Kerry is going to lose this election, not because of the SwiftVets debacle, but because of his own actions which opened a collossal can of worms.
More to the point, here are the specific things Kerry has screwed up on which are now starting to receive even the scrutiny of his erstwhile allies in the liberal news media:
1) Kerry, instead of laying out his plan for dealing with the issues that face America, chose to make his truncated four-month tour of duty in Vietnam the basis of his candidacy. Once he brought out his Vietnam service as a political issue, he opened himself up to the Swiftboat guys, who have been chafing for over 30 years at Kerry's repeated claims that all the men in his unit, and all Vietnam veterans, routinely engaged in the commission of war crimes. If you were such a veteran hearing those distortions of your war service, you might decide to join a group to set the record straight yourself, after being kicked in the ass and publicly humiliated for all those years.
2) Kerry's stories about his war service keep changing, the message of the SwiftVets hasn't budged once as far as I can tell. Kerry claims in a 1986 speech on the Senate floor that his boat spent Christmas, 1968 inside Cambodia, and that President Richard Nixon was lying to the country by saying that there were no American forces in Cambodia... moreover, that this incident was 'seared' into his memory and became a defining turning point in his life... the problem with this is, Richard Nixon wasn't President then, Lyndon Johnson was. No American forces were in Cambodia until much later. This whole "Apocalypse Now" scenario of Kerry's isn't holding water, and has in fact been rewritten several times by Kerry advisers (who were not in Vietnam or Cambodia themselves). There have already been a number of attempts to explain this factual lapse, but now they've at least moved the 'Christmas in Cambodia' story up to February, 1969, so that it more conveniently coincides with the Nixon presidency. There is also the ridiculous assertion that Kerry simply 'misremembered' the events as they happened, but that explanation doesn't work for a guy who stands on the floor of the U.S. Senate claiming to have had these events 'seared' into him to the point where it became a defining turning point in his life! He seems to have found the guts to repeat the same story 50 times verbatim over the years, but suddenly, under the scrutiny of a Presidential election, the story becomes harder to pin down than a pup tent during a cyclone.
3) Kerry's stories about throwing his war medals onto the White House lawn as a war protest also don't add up. First of all, he still has his own medals, but threw someone else's medals at the White House, but told the news media point-blank that they WERE his own medals. The very medals which got him out of his tour of duty in 'Nam early, the very medals which the SwiftVets say Kerry embellished his after-action reports and citations in order to receive. He repeated the story of how he tossed away 'his' medals until ABC's Peter Jennings found out that he had been lied to, and summoned 'Good Morning America' to take Kerry to task on this point on national television. It's all a matter of lying to keep up appearances, and to take Kerry seriously on any of this requires a person to not pay attention to more than one of his statements on any given subject. The man lies like a rug. If he ever stops lying, someone better check his pulse, quick.
4) The way that Kerry has handled the SwiftVets controversy has been dismal, and reveals much about how the man would comport himself as President were he to be elected. Instead of coming out and laying out to the American people, in simple terms, where and how the SwiftVets are lying, he sends DNC lawyers to the TV stations, demanding that the SwiftVet ads be pulled off the air. So much for the First Amendment, eh, Mr. Kerry? Is that how he would handle Al-Qaeda? Have his lawyers send Bin Laden a 'cease-and-desist' letter? Remember, he is running for President using his Vietnam service as the main plank of his campaign - but no one is allowed to comment on his war record without being summarily branded a 'liar'. This is asinine. He has put himself in the position of having to publicly attack 250 decorated Vietnam war veterans, or say nothing at all in the face of their assertions, when he could have simply ignored the Vietnam issue entirely and presented his vision of what a Kerry Presidency would mean to the country. Then he goes and tells the Firefighters' Convention this past weekend that the SwiftVets are nothing more than a cog in the machinery of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy (TM), (again, without stating exactly what facts the SwiftVets are mistaken about), and that the SwiftVets should 'Bring it on.' Big mistake, as you'll see below.
Here is the text of the SwiftVets ad that is going out this week in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and elsewhere. Kerry's own voice recordings, where he condemns his fellow veterans as war criminals during testimony before Congress, are interspersed with Swiftboat veterans' and Vietnam POWs' commentary:
KERRY: They had personally raped, cut off the ears, cut off heads--
JOE PONDER (wounded 1968): The accusations that John Kerry made against the veterans who served in Vietnam was just devastating.
KERRY: randomly shot at civilians--
PONDER: And it hurt me more than any physical wounds I had.
KERRY: cut off limbs, blown up bodies--
KEN CORDIER (former POW): That was part of the torture, was to sign a statement that you had committed war crimes.
KERRY: razed villages in the fashion reminiscent of Ghengis Khan--
PAUL GALANTI (former POW): John Kerry gave the enemy for free what I, and many of my comrades in North Vietnam, in the prison camps, took torture to avoid saying. It demoralized us.
KERRY: crimes committed on a day-to-day basis--
CORDIER: He betrayed us in the past. How could we be loyal to him now?
KERRY: Ravaged country sides in South Vietnam--
GALANTI: He dishonored his country and, more importantly, the people he served with. He just sold them out.
ANNOUNCER: S.B. Vets for Truth is responsible for the content of this ad.
The Colonel Cordier in the ad above was also working for the Bush campaign prior to this, but the Bush campaign has dismissed him from the campaign in accordance with the McCain-Feingold Act. This is the only proven link between the SwiftVets and the Bush campaign (except for a SwiftVets flier that was found on the floor of a Republican campaign HQ in Texas), but you know what? Who gives a damn? In this country we have (or DID have until McCain-Feingold) the right to peaceably assemble. It is funny, though, that the DNC, even with George Soros and Michael Moore out there spreading mendacity, prevarication and creatively-edited disinformation in all directions, to the tune of 60 million (!) dollars and climbing, and they never could make a dent in Bush's numbers. On the other hand, along come the SwiftVets and a few ads which cost less than $150,000 to make, and not only does Kerry's national numbers drop by a couple percentage points in only one week, but his support among veterans has dropped precipitously. No wonder Kerry's people are going nuts trying to get these guys off the air.
And just for the record, Adnauseum, why don't you give us all a break? You're a South African liberal spending time repeating quasi-intellectual non-information gleaned from the untrammeled bullshit available to you on the Internet. With all due respect, your posts reveal that you have about as much knowledge of American politics as a tadpole has about nuclear engineering. Maybe you are intending to embarass yourself, in that case, 'to each his own'.
-BoomerDog1
JoeUser Forums
PolMach Forums
search.... search..... search.... Sorry man, but he has not proposed any.