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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...

Please shut up, Terry McAuliffe--that is, about George W. Bush and his missing-time in the Texas Air National Guard. I keep receiving press releases from flacks at the Democratic Party about Bush's Guard service (or lack thereof). For instance, moments before John Kerry delivered a major speech on September 20 that refocused his campaign with a blast against Bush's war in Iraq, the Democratic National Committee press office emailed me and other reporters an invitation to participate in a conference call with McAuliffe on Bush and the Guard. The call was scheduled to occur in the middle of Kerry's speech....

She [Vice President Dianne Brandi] also turned down the latest spot from Swift Boat Veterans for Truth because it "accuses Kerry of treason, a crime punishable by death."

Fonda has been traveling the country registering women voters and denouncing President Bush as a "radical ideologue" - backing Kerry the same way she did 34 years ago when she bankrolled his group, Vietnam Veterans Against the War.........

DALLAS (AP) -- An upcoming video game lets players re-enact the Swift boat mission in Vietnam that won Sen. John Kerry a Silver Star award for battlefield heroism. The first-person shooter "Kuma War" uses a ripped-from-the-headlines approach where gamers can download and then relive actual battles, mainly from the current war in Iraq. Beginning Sept. 30, the "John Kerry" mission will be available for download as an add-on pack for the game, made by New York-based Kuma Reality Games. The Kerry mission is based on the Navy's records of the encounter on Feb. 28, 1969. Playing as Lt. John...

Arizona Daily Sun Swift Boat vet rallies 'troops' in Flag By SETH MULLER Sun Staff Reporter 09/22/2004 Retired Navy Capt. Wade Sanders, who commanded a Swift Boat alongside John Kerry in the Vietnam War, came to Flagstaff Sept. 14 to energize local Democrats and talk with the veterans at the American Legion. The second group proved the tougher crowd to win over. Sanders -- a former Navy undersecretary in the Clinton administration, now a San Diego attorney -- spoke before more than 200 Democrats at Little America before they held a closed-door meeting to discuss their grassroots strategy for the...

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...

First Look at New Ad Set to Air Wednesday, 9/22 [Go to the website to see the video. It is amazing! Best attack ad I have ever seen!]

In the last week I read a coherent explanation in the New York Times, New York Post, or a conservative web page like The Weekly Standard or Wall Street Journal that makes the entire Kerry medals controversy clear. This blog, in fact, has a discussion about Kerry's first "tour" on a boat kept off shore and facing no danger and not even considered to be a "tour" in Vietnam but his second was more dangerous than he ever expected.

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...

This John Kerry is not that John Kerry. This John Kerry has turned out to be an ineffectual, soporific presidential candidate whose main talent lies in torturing the syntax of his sentences so as to never get caught actually saying anything. That John Kerry was an earnest young man, so full of conviction that his eyes burned with it, a young man newly returned from a war in which he had fought bravely enough to earn a chestful of medals before deciding that the war was all wrong. I was in a Senate committee room on the now-famous day in...

Swift Boat Controversy ABC News Objects to Group’s Use of Good Morning America Footage in New Swift Boat Ad.

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...

Let us hope that since John Kerry chose to run his platform over what took place more than thirty years ago that it will become a valuable learning tool in what not to do. Future candidates need to learn there isn't anything more futile than running for office one dimensionally. Alas though, Kerry has insisted he must bloviate at any given moment that he served (four months) in Vietnam, Kerry has now been stumping longer on his service than he actually even served. Wouldn't one think if you asked a former president (Bill Clinton who won two terms) for advice...

Windows Media http://swift3.he.net/~swift3/dazed.wmv

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...

FYI..Hannity will debut the latest SBVFT ad in the last segment of his show..on now..he got an exclusive...should be worth watching..and commenting...but I hate it when then hold the good stuff till the very end..

In past years, the absolute depths to which the Democrat political machine was willing to sink in blind pursuit of power, was epitomized by Chicago’s elections, wherein “votes” were cast in the name of people who were, in reality, deceased. But that despicable behavior has been surpassed by John Kerry’s supporters, including CBS News (and who can doubt the collaborative relationship between CBS and the Kerry campaign), that have now enlisted the dead to “campaign” for Kerry. How else can the scandal of fabricated memos, attributed to Lt. Colonel Jerry Killian, be construed? Though refuted by Killian’s family along with...