You're right, that was my opinion. The difference between us is I didn't need someone to tell me that.
O'NEILL: "Kerry does not understand."
So very true.
Yeah. Anyway...
Laura Armstrong’s plain-talking, unnuanced speech is slicing Kerry open and exposing him for the complete fraud that he is. These vets are American citizens who did their duty, did it well, and came home to be either ignored or reviled. One veteran, though, came back to cheers. That he carried the mark of “hero” because of questionable wounds only made him a bigger catch for the left—he’d been “turned”. Like Nixon going to China, Kerry was supposedly a warrior truned against the war.
In fact, he was a rich brat who tried to get deferments, and when he didn’t he did serve, admirably, first on a ship and then, in a time when they were not so dangerous (by his own admission) on a Swift boat. He received wounds far less than those suffered by others, and got early release from the more dangerous part of his service. Then he sold out his brothers—NOT because he turned against the war, but because he protested the war in a way that hurt these men and others, helping the enemy win the war.
But there is a very human cost to his maneuvering, and this woman and the other speakers are filling in that picture.
The media want us to know the human costs of the war in Iraq—and that’s fine, we should be aware of that. Too bad when it comes to the thing Kerry did that made him their hero, they don’t have that same urge to show the whole story.