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This is a 25 minute speech by John O'Neil of the Swift Boat Vets for Truth given to the Wednesday Morning Club on Setember 8, 2004.

Those who dismiss critics of John Kerry's Vietnam service as just a bunch of right-wing Republicans out to advance George W. Bush's cause don't know what they are talking about -- or they are engaged in wishful thinking. Okay, I may have once thought that about the critics, too. But after poring over the large volume of e-mail I received after my Aug. 28 column, "What Matters About Kerry and Vietnam," I don't any longer .....Bill Clinton appointed Coleman to the Pentagon post, in which he served from 1994 to 1998. Somehow, despite our running into each other over the...

New York, NY, Sep. 24 (UPI) -- John F. Kerry biographer Douglas Brinkley said the Democratic nominee is not the war hero people thought he was, the New York Times reported Friday. Brinkley made the admission as part of a larger point that the debates over Kerry's service in Vietnam and George W. Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard are not nearly as important as the ongoing debate about the U.S. role in Iraq, the issue Kerry appears to have chosen to end the campaign with. A noted historian, Brinkley, whose book on Kerry is cited as the...

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So is John Kerry a war hero or a medal-grabbing phony? Each time that I've written about President Bush's dalliance with the National Guard, conservative readers have urged me to scrutinize the accusations against Kerry. After doing so for a week, here's where I come out: Did Kerry volunteer for dangerous duty? Not as much as his campaign would like you to believe. The Kerry Web site declares, "As he was graduating from Yale, John Kerry volunteered to serve in Vietnam - because, as he later said, 'It was the right thing to do.' " In fact, as Kerry was...

Earlier this year, as he lay in the hospital recuperating from major surgery in which he donated a kidney to his ailing wife, John O'Neill had no aspirations to literary success or political prominence. And if John Kerry had not a few weeks later surged to the front of the pack and in March sewn up the Democratic nomination for president, O'Neill may well have returned to his downtown Houston law practice and a comfortable life of relative obscurity. But the possibility that Kerry, a decorated Vietnam War veteran against whom O'Neill has held a personal grudge for more than...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Navy’s chief investigator concluded yesterday that procedures were followed properly in the approval of Sen. John Kerry’s Silver Star, Bronze Star and Purple Heart medals, according to a Navy memo. Vice Adm. R.A. Route, the Navy’s inspector general, conducted the review of Kerry’s Vietnam-ear awards at the request of Judicial Watch, a public interest group. Judicial Watch also requested in August that the Navy open an investigation of the matter, but Route said in the internal memo that he saw no reason for a full-scale probe. "Our examination found that existing documentation regarding the Silver Star,...

HOW CAN IT be that the Kerry campaign does not understand that the theme of Bush's "draft avoidance" is a nonissue? Large numbers of men who were of draft age during the Vietnam War (today's fiftysomethings) were anti-war, attended college, were left of center in their politics, and avoided going into the draft one way or another. Most applied for and received college deferments (Dick Cheney got several). Another favored method of avoiding the draft was by joining the National Guard. Still others fled to Canada or went to Europe for a wanderjahr or two. Those people don't care about...

Washington, DC, Sep. 17 (UPI) -- Sen. John Kerry's truthfulness on discarding his war medals to protest the Vietnam conflict was targeted Friday by anti-Kerry veterans. Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the 527 advocacy group made up of Kerry's former Navy colleagues in Vietnam, said Kerry's conflicting accounts make him unrealiable and that the act itself was a betrayal of veterans and his country. "When John Kerry threw his medals away, he betrayed his fellow veterans, he betrayed his country, and he betrayed every American our armed forces have fought to protect, retired Adm. Roy Hoffmann, founder of the group...

IT looks like George W. Bush. But by god it's unpredictable. The US presidential election on November2 now involves so many independent variables that our Washington embassy won't yet predict the result, although picking election results is one of the key analytical tasks for Australian embassies. The Howard Government dearly wants Bush to be re-elected. On the other hand, Mark Latham would love to start life as prime minister without all the scar tissue he has personally built up with the Bush administration, so he would prefer John Kerry. Australian analysts are saying they don't expect radical changes in US...

Who would have thought that this year's presidential campaign might turn out to be more of a referendum on John Kerry than on President Bush? Who would have thought the campaign would be focusing more on the Vietnam War than on the Iraq war? Who would have thought Kerry would base so much of his convention appeal on four months of service in Vietnam and still be unable to respond to questions raised by Swift boat vets known for years to have been angered by his criticisms of the war they fought together? Who would have thought that Kerry, vulnerable...

TO THE EDITOR: Watching John Kerry's acceptance speech on television, I came to the conclusion that it was the most fundamentally dishonest act that I had ever witnessed. The basic assumption of his speech was that the majority of the American people would not know about his actions after returning early from Vietnam or the fact that he had voted against every defense measure and weapons system that we now depend on in our war against terrorism. However, the most sickening factor to me was that he cloaked himself in a false mantle of patriotism and love for our flag....

Are they self-destructive? This week Democrats will hit the airwaves to continue questioning President Bush's National Guard duty. Their claim: Bush has a pattern of lying about his military service. Is it any wonder John Kerry's poll numbers have plummeted. Ignoring former President Clinton's advice to avoid miring in Vietnam, the Kerry camp apparently believes attacking Bush on what is a non-starter with voters is the best way to counter continued questions about the veracity of Kerry's war time claims and post-war activities. But this tact only reminds voters of the accusations made by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and,...

It has been clear for some years that the Democratic Party has no pension for truth, and a visibly growing desperation for power. But the American people are witnessing an unbridled Evil within that Party today that is unprecedented, and that’s what makes the blood boil in good old America loving Democrats like Zell Miller. The DNC thought they could get away with running our nations most liberal senator as a war time Presidential candidate on the basis of his four months in Vietnam, until his fellow soldiers came out of the woodwork challenging his self appointed hero status. Then...

FORT WORTH, Texas - (KRT) - Think you've got a right to know the names of the people paying for attack ads in a local congressional race? Curious what the Sustainable World Corp. is and why it cares who the next U.S. president is? Good luck. These mysteries and plenty more are brought to you despite campaign finance reform. This is the first presidential election since Congress tried to limit the influence of big contributors. While reformers can point to some successes, the highly touted effort has done little to tie the hands of wealthy donors, said Southern Methodist University...

WASHINGTON - Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, an advocacy group that jolted the presidential race with commercials questioning Sen. John Kerry's military service, said it has raised $6.7 million in a windfall brought about by the group's high profile in recent weeks. Several of the largest donors are longtime supporters of President Bush, according to a financial disclosure report filed on Friday with the Federal Election Commission. The largest contributor was T. Boone Pickens, a famous Texas oilman and longtime Republican supporter who was a major political backer of Bush's father, who contributed $500,000 to the swift boat group. Aubrey...

....................The financial report "proves without a doubt that we have received genuine grass-roots support for our message and, more importantly, touched off a national debate concerning John Kerry's character and leadership ability as a potential commander in chief," said Adm. Roy Hoffmann, founder of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. In television commercials, the accuracy of which has been undermined in newspaper articles and disputed by the Kerry campaign, the swift boat group has challenged Kerry's service in Vietnam and the medals he received there. The swift boat anti-Kerry campaign began just over a month ago with a relatively modest $500,000...

“It’s the wrong war at the wrong time in the wrong place.” Those words from Senator Kerry don’t date back some 30 years to his anti-war protesting days. They weren’t uttered at an anti-American rally, and they’re not in reference to Vietnam. Those words from John Kerry date back to last Monday while campaigning in Pennsylvania and they’re in reference to the Iraq War. The former New York City mayor was right. Senator Kerry still has time to change his position on the war a few more times before the election. With the left-wing media reporting hard on the death...

WASHINGTON - When Vietnam veterans rally on Capitol Hill against Sen. John Kerry's antiwar activities this weekend, John Tabarrini of Moreno Valley will be among them. "He testified that we were all basically war criminals," said Tabarrini, who served in the air wing of the U.S. Marine Corps in Vietnam from 1972 to 1973. "And I have a problem with that." Kerry testified before a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing after returning home from Vietnam. He told the panel that U.S. soldiers had been involved in a series of atrocities during the war, including rape and the random killing of...

If President Bush is re-elected, he needs to make Glenn Reynolds his new attorney general. He is a distinguished law professor at UT, the respected author of numerous books and law review articles, and an expert on hot-button issues like nanotechnology. Unlike John Ashcroft, his particular interests are individual liberty in an age of advanced technology. That alone makes him my candidate. But Reynolds also hosts a web log called Instapundit that’s been called The New York Times of the blogosphere. In addition to original reporting and commentary, Instapundit is also the traffic cop for hundreds of sites that plug...