, because the company wouldn't continue her health insurance.
Hmm, I thought: If I were a coldhearted political operative, I could get some rich friends to finance a group of Nieves' fellow employees—perhaps those who had returned to work without health insurance—call them Ribbon Workers for Truth and make this poor woman's life a trial. (As it is, I've acted as a Not-So-Swift Columnist for Truth by revealing some of the more problematic details of her story.) Ribbon Workers for Truth would be a nasty bit of business. It would purposely elide the most important fact—the larger truth—of Nieves' story: that she was laid off, and in a particularly brutal way.
As she left the factory on Aug. 4, she had no idea how she would support her three children. She still doesn't know. And the uncertainty of her fate is a question with enormous political ramifications: What do we, as a nation, do about the downside of economic globalization? In fact, the real reason why Ribbon Workers for Truth would exist would be to divert attention from that question.
The Ribbies would also turn Nieves' refusal to return to work without a health plan into a "character" issue—and thus evade the essential ridiculousness of a health-insurance system that would usually provide Nieves care (through Medicaid) if she were on welfare but doesn't if she is working a full-time job for an employer without a health plan.
But we're not talking only about Elba Nieves here, are we? Now that the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth have turned out to be anything but—the only "lies" they've turned up are a mistaken date or a mild Kerry exaggeration about operating in Cambodia and a Purple Heart received for a minor wound—we are told their real gripe is that Kerry protested the war after he came home and sullied their service by testifying to atrocities committed by American troops in Vietnam.
These are heartfelt gripes, perhaps, but wrong on the merits. Kerry's protest was not only honorable, it was accurate. The war in Vietnam was an unnecessary disaster, entered into under false pretenses—the fabricated Gulf of Tonkin incident—and fought because of a mistaken intellectual theory: that the Vietnamese national liberation movement was part of an international communist conspiracy to overwhelm Asia. (The subsequent war between Vietnam and China put a crimp in that one.) And, yes, there were atrocities aplenty.
I spent three years in the 1980s writing about a platoon of former Marines, men I consider heroes, and several unburdened themselves of awful memories before we were done: tossing a Vietnamese prisoner out of a helicopter, shooting an obviously innocent woman civilian in the back, collecting the ears of enemy dead. It was a meaningless, despicable war, and insane brutality was not an uncommon reaction.
But we're not really talking about Vietnam here, are we? We are talking about the politics of misdirection, about keeping John Kerry on the defensive by raising spurious questions about his "character."
We may also be talking about Iraq—and limiting Kerry's ability to question the President's decision to go to war. If so, the Swifties need not have bothered. Kerry hasn't shown much inclination to raise the real question about Iraq: Was it the right thing to do? And Bush hasn't shown much inclination to talk about the mixed, confusing effects of globalization on people like Elba Nieves. Which means there are nondebates on the two most important issues facing the nation. Not-So-Swift Columnists for Truth is appalled.
Kerry brought it up. Joe.
Remember his speech at the convention?
It should read: Kerrys betrail of Viet Vets has cost the Dems the election.
One can tell from the screams of the left wing media, that the Swift Boat ads are having an effect...
Time has long ago lost any claim to being "fair and balanced"....
SEND MONEY to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth....
It will be well spent and it will unveil the real Kerry, and it ain't pretty..
Semper Fi
EXACTLY...........another truth we can't let the Dems forget!!!
But she listened to her union who told her not to go back to a job that could support her three children while she figured out some way to get health coverage. Gee, maybe the union could find a way to do that instead of blowing the members' dues on executive salaries, conventions and support of John F'n Kerry.
TIME knows about this:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1202310/posts
BUT will never thell the truth about how Kerry chose evil over good in 1971.
Union member, with children, refusing to work because she can't get company funded health care.
"How am I going to feed and house my children?"
WORK 8!+#
Kerry makes his 4 months in Viet Nam the center piece of his campaign, a group of Viet Nam veterans takes him up on it, and now it's Bush's fault that we're not talking about the "real issues". Joe Klein and Time magazine are a joke.
Joe Klein has nailed it. Unfortunately, it was Kerry who perpetrated this artifice. He didn't want scrutiny of his extraordinarily liberal voting record, nor his bordering-on-traitorous anti-war efforts (no, Joe, they were not 'honorable'). The misdirection by Kerry blew up in his face.
Klein is a pinko. No doubt, he is singing exactly the same tune today regarding Iraq. He was wrong then, and he is wrong now.
This revisiting the Mekong Delta, means the thoughts and hatred towards the serving members of the military is being reexamined.
The failed policies of the left wing of the rat party are being examined much as it should be.
Mekong Delta is front and center as it should be, for tracing and following the history of this Boston Brahma, who went to war as a poetical motive, much as Al Gore went to Viet Nam to help his daddy's campaign.
MSM is in complete denial.
Klein is a dunce!
The communist conspiracy was not to just overwhelm asia, but the whole world.
Where has Klein been hibernating?
That's because he has no PLAN, Joe. He will defer to the same foreign leaders that obfuscated and allowed Saddam to stay in power as long as he did. Kerry is a poser, plain and simple.
SWIFTIES had nothin' to do with it....HELLO it was your lying sociopath candidate. Kerry is a loser, traitor, commie, liar, fraud; and does not represent the true American Spirit. So there you old goons!!!
Keep it up Swift Boat Vets. The truth hurts.
Joe would have been much happier if the SWFB Vets brought up Universal Health Care instead.
Liberal Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page had a similar column, but did mention (unlike Joe) that Kerry brought this on himself by bringing up Vietnam again...and again....and again.
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