Free Republic

Last week I used this space to explore the history of dirty tricks in American politics. As you would remember, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth had released a sequence of advertisements on television casting doubt on Senator Kerry's much vaunted Vietnam War record. Today, as I sat down to submit my article, I noticed an item in the news concerning the swift boat vets once again. Early yesterday, Max Cleland, a former US Senator from Georgia ventured down to the President's ranch in Crawford, Texas, to deliver a letter to Bush requesting him to personally denounce the Swift Boat...

The Kerry campaign sent Max Cleland down to President Bush's Texas ranch yesterday to complain about the Swiftvet ad campaign, hoping that Cleland's image as the quintessential Vietnam veteran who sacrificed three limbs in a wartime accident will cause other vets to take notice. But there's one detail about Cleland that Kerry & Co are hoping nobody notices: The fact that he's been bankrolled over the years by Vietnam veteran Public Enemy No. 1, "Hanoi Jane" Fonda.

BY JAMES TARANTO Wednesday, August 25, 2004 2:53 p.m. EDT That '70s Show "I called the media. . . . I said, 'If I take some crippled veterans down to the White House and we chain ourselves to the gates, will we get coverage?' 'Oh, yes, we will cover that.' "--John Kerry, testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, April 22, 1971 "Kerry is sending to Crawford former Sen. Max Cleland of Georgia, a frequent companion of Kerry's on the campaign trail and a fellow Vietnam War veteran who lost three limbs during the war. Cleland . . . will...

If you listen to talk radio on a regular basis, you'll notice a chorus of complaints on a single theme. How can the widow Teresa Heinz Kerry use the fortune she inherited from Republican Senator John Heinz to aid the liberal John Kerry's presidential campaign? Furthermore, how can John Heinz's sons so blithely lend their support to a man of the left like Kerry? The complaints assume that Senator Heinz was a conservative or even a right-of-center moderate. Neither was the case. John Heinz was the first man in his family to choose public service over a place at the...

I'll get into Sandy Berger's pants, crowded as they are, momentarily. But let me sneak up on them in a roundabout way. A few days ago, I woke up to find an e-mail from a pal enclosing the following UPI story: "Iraqi security reportedly discovered three missiles carrying nuclear heads concealed in a concrete trench northwest of Baghdad, official sources said Wednesday." "Isn't that GREAT NEWS?" asked my friend, rhetorically. Well, the story didn't pan out, and a couple of hours later he e-mailed again to apologize for the premature yelping and high-fiving, and adding that he hadn't meant it...

<p>Max Attacks Sunny John Edwards, as we've noted before, is singularly ill-suited to the traditional vice-presidential role of political hatchet man. So the Kedwards ticket has outsourced that job to a surrogate, someone John Kerry apparently never seriously considered as his running mate: Max Cleland, the patriotic former senator from Georgia.</p>

Per Carl Cameron, Fox News, in a conference call today Max Cleland, trashed President Bush. He said that George W. Bush wanted to be president "because he (Pres. Bush) concluded that his daddy was a failed president." Bush wanted to be a macho man. Bush lied to congress.

US Democrats stepped up attacks on George W. Bush's anti-terror policies when an official of White House candidate John Kerry (news - web sites)'s campaign said the president "flat-out lied" over the Iraq war. Former senator Max Cleland made his remarks in a conference call to reporters with Democratic chairman Terry McAuliffe as part of a party offensive ahead of this week's release of a major report sure to fuel criticism of Bush's war on terror. Cleland, a national co-chairman of Kerry's campaign, described the Bush administration's arguments that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and ties to al-Qaeda terrorists,...

ARLINGTON, Va. WITH the air-conditioning off to avoid extraneous sound as the camera rolled, George Butler and Max Cleland sat a scant three feet apart here in the sticky-hot party room of Mr. Cleland's apartment building, doing their bit to get their mutual friend John Kerry elected leader of the free world. Mr. Cleland — a veteran who lost three limbs in Vietnam, then went on to share six years in the Senate with Mr. Kerry — expertly wove together lines from the candidate's stump speech, a tribute to Mr. Kerry's courage and his own war story. Mr. Butler, a...

Dan Rather introduced the June 15 CBS Evening News profile by relating how Pitts "talked one on one with Theresa Heinz-Kerry and her one of a kind take on life and politics." Pitts began his glowing profile: "She is both rich and reachable." Heinz-Kerry in a classroom with pre-schoolers: "I'd like to be a dog. Wouldn't you like to be a dog? I would. Dogs are friendly." Pitts: "Teresa Heinz-Kerry is one of the wealthiest women in the world, worth an estimated $500 million. She is not easily defined." Pitts to Heinz-Kerry, as two sit in chairs in an ornate...

We are now oh so thrilled that Teresa Heinz Kerry has seen fit to share with us the reasons behind her switch from the Republican to the Democratic parties. Ms. Kerry, the multi-millionaire supporter of numerous liberal causes, tells us that she made the switch because she became disgusted when Republicans attacked the patriotism of Max Cleland during the 2002 election. I was right here in Georgia during that election doing talk. I'm here to tell you that the patriotism of Max Cleland was never an issue in Georgia in that campaign. It didn't happen. Max Cleland remains a beloved...

WASHINGTON - Teresa Heinz Kerry says anger, not ideology, prompted her to become a Democrat. The wife of Sen. John Kerry (news - web sites), the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, says her emotion stemmed from the way the Republican Party, to which she had pledged allegiance, treated Democratic Sen. Max Cleland of Georgia in 2002. Cleland, who lost both legs and an arm as an Army captain during the Vietnam War, lost his re-election bid in a bitter campaign against then-Rep. Saxby Chambliss. The GOP had raised questions about Cleland's patriotism because of his position on legislation to create the...

Heinz Kerry Tells Why She Joined Democrats By EMILY FREDRIX, AP WASHINGTON (June 14) - Teresa Heinz Kerry says anger, not ideology, prompted her to become a Democrat. The wife of Sen. John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, says her emotion stemmed from the way the Republican Party, to which she had pledged allegiance, treated Democratic Sen. Max Cleland of Georgia in 2002.Cleland, who lost both legs and an arm as an Army captain during the Vietnam War, lost his re-election bid in a bitter campaign against then-Rep. Saxby Chambliss. The GOP had raised questions about Cleland's patriotism because...

Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry insisted on being awarded his first Purple Heart in Vietnam even though his injury amounted to no more than a "fingernail scrape," his commanding officer at the time now says. Retired Lt. Cmdr. Grant Hibbard tells the Boston Globe that he can still recall Kerry's wound, and that "it resembled a scrape from a fingernail," the paper said. "I've had thorns from a rose that were worse," Hibbard insists. Still, the former Navy man remembered that Kerry insisted on receiving a Purple Heart for the wound he said was incurred during a Dec. 3,...

Among the attendees at the Democratic National Committee's gala "unity" dinner last week was former Georgia Sen. Max Cleland, who now spends so much time on stage with Sen. John Kerry that he's practically Kerry's running mate. Cleland, who was defeated in a famously brutal 2002 campaign, has said losing his Senate seat left him humiliated and mired in deep depression, but you wouldn't know it from his glamorous arrival at the unity event. I was standing near an elevator when the doors opened and Cleland, who lost two legs and an arm to a grenade explosion in Vietnam, rolled...

Former Sen. Max Cleland said Sunday there was no reason for Democratic presidential front-runner John Kerry to release his full medical file - including records documenting the injuries that won him three Purple Hearts in Vietnam...

Former Sen. Max Cleland said Sunday there was no reason for Democratic presidential front-runner John Kerry to release his full medical file - including records documenting the injuries that won him three Purple Hearts in Vietnam - calling requests for the Vietnam records "the height of hypocrisy." "That might be the height of hypocrisy, for people who never went to Vietnam [to ask for Kerry's wartime medical file]," Cleland, a leading Kerry backer, told WABC Radio's Steve Malzberg. "I mean - I felt a wound. John Kerry felt a wound," he added. Sen. Cleland, who lost three limbs in Vietnam...

Coulter Attacks Cleland's War Record Columnist and television commentator Ann Coulter, in a column published this week, said former Senator Max Cleland, who lost both legs and an arm in Vietnam, is no war hero. Cleland, as he campaigns for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, is saying President Bush’s military record is inferior to Kerry’s service in Vietnam. “The question should be: Where were you in the war of your generation? Did you take your place in the line? Or did you escape and avoid, by political means, and then cut short your tour of duty to go to Harvard...

Kerry's Vietnam service deserves a look The Democrats have been making much hay over President Bush's time in the National Guard. However, John Kerry's Vietnam service has been taken for granted. In only four months in Vietnam, Mr. Kerry won a Silver Star, Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts. That is some record. Better than Audie Murphy, Sgt. York or even Hollywood's Rambo. Yet something here does not compute. In action, any combat vet will say there are few minor wounds. Yet Mr. Kerry took three of them in 16 weeks and had little down time. Upon the third award,...

Sen. Joseph Maxwell Cleland Sen. Max Cleland, U.S. senator from Georgia, served in the Army from 1965 to 1968 and as a Signal Corps officer from Oct. 18, 1967 to Dec. 23, 1968 in Vietnam, where he was severely wounded in a grenade explosion. Sen. Cleland was an aide to then-BG Tom Rienzi at Fort Monmouth, N.J., when he volunteered for duty with 1st Air Cavalry Division in Vietnam. First assigned to 1st Cavalry’s Signal battalion, CPT Cleland then volunteered as communications officer for 2d Battalion, 12th Cavalry, which had been chosen for Operation Pegasus – the relief of Khe...