Posted on 08/24/2004 8:07:05 AM PDT by Callahan
Edited on 08/24/2004 8:36:11 AM PDT by Admin Moderator. [history]
XXXXX DRUDGE REPORT XXXXX TUE AUG 24, 2004 11:09:31 ET XXXXX
KERRY PHONES SWIFT BOAT FOES
**Exclsuive**
Dem presidential hopeful John Kerry personally phoned anti-Kerry swift boat vets, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned.
Kerry reached out to Robert "Friar Tuck" Brant Cdr., USN (RET) Sunday night, just hours after former Sen. Bob Dole publicly challenged Kerry to apologize to veterans.
Brant was skipper of the #96 and # 36 boat and spent time with Kerry in Anm Thoi. Kerry and Brant slept in the same quarters, and Brant used to put Kerry back to be at night when Kerry was sleepwalking.
Brant received a call from Kerry at his home in Virginia while he was watching the Olympics on TV.
The call lasted 10 minutes, sources tell DRUDGE.
KERRY: "Why are all these swift boat guys opposed to me?"
BRANT: "You should know what you said when you came back, the impact it had on the young sailors and how it was disrespectful of our guys that were killed over there.
[Brant had two men killed in battle.]
KERRY: "When we dedicated swift boat one in '92, I said to all the swift guys that I wasn't talking about the swifties, I was talking about all the rest of the veterans."
Kerry then asked if he could meet Brant -- man to man -- face to face.
Brant declined the invite, explaining that Kerry was obviously not prepared to correct the record on exactly what happened during Vietnam and what happened when Kerry came back.
Developing...
That's why I very rarely ever watch it. I like his radio show though...he's listing instances of Dem/527 collusion now ;- )
The Party owns the ballot line in each state. The electors are the ones for whom you vote and they are pledged to the Party's candidate. Since the ballots haven't been printed in most states because the process of choosing candidtes for other offices is still going on, I don't foresee a problem with Kerry. The Dems replaced Eagleton with Shriver about this time in '72 with little difficulty.
At least the above line from the Kerry-Edwards emailing is correct.
It was one of the aides at the White House. It was about Hillary I believe. Not sure though. Can anybody help here?
Thanks for looking that up!!!
Thank, but people have different reasons for not talking about their war experiences. For some it is because the were too horrible. For myself it is that I had a soft desk job in the most secure area outside D.C.
But I was there the day Kerry got his first medal, and for the life of me I can't figure out how he had the nerve to claim a medal at Cam Ranh.
Am I misunderstanding what he's saying, there? Because it sounds like he's saying that what he said is okay, because he was trashing EVERY OTHER VET, and not the Swift Vets in particular.
LOL!!! Good one!!!
...or not. If you look real closely you will see it's not a Whaler.
And that this perfectly prepared him for leadership of this country!!!! Did he steal poor Saddam's political platform??
Oh, I guess that's suppose to make it all okay that he was only attacking ALL other veterans. What a guy. (What an a**h*le).
Great post. You summed up Kerry's accidentally harmful selfishness perfectly. I too think that he was not properly (I just can't use the word vetted) examined for nomination by his party.
GO SWIFTIES! Kerry didn't know whom he tangeld with!
I just mailed them a contribution.
http://www.swiftvets.com
It was also an interesting tidbit, that Kerry sleepwalks:
"Kerry and Brant slept in the same quarters, and Brant used to put Kerry back to be at night when Kerry was sleepwalking. "
Hmmm.
You beat me to it, LOL. I didn't see yours. It's a long thread; there may be other Klinger photos before you even get to mine.
..
They do indeed.
I don't know how to format this here and still retain the original paragraph breaks. FR needs and auto-formatter! I'm hoping someone will read my whole post and bold or enlarge the important parts. KERRY IS A LIAR!
As told by Cockburn and St. Clair, in "an entry from his diary about a subsequent excursion, written on December 11, 1968, nine days after the incident that got Kerry his medal," Kerry asserted that his crew remained cocky and feeling invincible "because we hadn't been shot at yet, and Americans at war who haven't been shot at yet are allowed to be cocky." Brinkley cites this same entry, but avoids assigning it a date. That might be too obvious, apparently.
Regardless, this plainly reads as an admission that two weeks after a purported firefight, Kerry in fact remained an American at war who had yet to face combat. Given that Kerry's boatmates that night also question the presence of hostile fire, this should settle things. Voters can be spared surrogates lacking first-hand knowledge who are sent to shout down eyewitness testimony.
http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewPrint.asp?Page=%5CCommentary%5Carchive%5C200408%5CCOM20040820b.html
Cockburn and St. Clair are Leftists who have no time for Kerry's Lies. Good article.
Hail, the Conquering War Criminal Comes!
What Kerry Really Did in Vietnam
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
and JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
July 29, 2004
(snip)
On December 2, Kerry went on his first patrol up one of the canals. It was near midnight when the crew caught sight of a sampan. Rules of engagement required no challenge, no effort to see who was on board the sampan. Kerry sent up a flare, signal for his crew to start blazing away with the boat's two machineguns and M16 rifles. Kerry described the fishermen "running away like gazelles".
Kerry sustained a very minor wound to his arm, probably caused by debris from his own boat's salvoes. The scratch earned him his first Purple Heart, a medal awarded for those wounded in combat. Actually there's no evidence that anyone had fired back, or that Kerry had been in combat, as becomes obvious when we read an entry from his diary about a subsequent excursion, written on December 11, 1968, nine days after the incident that got Kerry his medal. "A cocky air of invincibility accompanied us up the Long Tau shipping channel, because we hadn't been shot at yet, and Americans at war who haven't been shot at are allowed to be cocky."
He got two more Purple Hearts, both for relatively minor wounds. Indeed Kerry never missed a day of duty for any of the medal-earning wounds.
(snip)
It's very striking how we never find, in any of Kerry's diaries or letters, the slightest expression of contrition or remorse--and Brinkley would surely have cited them had Kerry ever written such words. Nor did Kerry, in his later career as a self-promoting star of the antiwar movement, ever go beyond generalized verbiage about accidents of war, even as many vets were baring their souls about the horrors they had perpetrated.
(snip)
How He Won His Silver And Bronze Stars
The incident that won US Navy lieutenant John Kerry his Silver Star, thus lofting him to the useful status of "war hero", occurred on February 28, 1969. His Swift boat was ferrying US "explosives experts" and some South Vietnamese soldiers up the Dong Cung river. After dropping them off, Kerry's boat came under small arms fire. Kerry turned the boat toward the source of the shots, beached the boat and opened up at the forest with the boat's .50 and .60 caliber machine guns.
By beaching the boat Kerry was disobeying standard orders forbidding this on the grounds that it made the craft and its crew a sitting duck. Kerry's motive? As crew member Michael "Duke" Medeiros explained it to Kerry's biographer, Douglas Brinkley, it was a matter of verifying kills. "We never knew whether we killed any VC or not. When fired upon, he [Kerry] wanted to beach the boat and go get the enemy."
The boat's machine-guns had in fact killed a Vietnamese, described as "a VC guerilla", and they took evidence [undescribed] from the body.
The boat continued downstream and was fired on once more, by a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. Here's where accounts of the event diverge markedly, depending on the interests of the various narrators. The citation for Kerry's Silver Star describes the event this way: "With utter disregard for his own safety and the enemy rockets, he again ordered a charge on the enemy, beached his boat only ten feet from the VC rocket position, and personally led a landing party ashore in pursuit of the enemy. Upon sweeping the area an immediate search uncovered an enemy rest and supply area which was destroyed. The extraordinary daring and personal courage of Lieutenant (junior grade) KERRY in attacking the n numerically superior force in the face of intense fire were responsible for the highly successful mission."
This citation, issued by Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, was based on the incident report, written by John Kerry. Missing from the Zumwalt version was a dramatic confrontation described by Kerry 27 years later in 1996, in the heat of a nasty relection fight against Republican William Weld, when Kerry was seeking a third senate term. Kerry imparted to Jonathan Carroll, writing for the New Yorker, a story going as follows: he had faced down a Viet Cong standing a few feet from him with a B-40 rocket launcher; "It was either going to be him or it was going to be us", Kerry told Carroll. "It was that simple. I don't know why it wasn't us--I mean, to this day. He had a rocket pointed right at our boat. He stood up out of that hole, and none of us saw him until he was standing in front of us, aiming a rocket right at us, and, for whatever reason, he didn't pull the trigger--he turned and ran. He was shocked to see our boat right in front him. If he'd pulled the trigger, we'd all be dead. I just won't talk about all of it. I don't and I can't. The things that probably really turn me I've never told anybody. Nobody would understand."
(He may not have wanted to talk but he certainly liked to screen. The first time Kerry took Hollywood star Dana Delany to his home in the Eighties she says his big move was showing her video clips taken of him in the Navy when he was in Vietnam. She never went out with him again. (As he prepared to make his grand entry to the Democratic convention in Boston, stories circulqatyed that Kerry had reenacted his skirmishes, filming them with an 8mm camera for later political use.)
(snip)
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn07292004.html
You nailed it. He shows all the signs of narcissism. Love your "Help is on the way!"
Powerful words/thoughts; thanks for sharing.
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