onetime2

Personally I couldn't care less about the whole "issue". I don't like either side's position on this.

Kerry was in Vietnam he was awarded some medals. That's splendid.

The complete bullshit involved in this campaign underscores for me why current political tactics and the effort voters put in to understand reality are pathetic.

On the specific issue of military service the hypocrisy amazes me.

There are claims that Kerry didn't earn these medals. The response from the Kerry campaign is basically that they went through the necessary military channels to be approved so they shouldn't even be in dispute. Fine. I agree.

Now, on to the claims against Bush and his attendance at guard drills. His campaign claims that everything went through the proper channels, they were approved otherwise the military wouldn't have signed off on his completion of duty. Fine. I agree.

However, each side refuses to stipulate that the military approval(s) of the other were proper.

Now, on to this Swift boat group. They are a group of people with something to say and they are saying it. They are taking donations from people who support their message. Somehow the other side thinks it's wrong that they're doing this because they are supposedly politically motivated or whatever. Fine, while I think they have the right to say what they want, I feel this group is subverting campaign finance reform laws by taking unlimited contributions and working against Kerry. But so are the 527 groups being used by the Dems.

All the BS associated with these issues is fully partisan manure. Until people recognize it and focus on real issues we will only get more of the same.

__________________
Strive to be more curious than ignorant.

Superbelt

You're right. I would also like to see all 527's barred from advertising. I'd also like to see the NRA, Sierra Club, ect stop political advertisements as well.

All advertisements should be restricted to positive messages for a particular candidate. Negatives should be strictly prohibited.

jcookc6

Gee Superbelt, you and I agree on something.

onetime2

I wouldn't go so far as saying all negatives should be banned. I don't have much of a problem with the Sierra club and the NRA advertising. I think it's because they are more issue oriented than politically motivated IMO. I would expect the NRA to support candidates who agree with their goals relating to gun ownership and the like and oppose those who don't. So long as they focus on the issues that relate to them I think it's ok.

The problem I have is with groups that are created with the sole intention of supporting a specific political party (or opposing another). They become pseudo arms of the party system and subvert campaign finance reform.

I guess I see the possibility that the NRA or Sierra Club could change alliances if the parties eventually migrate toward the other side on issues important to the groups.

Of course, allowing groups with very specific agendas to continue to take unlimited campaign contributions while banning the "general political" groups from doing so would only encourage the parties to set up dummy issue oriented groups to campaign against their opposition.

In the end, what I would ideally like to see is restrictions on all advertising for or against candidates. If groups want to advertise to influence elections, their contributors should be revealed and their individual (and corporate) $ contributions capped at a reasonable level. That way those with the most money to advertise are the ones with the broadest support from voters.

__________________
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shakran

so. . . how are you two gonna do that without violating the first amendment?

ARTelevision

onetime2's thoughts on this (above), echo my own.

__________________
create evolution

onetime2

Limiting contributions is not a violation of the First ammendment. Individuals would still be allowed to say what they want. You want to take out an ad in the NY Times saying you think GWB is an idiot or that you disagree with specific issues, feel free.

These limits are the same as we see being placed on the GOP and DNC. Do you think all campaign finance reform limits violate the right to free speech? If so, we disagree and won't likely find common ground.

__________________
Strive to be more curious than ignorant.

pan6467

God I hate when I agree with Onetime.... I feel so so ..... conservative. LOL.... I tease cause I love ya, Onetime.

I still say the best way for campaign reform is to force all stations that have FCC licsences to give not just equal time but FREE time.

Each federal and gubenatorial candidate gets 3 - 30 second commercials every other half hour or hour.

As for magazines and newspapers each candidate gets FREE equal space and the ads either run next to each other in WEEKLIES (Kerry's on page 32, then Bush is on page 33 and if Badnarik and Nader are on all 50 state ballots then Kerry and Bush each get 1/2 of page 32 and Bad. and Nader each get 1/2 of page 33) or in DAILIES the ads run every othe day Kerry/Badnarik get page 4 on M/W/F = Bush/ Nader get page 4 T/TH/SA and Sunday the ads are shared like in a weekly.

That cuts down probably the most expensive part of campaigning.

There is precendence for this as by FCC law stations have to have so much time devoted to public service AND they have to offer equal time to candidates.

The rules are now if a candidate cannot afford equal time "AW WELL, FUCK THE DEADBEAT, HE CAN'T PAY FOR THE SPACE"

But this will never happen the media makes too much money on campaign ads.

That's how I would do it. See if it works and how well.

__________________
I just love people who use the excuse "I use/do this because I LOVE the feeling/joy/happiness it brings me" and expect you to be ok with that as you watch them destroy their life blindly following. My response is, "I like to put forks in an eletrical socket, just LOVE that feeling, can't ever get enough of it, so will you let me put this copper fork in that electric socket?"

onetime2

Yeah sometimes it burns doesn't it? ;-)

I thought that you didn't agree with regard to the 527 groups though? Our last discussion on this topic ended with your acceptance of them in an "anything to defeat Bush" kind of way.

Not trying to stir things up here, I'm just curious. Did you change your mind on the groups? If so I'd love to hear what shifted the stance. If you still feel the same that's fine but sometimes it's reassuring to hear of people overcoming the partisanship to focus on issues that go beyond Republican and Democrat (or Independent, Green, whatever).

Personally, I think these groups lead to more partisanship and send us down the wrong path in addition to allowing too much influence on the process from large contributors.

__________________
Strive to be more curious than ignorant.

Superbelt

I'll continue to point out how this group is sunk as I see them.

Adm. Roy Hoffman

Now he is saying
What are these people getting out of making up these statements?

shakran

That's not limiting contributions, that's restricting what can be said. They're advocating making it illegal to say anything but what they want you to say. That's a violation of the 1st.


I missed that comment the first time around. ROFL!

pan6467

I honestly don't remember arguing 527 groups, I will say part of me says let them say what they want, part of me says they just add to hate mongering. But they burn themselves out. Like Move On has burnt itself out and noone pays attention to them anymore.

Flipping through today on Faux News there was something I finally agreed with them on. Forget who it was (around 10AM EST), but they were talking about this Swift Group from the thread and he said that Bush should just concede Kerry as a war hero and disassociate himself with the Swift Group and move onto the issues Bush knows he can win on.

His reasoning was that Bush is opening a can of worms, lowering himself to mudslinging and people are going to get sick of hearing about the Swift Group much like they did Move On and then it'll be more hurtful to his candidacy than helpful.

After I watched that they did something else, but it was much more partsan, so like a good American, I flipped to Gilligan's Island.

__________________
I just love people who use the excuse "I use/do this because I LOVE the feeling/joy/happiness it brings me" and expect you to be ok with that as you watch them destroy their life blindly following. My response is, "I like to put forks in an eletrical socket, just LOVE that feeling, can't ever get enough of it, so will you let me put this copper fork in that electric socket?"

uncle phil

pan6467, I spent two years in Vietnam, and in essence I have to say that your observations on the first page of this thread are right on the money; however, the Swift Boat Veterans seem to think they have experienced things differently. Although I don't agree with their particular ideology, they have "walked the walk" and one can't take that away from any of them. I have never felt "dishonored" by what any person who served in Vietnam has had to say about his or her particular experience.

__________________
"We were wrong, terribly wrong. (We) should not have tried to fight a guerrilla war with conventional military tactics against a foe willing to absorb enormous casualties...in a country lacking the fundamental political stability necessary to conduct effective military and pacification operations. It could not be done and it was not done."
- Robert S. McNamara
-----------------------------------------
"We will take our napalm and flame throwers out of the land that scarcely knows the use of matches...
We will leave you your small joys and smaller troubles."
- Eugene McCarthy in "Vietnam Message"
-----------------------------------------
never wrestle with a pig.
you both get dirty;
the pig likes it.

mattevil

These days everyone tries to twist the truth and only gives you half the story. Here's a pretty nonpartisan look at that ad:

http://www.factcheck.org/article.aspx?docID=231

One of the men featured, George Elliott, says he made a "terrible mistake" when he accused Kerry of not deserving one of his awards.

Here's what John McCain said about the ad:

McCain : I think the ad is dishonest and dishonorable. As it is none of these individuals served on the boat (Kerry) commanded. Many of his crewmates have testified to his courage under fire. I think John Kerry served honorably in Vietnam.

Sun Tzu

I'm not pro Kerry; actually Im not pro Bush either.

Any medal issued in the military goes through a review board. So basically these men the SWIFT boat crew are attacking the integrity of the military itself. Why havent they taken the fight to them; or the first instant he ran for any public service.

The one point I do agree on is the fact that a picture is being used (although I dont know where as the site claims) without their consent.

When one clicks on the about us link this is what is stated: "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth is a tax exempt non-partisan public advocacy "527" organization that consists of and is limited to former military officers and enlisted men who served in Vietnam on U.S. Navy "Swift Boats" or in affiliated commands."

Thats sounds fair and neutral-

There is no link to George Bush; however the source of the Swift Boat group's financing wasn't known when it first surfaced, but a report filed July 15 with the Internal Revenue Services now shows its initial funding came mainly from a Houston home builder, Bob R. Perry, who has also given millions to the Republican party and Republican candidates, mostly in Texas, including President Bush and Republican Majority Leader Tom DeLay, whose district is near Houston.

Perry gave $100,000 of the $158,750 received by the Swift Boat group through the end of June.

Perry and his wife Doylene also gave more than $3 million to Texas Republicans during the 2002. The Perrys also were among the largest Republican donors in neighboring Louisiana, where they gave $200,000, and New Mexico, where they gave $183,000. At the federal level the Perrys have given $359,825 since 1999, including $6,000 to Bush's campaigns.

http://forms.irs.gov/politicalOrgsSe...4&formType=E72

Non partisan? Going back to what others have said in this post; I think this was the wrong area to attack; when a comparison is done the the service of GWB; it only further accents the truth.

A couple of sites that track any funding are

http://www.followthemoney.org/index.phtml

and

http://www.opensecrets.org/indivs/index.asp

__________________
To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit.- Stephen Hawking

Stompy

Didn't read all the threads, but I'm surprised there wasn't more talk about how ridiculous that site is.

They're upset that he's using the photo that he's in? Wow. Unless Kerry has been saying, "Everyone in this photo supports me", then there's not much of a problem.

He took a picture with other people and he showed it off. So f'n what? All this stuff is trivial nitpicking and has NOTHING to do with his stand on the issues.

People need better things to do with their time

I did get a kick out of the "Click here for a morphing video of the "before" and "after" images above." They actually took the image that they use for the rollover (that highlights Kerry and his supporter) and made a flash movie of it. What's the point?!

__________________
I love lamp.

BigGov

Because it seems as if Kerry was saying that those men support him, and they wanted to make their views clear.

__________________
One day an Englishman, a Scotsman, and an Irishman walked into a pub together. They each bought a pint of Guinness. Just as they were about to enjoy their creamy beverage, three flies landed in each of their pints. The Englishman pushed his beer away in disgust. The Scotsman fished the fly out of his beer and continued drinking it, as if nothing had happened. The Irishman, too, picked the fly out of his drink but then held it out over the beer and yelled "SPIT IT OUT, SPIT IT OUT, YOU BASTARD!"

onetime2

You're right, it was mml that made the statement about 527 groups. (Don't think that I'm just grouping all you liberal wack jobs together it's just that there are a few people from "the other side" on here whose opinions I respect and I tend to group them together and occasional may get you confused. You and mml make up about 50% of that group.)

As far as burning themselves out I disagree. They are likely getting stronger and there will soon be a significant counter offensive on the right.

Check out the concert with Bruce Springsteen et al, they're sponsoring. That hardly seems like ACT and Move On have lost their drive or funding.

The fact that the press isn't focusing on these groups gives them more strength. That means there will be less pressure for the FEC to shut them down and a greater likelihood that the Republicans will form their own on a grand scale. Right now the Republicans have been using these in limited ways (probably waiting till the FEC rules so they can make a big deal about it should the groups be found in violation of campaign finance laws).

--Paul

__________________
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shakran

No, Kerry said that the men he SERVED with supported him. Not a few wankers who were never in the same boat as him but who participated in a smear campaign to mislead the public into THINKING they served with him.

onetime2

I've made the same point about the medals. Additionally I likened it to the argument that Bush did not complete his duties in the National Guard. The military says differently yet the Kerry supporters deride Bush as AWOL.

As far as the Swift Boat group being a 527, I covered that as well. They are a 527 just like ACT and Move On. They all accept unlimited donations from who ever wants to support them. If the argument is that they should not be listened to or allowed to profess their beliefs, it must cut both ways.

All of this is partisan politics at its finest. Both sides are criticizing the other for the EXACT things they are doing themselves. According to the Dems, Move On and ACT are perfectly acceptable despite the millions given by individuals (George Soros for one) yet the Swift Boat group is unacceptable because it took $100k.

Bush's discharge went through military channels. Kerry's medals went through military channels. Are there questions about each of their service? Absolutely. But it doesn't mean a damned thing today.

__________________
Strive to be more curious than ignorant.

Superbelt

Funny line I read about this: "a bunch of veterans who are telling their story about a Presidential candidate about 30 years too late"

jcookc6

This gets more interesting day by day

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles...e.asp?ID=14583

Legal Terrorism
By Henry Mark Holzer and Erika Holzer
FrontPageMagazine.com | August 10, 2004

Presidential nominee John Kerry is working overtime to blunt growing criticism of his Vietnam service and simultaneously reassure uncommitted voters that his acts of alleged heroism as a Swift boat officer—over 30 years ago—far outweigh his antiwar history. He has made his medals—a Silver Star, a Bronze Star, and three Purple Hearts—a central focus of his candidacy. He has made a colossal mistake.

No surprise, then, that Swift Boat Veterans For Truth, an organization unaffiliated with any political party—whose members were no strangers to Lieutenant Kerry 30 years ago—last week began airing a dramatic, highly effective TV spot that flatly disputes Kerry’s claims, and, worse for Kerry, his integrity.



Predictably, Kerry’s lawyers responded with a venomous and distorted account of the TV spot and the veterans who had organized it. Marc Elias, Esq., General Counsel for the Kerry-Edwards campaign, joined by Joseph Sandler, General Counsel for the Democratic National Committee, faxed to TV station managers the kind of intimidating message that gives lawyers a bad name.



The three-page letter is a not-so-thinly veiled threat with only one possible goal: to scare the stations into dropping the ad. How? By misstating provable facts that back up the ad’s claims, and by shamelessly misrepresenting the law. How, specifically? On the legal side of the ledger, by trotting out the standard bogeymen for TV stations: false and misleading advertising, frowned on by the FTC; the specter of libel suits; dark hints of serious damages unless, “in the public interest,” station managers refuse to run the ad.



On the factual side, one assertion by Kerry’s lawyers is that Swift Boat Veterans For Truth is a “sham” organization. Why? Because its hard-hitting controversial ad was “spearheaded” by a “Texas corporate media consultant” and “financed largely” by a Houston homebuilder. Since when does the support of a businessman who believes the claims of a large number of Navy Vietnam veterans make the entire organization, ipso facto, a “sham”—i.e., a fake? Only the naïve would regard this contentless assertion as having any substance and not recognize it for what it is: an ad hominem attack.



As to Navy physician Louis Letson (whom Elias and Sandler attempt to demean by putting Dr. Letson’s title in quotation marks), Kerry’s lawyers descend to a level that is truly shocking. They assert that Dr. Letson was “pretending to be the doctor who treated Kerry for one of his injuries,” and “not the doctor who actually signed Senator Kerry’s sick call sheet.” They assert that it was someone else who “actually signed” the sheet. They assert that “Letson is not listed on any document” as having treated Kerry after December 2, 1968.



Fact (based on a notarized statement of Louis Letson): The injury Dr. Letson treated Kerry for occurred when Kerry and two others (a fellow lieutenant and a crewman), seeing movement from an unknown source, opened fire. Kerry’s rifle jammed, and in the absence of return fire, he resumed firing with a grenade launcher, spraying his own boat and causing a tiny piece of shrapnel to be embedded in his arm. The lieutenant and crewman, parties to the incident, accompanied Kerry to sick call, where they disputed Kerry’s claim that he’d been wounded by hostile fire and provided an account of the actual episode to Dr. Letson—after which Letson removed the tiny fragment with tweezers and covered Kerry’s scratch with a band aid. The lieutenant-witness is alive and available to testify, in detail, as to what happened. As for the maligned Dr. Louis Letson, he is entitled to say, as he did in the Swift Boat TV ad: “I know John Kerry is lying about his first Purple Heart because I treated him for that injury.”



Fact (based on a sworn affidavit by Grant Hibbard): Next morning Kerry showed up at Division Commander Grant Hibbard’s office. Hibbard had already investigated the incident and spoken to the lieutenant-witness. Characterizing Kerry’s purported injury as a “rose thorn” scratch insufficient to justify a Purple Heart—awarded for hostile-fire wounds requiring medical attention, and excluding wounds that are accidental and self-inflicted [except non-negligent ones sustained in battle]—Commander Hibbard summarily turned down Kerry’s request for a Purple Heart and dismissed him. Commander Hibbard, who participated in the Swift Boat TV ad, is willing to testify, in detail, as to what happened.



Fact (based on rotation records and Kerry’s website): Some three months after everyone who was personally familiar with Kerry’s bogus claim to a Purple Heart had left Vietnam, Kerry persisted in the claim for his “rose-thorn” injury, managing to convince an officer that he had earned the Purple Heart. Yet that officer had no personal information about the incident, no connection to Kerry’s small naval unit, and no knowledge that Hibbard had rejected Kerry’s earlier request for the medal. Whenever Kerry has been pressed to produce evidence justifying this first Purple Heart, he cites Dr. Letson’s tweezers treatment—on the basis of which Commander Hibbard denied the medal. As to the Purple Heart that was awarded, there is not a shred of documentary evidence to justify it.



Some lawyers, when confronted with too much damning evidence, fall back on the old shotgun approach. With Swift Boat Veterans For Truth, Elias and Sandler are facing off against an organization with a membership of over 250 [and growing daily since the ad ran], led by a retired rear admiral and comprised of vice admirals, commanders and hundreds of seamen. A large majority of men who served on Swift boats in Kerry’s naval unit have joined the organization. Kerry’s lawyers sought to poke holes in this formidable opponent’s accusations (thus deflecting attention from the holes in their own) by giving a false impression of the organization’s numbers. After calling the Swift Boat ad “an inflammatory, outrageous lie”—and making much of the fact that only “twelve men ‘appear’ to make statements about Senator Kerry’s service in Vietnam”—the lawyers make it seem as if the ad were the work of a disgruntled few.



And they don’t just avoid talking numbers; they choose not to mention the background and credentials of some of the seemingly disgruntled malcontents who “appear” to have served with Lieutenant John Kerry. Were Elias and Sandler seriously accusing Rear Admiral Roy Hoffman, who heads Swift Boat Veterans For Truth—and who was Commander of all Swift boats in Vietnam during the period of Kerry’s abbreviated tour of duty (late November ’68 to mid-March ’69)—of telling an “outrageous lie” when he accuses Kerry in the ad of “not being honest”?



Possibly the most effective technique employed by Kerry’s lawyers—a straw man they constructed in a transparent effort to mislead station managers and, in the process, an uninformed public—is about how Swift boats in Vietnam operated: Anyone who technically wasn’t a crewmate of Kerry’s and didn’t serve on either of his two Swift boats is—without more—an unreliable eyewitness to anything Kerry did or said.



But there is more---and from a very knowledgeable source. John O’Neill, partner in a Houston law firm and a founding member of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, anticipating the controversy the TV spot would generate and the need for documentation, sent a letter to station managers on August 2 (three days before the team of Elias and Sandler shifted into gear). The letter itself, eight pages long, is buttressed with 27 exhibits—roughly 100 pages of what O’Neill correctly labeled “factual support for the advertisement.” What O’Neill explains about how the Swift boats actually operated should put to rest, for all but those who have a political ax to grind, any doubt about eyewitness reliability being tainted by non-crewmates.



Kerry’s four-month tour of duty was with Coastal Division 11, a small naval unit of roughly a hundred sailors and fifteen to sixteen boats, where Kerry spent most of his time. These boats operated in even smaller groups of two to six and, quoting O’Neill: “Each of these boat officers operated directly with John Kerry on numerous occasions.” Four of these same officers are featured in the Swift boat ad, and have backed up their eyewitness accounts of Kerry’s lies with affidavits. A retired enlisted man served on one of the boats operating in close proximity to Kerry’s—a few yards away, to be precise—lending credence (again, backed up by affidavit) that “John Kerry lied to get his Bronze Star. I know, I was there, I saw what happened.” As to others in the ad—the captain who was Kerry’s direct commander in Coastal Division 11, another captain who was his administrative commander, and, as mentioned above, the rear admiral in command of all Swift boats during Kerry’s tour, O’Neill writes: “Each of these commanders interacted on numerous occasions with Kerry” (as Kerry’s authorized campaign biography readily acknowledges).



Swift Boat Veterans For Truth is comprised of men who honorably served their country, many of them awarded medals that Kerry never earned. What these veterans have earned is the right to go public with provable facts without suffering the indignity of being labeled liars and shuffled aside in favor of the Kerry campaign’s revolving group of eight veterans from Coastal Division 11—none of whom, according to O’Neill, served with Kerry as much as two months. As for the charge that running the TV spot is a dirty campaign tactic instead of what it is—a matter of conscience—and that coming forward 30 years after the events in question suggests bad motives, the proper response to such a charge is quid pro quo. Kerry’s concocted stories fall within the same time frame. How could men who know otherwise—who knew him then—remain silent?



It was not until halfway through their letter that the lawyers accused the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth of libel. By leveling that very serious charge, they purported to know something about libel law—especially about several legal principles that negate any legitimate libel claim by Kerry.



First, any statement made in the TV spot that is an “opinion”—e.g., Kerry’s “account of what happened and what actually happened are the difference between night and day” [Chenoweth]; Kerry “lacks the capacity to lead” [Lonsdale]; Kerry “betrayed all his shipmates . . . . “ [Hibbard]—cannot constitute libel. Only the false statement of facts are capable of being libelous.



Second, many of the factual statements are utterly benign, and thus could never be actionable. For example, “I served with John Kerry” [French, Elder, Hildreth]. That leaves factual statements like Hibbard’s: Kerry “lied before the Senate.” In libel law, truth is an absolute defense. If, for example, it is true that Kerry “lied before the Senate,” that Kerry “has not been honest about what happened in Vietnam” [Elliott], that Kerry “is lying about his record” [French], and that Kerry “lied to get his Bronze Star” [O’Dell], Kerry has no case for libel.



Third, even without the absolute defense of truth, Kerry, as a public official, has a constitutionally required burden of proof in a libel case to produce evidence showing that the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth witnesses either knew their statements were false, or recklessly disregarded knowledge of falsity. Kerry’s lawyers must realize their client can never satisfy this burden of proof.



For these reasons, and others, the democrat lawyers’ threatening letter to TV station managers was an unconscionable attempt to protect their candidate from the damning truths spoken by Vietnam veterans who have earned the right to exercise their First Amendment freedom of speech.



To their credit, TV stations in some marketplaces have refused to surrender to the bullying tactics of Kerry’s lawyers. This presents the democrat party and the Kerry campaign with two choices: put up or shut up.



They can slink off the field for having threatened TV stations with a baseless libel lawsuit, or, despite how they eventually hedge their threat, they can actually sue those TV stations that aren’t intimidated.



The latter course would be utter disaster—and Kerry’s lawyers have to know this. Kerry would no longer be able to hide behind spin masters. He would have to file a written complaint. Sworn depositions (including Kerry’s) would have to be taken. He would have to respond to requests for factual admissions. He would have to answer written interrogatories. He would have to produce documents.



There would have to be a trial. That means sworn testimony, cross examination, documentary evidence—all in front of a jury, reporters, perhaps even TV cameras.



Once all that happened, America would know who told the truth—and who lied.



Henry Mark Holzer [www.henrymarkholzer.com; hank@henrymarkholzer.com], Professor Emeritus at Brooklyn Law School, specializes in federal appeals. Erika Holzer [www.erikaholzer.com] is a lawyer and novelist

mml

I have no idea why I have chosen to wade into this filthy pool of mud, but I am. I don't like negative ads and mudslinging, but it works and it is legal. I don't like The Veterans for Truth ads or their book, but they have every right to release them. Now, Kerry and his supporters should not be called to task because they are going to defend themselves from this attack and most likely strike back. (i.e. discredit the individuals involved) I think that most of us can agree that we would prefer to have a real debate on issues that matter, not what may or may not have happened thirty some-odd years ago.

Yes, I know all the Kerry bashers will say it is about his character and tells us about what he will be like as President. Do you hold the same standard for President Bush? Do his actions as a young man (alcoholism, drug use, one failed business after another, SEC investigations, etc...) color your opinion of him now? If so, great - bash away at the both of them. The reality is that these are both men who love their country and want to see it succeed and prosper. They just don't agree about how to do it. That is what we should be talking about. I, like my Senator, John McCain, find this ad and these gentlemen to be disgraceful and only hindering the true and noble cause of determining who will lead our nation.l


Oh, and Onetime2 it was me who was "defending" 527s. I think I said they were not my favorites, but since they are helping to serve my goal of electing John Kerry I won't complain too much. I think I also threw in something about Republicans and "sour grapes" that the Dems were doing a better job in this arena. I don't think they are getting weaker, I think they have been saving their money for this interim period between Conventions (or Coronations whichever you prefer) where Kerry can't afford to spend too much money. I am still being a pragmatist, but I must concede I would love to find a way to rid ourselves of them and find a legal/consitutional way to deal with elections.

Also, here is an excerpt from "Meet the Press" where, in my opinion, Kerry shows he is an honest and thoughful individual who has grown (like we all do) over the years.

MR. RUSSERT: Before we take a break, I want to talk about Vietnam. You are a decorated war hero of Vietnam, prominently used in your advertising. You first appeared on MEET THE PRESS back in 1971, your first appearance. I want to roll what you told the country then and come back and talk about it:

(Videotape, MEET THE PRESS, April 18, 1971):

MR. KERRY (Vietnam Veterans Against the War): There are all kinds of atrocities and I would have to say that, yes, yes, I committed the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers have committed in that I took part in shootings in free-fire zones. I conducted harassment and interdiction fire. I used 50-caliber machine guns which we were granted and ordered to use, which were our only weapon against people. I took part in search-and-destroy missions, in the burning of villages. All of this is contrary to the laws of warfare. All of this is contrary to the Geneva Conventions and all of this ordered as a matter of written established policy by the government of the United States from the top down. And I believe that the men who designed these, the men who designed the free-fire zone, the men who ordered us, the men who signed off the air raid strike areas, I think these men, by the letter of the law, the same letter of the law that tried Lieutenant Calley, are war criminals.

(End videotape)

MR. RUSSERT: You committed atrocities.

SEN. KERRY: Where did all that dark hair go, Tim? That's a big question for me. You know, I
thought a lot, for a long time, about that period of time, the things we said, and I think the word is a bad word. I think it's an inappropriate word. I mean, if you wanted to ask me have you ever made mistakes in your life, sure. I think some of the language that I used was a language that reflected an anger. It was honest, but it was in anger, it was a little bit excessive.

MR. RUSSERT: You used the word "war criminals."

SEN. KERRY: Well, let me just finish. Let me just finish. It was, I think, a reflection of the kind of times we found ourselves in and I don't like it when I hear it today. I don't like it, but I want you to notice that at the end, I wasn't talking about the soldiers and the soldiers' blame, and my great regret is, I hope no soldier--I mean, I think some soldiers were angry at me for that, and I understand that and I regret that, because I love them. But the words were honest but on the other hand, they were a little bit over the top. And I think that there were breaches of the Geneva Conventions. There were policies in place that were not acceptable according to the laws of warfare, and everybody knows that. I mean, books have chronicled that, so I'm not going to walk away from that. But I wish I had found a way to say it in a less abrasive way.

MR. RUSSERT: But, Senator, when you testified before the Senate, you talked about some of the hearings you had observed at the winter soldiers meeting and you said that people had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and on and on. A lot of those stories have been discredited, and in hindsight was your testimony...

SEN. KERRY: Actually, a lot of them have been documented.

MR. RUSSERT: So you stand by that?

SEN. KERRY: A lot of those stories have been documented. Have some been discredited? Sure, they have, Tim. The problem is that's not where the focus should have been. And, you know, when you're angry about something and you're young, you know, you're perfectly capable of not--I mean, if I had the kind of experience and time behind me that I have today, I'd have framed some of that differently. Needless to say, I'm proud that I stood up. I don't want anybody to think twice about it. I'm proud that I took the position that I took to oppose it. I think we saved lives, and I'm proud that I stood up at a time when it was important to stand up, but I'm not going to quibble, you know, 35 years later that I might not have phrased things more artfully at time.

edit: also onetime2 thanks for the kind words and right back at ya!

__________________
Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so."
-Douglas Adams

cheeterbo

it seems to me that bushes puppet masters are trying to make this kerrys "willie horton".

it is a disgrace. perhaps if bush had served in the military, his controllers could try to use it, but he can't even prove he was in the military.

jcookc6

It was only a matter of time for more stories or versions to come out.

http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn07292004.html


Hail, the Conquering War Criminal Comes!
What Kerry Really Did in Vietnam

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
and JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

In his senior year at Yale in 1966 John Kerry enlisted in the US Navy, with his actual induction scheduled for the summer, after his graduation. Already notorious among his contemporaries for his political ambition, he'd maneuvered himself into the top slot at the Yale political union, while also winning admission to Skull and Bones.

While Bush, two years behind Kerry, was seeking commercial opportunity at Yale by selling ounce bags of cocaine, (so one contemporary has recalled) Kerry was keeping a vigilant eye on the political temperature and duly noted a contradiction between his personal commitment to go to war and the growing antiwar sentiment among the masses, some of whom he hoped would vote for him at a not too distant time.

It was a season for important decisions and Kerry pondered his options amid the delights of a Skull and Bones retreat on an island in the St Lawrence river. He duly decided to junk his speech on the theme of "life after graduation" and opted for a fiery denunciation of the war and of an LBJ. The speech was well received by the students and some professors. Most parents were aghast, though not Kerry's own mother and father.

Unlike Bill Clinton and George Bush, Kerry duly presented himself for military service. After a year's training he was assigned to the USS Gridley, deployed to the Pacific, probably carrying nuclear missiles. Beset by boredom, Kerry received the news that once of his best friends, Dickie Pershing, grandson of "Black Jack" Pershing had been killed in Vietnam. Kerry seethed with rage and yearned, as he put it years later to his biographer Douglas Brinkley, for vengeance. (Brinkley's recently published and highly admiring bio, A Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War, offers many telling vignettes to an assiduous reader. It's based almost entirely on Kerry's diaries and letters of the time.)

Kerry engineered reassignment to the Swift boat patrol. In Vietnam the Tet offensive had prompted a terrible series of search and destroy missions by the US, plus the assassination program known as Phoenix. As part of the US Navy's slice of the action, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt and his sidekick Captain Roy "Latch" Hoffman had devised "Operation Sea Lords", in which the Swift boats would patrol the canals and secondary streams of the Mekong Delta, with particular emphasis on the areas near the Cambodian border. The basic plan, explicitly acknowledged by many Swift boat veterans, was to terrorize the peasants into turning against the National Liberation Front, aka Viet Cong. The entire area, except for certain designated "friendly villages", was a free fire zone, meaning the Americans could shoot at will and count anyone they killed as VC.

Arriving in Vietnam on November 17, 1968, Kerry chafed at patrols around Cam Ranh bay and pushed successfully for assignment to the forward, killing patrols. He was no Al Gore, peaceably smoking dope and shooting hoops on his Army base in Vietnam and writing home fierce moral critiques of the war. "I was more opposed to the war than ever", Kerry told Brinkley in 2003, "yet more compelled by patriotism to fight it. I guess until you're in it, you still want to try it."

Day after day, night after night, the Swift boats plied the waters, harassing and often killing villagers, fishermen and farmers. In this program, aimed at intimidating the peasants into submission, Kerry was notoriously zealous. One of his fellow lieutenants, James R. Wasser, described him admiringly in these words: "Kerry was an extremely aggressive officer and so was I. I liked that he took the fight to the enemy, that he was tough and gutsy--not afraid to spill blood for his country."

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.

Craving more action, Kerry got himself deployed to An Thoi, at Vietnam's southern tip, one of the centers for the lethal Phoenix sweeps and the location of a infamous interrogation camp which held as many as 30,000 prisoners.

Kerry's first mission as part of the Phoenix program was to ferry a Provincial Reconnaissance Unit of South Vietnamese soldiers, which would have been led by either a Green Beret or CIA officer. After off-loading the unit Kerry hid his Swift boat in a mangrove backwater. Two hours later a red flare told them that the PRU wanted an emergency "extraction". Kerry's boat picked up the PRU team, plus two prisoners. The leader of the PRU team told Kerry that while they were kidnapping the two villagers (one of them a young woman) from their hut, they'd seen four people in a sampan and promptly killed them. The two prisoners were "body-snatched" as part of a regular schedule of such seizures in the victims would be taken to An Thoi for interrogation and torture.

Kerry's term to Brinkley for such outings--and there were many in his brief--is "accidental atrocities".

On daylight missions the Swift boats were accompanied by Cobra Attack helicopters that would strafe the river banks and the skeletal forest ravaged by napalm and Agent Orange. "Helos upset the VC [sic, meaning anyone on the ground] more than anything else that we had to offer", Kerry tells Brinkley, "and any chance we had to have them with us was more than welcome."

An example of these Cobras in action. It's daylight, so the population is not under curfew. Kerry's boat is working its way up a canal, with a Cobra above it. They encounter a sampan with several people in it. The helicopter hovers right above the sampan, then empties its machineguns into it, killing everyone and sinking the sampan. Kerry, in his war diary, doesn't lament the deaths but does deplore the senselessness of the Cobra's crew in using all of its ammunition, since the chopper pilot "requested permission to leave in order to rearm, an operation that left us uncovered for more than 45 minutes in an area where cover was essential".

Christmas Eve, 1968, finds Kerry leading a patrol up a canal along the Cambodian border. The Christmas ceasefire has just come into effect. So what the boat was doing there is a question in and of itself. They spot two sampans and chase them to a small fishing village. The boat takes some sniper fire, (or at least Kerry says it did). Kerry orders his machine-gunner, James Wasser, to open up a barrage. At last a note of contrition, but not from Kerry. Wasser describes to Brinkley how he saw that he'd killed an old man leading a water buffalo. "I'm haunted by that old man's face. He was just doing his daily farming, hurting nobody. He got hit in the chest with an M-60 machinegun round. It may have been Christmas Eve, but I was real somber after that... to see the old man blown away sticks with you." It turned out that Kerry's boat had shot up one of the few "friendly" villages, with a garrison of South Vietnamese ARV soldiers, two of whom were wounded.

Contrast Wasser's sad reflections with Kerry's self-righteous account in his diary of such salvoes, often aimed into Cambodian territory. "On occasion we had shot towards the border when provoked by sniper or ambush, but without fail this led to a formal reprimand by the Cambodian government and accusations of civilian slaughters and random killings by American 'aggressors'. I have no doubt that on occasion some innocents were hit by bullets that were aimed in self-defense at the enemy, but of all the cases in Vietnam that could be labeled massacres, this was certainly the most spurious."

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.

It's not that he couldn't have summoned up for his audiences back then some awful episodes. For example, a few weeks after the incident on the Cambodian border Kerry's boat was heading up the Cua Lon river toward Square bay, when one of the crew yelled "sampan off port bow". Kerry ordered the machineguns to fire on the fishing boat. The sampan stopped and Kerry and his crew boarded it. They found a woman holding an infant, and near her the body of her young child riddled with machine gun bullets, lying face down among bags of rice. Kerry tells Brinkley he refused to look at the dead child, saying, "the face would stay with me for the rest of my life and it was better not to know whether it was a smile or grimace or whether it was a girl or boy". Kerry's preferred mode is the usual one. "Our orders", he tells Brinkley a few pages later, "were to destroy all the hooches and sampans we could find."

As part of Operation Sea Lords Kerry would ferry Nung tribesmen on assassination missions. The Nung were paid by the kill, and Kerry contrasts them favorably to the South Vietnamese PF guardsmen, derisively terming the latter "Cream Puffs". On one occasion, Kerry tells Brinkley, he ferried Nung to a village where they seized an old man and forced him to act as a human mine detector, walking ahead of them along the trail. There were no mines and the Nung encountered no enemy. But for the old man it was a one way trip. The Nung slit his throat, disembowelled him and left a warning note on his body.

When Kerry was awarded his Silver Star he had it pinned on by Admiral Elmo Zumwalt and at the ceremony had the opportunity to meet Commander Adrian Lonsdale, the operational commander of Seas Lords. Kerry seized the chance to criticize the conduct of the war: "It's not that the men are afraid or chicken to go into the rivers", he says he told Lonsdale. "It's not that they're not willing to risk their lives, or that they don't agree with the principle of what's being done over here. It's just that they want to have a fair chance to do something that brings results and what they're doing now isn't bringing them anything. If we were to have some support, something that would guarantee that we were gaining something, but for a country with all the power that we have, we're making men fight in a fashion that defies reason.... What we need, Sir, are some troops to sweep through the areas and secure them after we leave; otherwise we're just going to be shot to hell after we go through, and there'll be nothing gained."

Yes, this is the same Kerry who today is calling for 40,000 more US troops to deployed to Iraq.

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.)

Two of Kerry's crew members, Medeiros and machine-gunner Tommy Belodeau, found no mystery in why the VC soldier didn't fire his B-40 RPG launcher. The Vietnamese was effectively unarmed. He hadn't reloaded the RPGafter the first shot at Kerry's boat as it headed down the river.

Later that year of 1996 Belodeau described the full scope of the incident to the Boston Globe's David Warsh. Belodeau told Warsh that he opened with his M-60 machine gun on the Vietnamese man at a range of ten feet after they'd beached the boat. The machine gun bullets caught the Vietnamese in the legs, and the wounded man crawled behind a nearby hooch. At this point, Belodeau said, Kerry had seized an M-16 rifle, jumped out of the boat, gone up to the man who Belodeau says was near death, and finished him off.

When the Globe published Warsh's account of Belodeau's recollection, essentially accusing Kerry of a war crime, the Kerry campaign quickly led Madeiros to the press and he described how the Vietnamese, felled by Belodeau's machine-gun fire, got up, grabbed the rocket launcher and ran off down a trail through the forest and a disappeared around a bend. As Kerry set off after him, Medeiros followed. They came round the corner to find the Vietnamese once again pointing the RPG at them ten feet away. He didn't fire and Kerry shot him dead with his rifle.

Circulating around veterans' websites in early February of 2004 was an email written by Mike Morrison who, like Kerry, won a bronze star won in Vietnam. Morrison who later went on to write speeches for Lee Iacocca, was highly suspicion of Kerry's claims to martial glory. In a letter to his brother Ed he wrote as follows:

"I've long thought that John Kerry's war record was phoney. We talked about it when you were here. It's mainly been instinct because, as you know, nobody who claims to have seen the action he does would so shamelessly flaunt it for political gain.

"I was in the Delta shortly after he left. I know that area well. I know the operations he was involved in well. I know the tactics and the doctrine used. I know the equipment. Although I was attached to CTF-116 (PBRs) I spent a fair amount of time with CTF-115 (swift boats), Kerry's command.

"Here are my problems and suspicions:

"(1) Kerry was in-country less than four months and collected, a Bronze Star, a Silver Star and three purple hearts. I never heard of anybody with any outfit I worked with (including SEAL One, the Sea Wolves, Riverines and the River Patrol Force) collecting that much hardware so fast, and for such pedestrian actions. The Swifts did a commendable job. But that duty wasn't the worst you could draw. They operated only along the coast and in the major rivers (Bassac and Mekong). The rough stuff in the hot areas was mainly handled by the smaller, faster PBRs. Fishy.

"(2) Three Purple Hearts but no limp. All injuries so minor that no time lost from duty. Amazing luck. Or he was putting himself in for medals every time he bumped his head on the wheel house hatch? Combat on the boats was almost always at close range. You didn't have minor wounds. At least not often. Not three times in a row. Then he used the three purple hearts to request a trip home eight months before the end of his tour. Fishy.

"(3) The details of the event for which he was given the Silver Star make no sense at all. Supposedly, a B-40 (rocket propelled grenade) was fired at the boat and missed. Charlie jumps up with the launcher in his hand, the bow gunner knocks him down with the twin .50 (caliber machine guns), Kerry beaches the boat, jumps off, shoots Charlie, and retrieves the launcher. If true, he did everything wrong. (a) Standard procedure when you took rocket fire was to put your stern to the action and go (away) balls to the wall. A B-40 has the ballistic integrity of a Frisbee after about 25 yards, so you put 50 yards or so between you and the beach and begin raking it with your .50's. ( Did you ever see anybody get knocked down with a .50 caliber round and get up? The guy was dead or dying. The rocket launcher was empty. There was no reason to go after him (except if you knew he was no danger to you--just flopping around in the dust during his last few seconds on earth, and you wanted some derring-do in your after-action report). And we didn't shoot wounded people. We had rules against that, too.

"Kerry got off the boat. This was a major breach of standing procedures. Nobody on a boat crew ever got off a boat in a hot area. EVER! The reason was simple. If you had somebody on the beach your boat was defenseless. It couldn't run and it couldn't return fire. It was stupid and it put his crew in danger. He should have been relieved and reprimanded. I never heard of any boat crewman ever leaving a boat during or after a firefight.

"Something is very fishy."

The account that makes sense to us is Belodeau's. There were three high-powered machine guns on the boat and one Vietnamese at close range on the land and Belodeau says his machinegun knocked him down. Even if the Vietnamese fighter miraculously got up and started running away down that trail, is it likely that the two would have pursued him down an unknown path on foot. Wouldn't be more likely that the boat would have used its machineguns again, blazing away as on Kerry's own account they did, day and day and night after night?

Kerry's Bronze Star On March 13, 1969, two weeks after the episode that yielded the Silver Star Kerry saw his last slice of action. It got him his bronze star and his third purple heart, which meant he could file a request to be transferred out of Vietnam.

Kerry earned the bronze star by pulling another lieutenant out of the water after the latter's Swift boat had hit a mine. That same mine's detonation caused enough wake to throw Kerry against a bulkhead, bruising his arm. This was classed as a wound, which meant the third purple heart. Then, amid rifle fire, Kerry maneuvered his boat toward Lieutenant Rassman and hoisted him onto the deck.

Both boats had been on yet another mission ferrying Green Berets, US Navy SEALs and Nung assassins to a village. Once again they had mistakenly targeted a friendly village, where they opened fire on South Vietnamese troops who were interrogating a group of women and children lined up against a wall.

When the Green Berets and SEALs opened fire, the South Vietnamese soldiers jumped the wall and at least ten of the women and children were killed. Meanwhile, against orders, Kerry had again left his boat and attached himself to the Nung and was, by his own words, "shooting and blowing things up". One of the Nung threwew a grenade into a hut which turned out to be filled with sacks of rice. Kerry got grains of rice and some bits of metal debris embedded in his ass, the most severe wounds he sustained in Vetnam.

With three purple hearts, the silver and bronze stars, Kerry now applied for reassignment as a personal aide to a senior officer in either Boston, New York or Washington DC. He ended up in New York working for Admiral Walter F. Schlech in New York. In January 1970 he applied for early discharge to run for office. As he put it, he'd decided not to join the antiwar movement but work within the system and try and win a seat in Congress from the Third District in Massachusetts.

Zumwalt: "Kerry's Record Will Haunt Him"

A former assistant secretary of defense and Fletcher School of Diplomacy professor,W. Scott Thompson, recalled a conversation with the late Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr. that clearly had a slightly different take on Kerry's recollection of their discussions: "[T]he fabled and distinguished chief of naval operations,Admiral Elmo Zumwalt,told me --30 years ago when he was still CNO [chief naval officer in Vietnam] that during his own command of U.S. naval forces in Vietnam,just prior to his anointment as CNO, young Kerry had created great problems for him and the other top brass,by killing so many non-combatant civilians and going after other non-military targets. "We had virtually to straitjacket him to keep him under control", the admiral said. "Bud" Zumwalt got it right when he assessed Kerry as having large ambitions --but promised that his career in Vietnam would haunt him if he were ever on the national stag

rusti

You just can't stand that there is an honorable, military democrat who is about to humiliate Bush in the polls in November.

Fact is, his entire crew is standing behind him except for one man, and he just happens to be the guy Kerry almost got dishonorably discharged for indiscriminate shooting. That crew is the only bunch who matters. They were with him through it all and they support him and attest to his honor.

You can't touch him. It's done, give it a break.

Zeld2.0

Yet more spin despite the fact those who were with him support him

Spin spin spin spin spin

pan6467

What is truly PATHETIC is that this is even an issue.

By focussing on this the GOP aren't letting Kerry's message get heard. Are they that scared of what he has to say and his platform?

Also I have a feeling IF Kerry does get elected his presidency will be plagued with GOP trying to find anything they can to crucify him... much like they did Clinton.

"Hey, guys we can't allow a Dem. president to succeed so let's spend billions and billions of tax dollars to find something on him so that his whole term in office is spent fighting this and not getting anything done to help the US. And we can have Limbaugh and Faux News make issues out of rumors, people with vendettas and vague innuendoes."

__________________
I just love people who use the excuse "I use/do this because I LOVE the feeling/joy/happiness it brings me" and expect you to be ok with that as you watch them destroy their life blindly following. My response is, "I like to put forks in an eletrical socket, just LOVE that feeling, can't ever get enough of it, so will you let me put this copper fork in that electric socket?"

jcookc6

The thing is, John Kerry is basically running on his record in the Navy. It seems to me that not to long a go, a football coach got a job at a Major school. It turned out that he had fudged his record a little. He got fired. He had admitted he made a mistake and paid for it dearly.
If John Kerry has nothing to hide, why haven't the records on his first Purple Heart been released.
To get off the military aspect, he has made statements on his attending the secret meetings of the Intelligence Committee. He has been challenged to release his attendence records, he hasn't done so.
It seems that the DNC thought that because they had the Major TV Networks in thier pocket, they could hide alot of stuff. I think they have underestimated the power of AM talk radio. Also, Fox News, though I find that most of the time Fox is unwatchable with people trying to scream each other down.
As with the post a couple of posts above, more stories are coming out.
It is almost like, maybe John Kerry has been set up by his own party, has anyone ever thought of that. Maybe the Clinton's don't want him to win, but put up an honorable battle so that Hillary can have the nomination in 2008. Can you imagine what that election will by like Hillary a woman, Against Mitt Romney a Morman.

rusti

He's running on his record in the navy because a) his record shines. Nothing any of you have said has diminished it. His record is who he is. He saved several mens lives, directly. b) Republicans make it an issue when they accuse us of being weak on national security.

You guys keep pushing this though. All it does is keep your side negative, which turns off swing voters, and keeps attention on the fact that Kerry actually served this nation in wartime. It's good things.
That, plus keeping the undecided swing voters out of any venue where they could have possibly heard Bush speak are all right in my book. I love reading the stories of undecided individuals who wanted to get in but were refused, who now have a healthy distrust of the man. If you want to throw the election we won't stop you.

rukkyg

They're campaining on his navy record because they're trying to portray him as capable of being the commander-in-chief during this war-time and terrorism and what not. Kerry will already get 40% of the vote without this aspect of the campaign, but too many people are all overconcerned about terrorism because of how the media tries to scare us every day.

Zeld2.0

I still believe that above all, this campaign against Kerry just shows how low people everywhere are willing to go where questioning people's service in a war that wasn't and still isn't exactly popular is used for political gain.

And honestly, if he was lying, do you have so much to fear? I think this entire obsession with Kerry shows a fear of the fact his record does shine and stand out if anything

onetime2

They're campaigning on his navy record because he will have very few policies which differ from Bush in other areas.

What will he do in Iraq that's different and how does he hope to achieve it?

What about healthcare? How will he do things differently/achieve it?

The economy?

The intelligence services?

Anti Terror?

Budget?

There are few if any details on his plans. The Dems are running a campaign basically against the man in office now and not against the "issues". They've chosen this path because they know there are few significant differences in what the two men will push and how they will go about it.

__________________
Strive to be more curious than ignorant.

rukkyg

I realize Republicans and Democrats are basically the same party, but at least a lot of the people in the democratic party that don't run for office are voting for progressive ideals.

I want President Palmer from 24 to be my president.

Superbelt

Monstrously big difference in environmental stance and the opinions of who should be getting tax cuts (if any) Do you dream of the day you can eat fish without toxic levels of mercury? How about forcing the grandfathered power plants in the mid west to clean up their emissions one day soon? I wouldn't mind drinking water with lower levels of arsenic. Same thing goes for maintaining the integrity of old growth forests and halting the segmentation of crucial wetlands. Those are all BIG policy differences between the two.

Anti Terror, Kerry will quit pushing missile defense and do what he has been advocating for years now, whichis giving the Coast Guard and our ports the funding to stop terrorism at the borders, rather than be fearful for missiles that we have no chance in hell of stopping anyway, let's worry about the threat that is actually coming.

Intelligence Services: National Security Director, as described by 9/11 commission who has the power of controlling the budget, rather than just be an additional layer of Bureaucracy as Bush wants.

jcookc6

WHAT IS THE TRUTH JOHN? SHRAPNEL IN THE LEG?
How did Jim Rassmann end up in the water, who wrote the reports for the medals? WHY WON'T THIS GO AWAY? Why doesn't John Kerry just keep his mouth shut, if they keep up the argument, other people are going to start to take notice.
Why don't we just stop talking about anything that happened before 1990. Why don't we just start telling the voter what we are going to do? No more I have a plan, but can't tell you until I am elected. WHAT THE FUCK ARE THE PLANS?

Statement By Swift Boat Veterans for Truth Member Larry Thurlow
Author:
Dated: Thursday, August 19 2004 @ 09:00 AM PDT
Viewed: 48633 times
For Immediate Release

Statement By Swift Boat Veterans for Truth Member Larry Thurlow

I am convinced that the language used in my citation for a Bronze Star was language taken directly from John Kerry's report which falsely described the action on the Bay Hap River as action that saw small arms fire and automatic weapons fire from both banks of the river.

To this day, I can say without a doubt in my mind, along with other accounts from my shipmates -- there was no hostile enemy fire directed at my boat or at any of the five boats operating on the river that day.

I submitted no paperwork for a medal nor did I file an after action report describing the incident. To my knowledge, John Kerry was the only officer who filed a report describing his version of the incidents that occurred on the river that day.

It was not until I had left the Navy -- approximately three months after I left the service -- that I was notified that I was to receive a citation for my actions on that day.

I believed then as I believe now that I received my Bronze Star for my efforts to rescue the injured crewmen from swift boat number three and to conduct damage control to prevent that boat from sinking. My boat and several other swift boats went to the aid of our fellow swift boat sailors whose craft was adrift and taking on water. We provided immediate rescue and damage control to prevent boat three from sinking and to offer immediate protection and comfort to the injured crew.

After the mine exploded, leaving swift boat three dead in the water, John Kerry's boat, which was on the opposite side of the river, fled the scene. US Army Special Forces officer Jim Rassmann, who was on Kerry's boat at the time, fell off the boat and into the water. Kerry's boat returned several minutes later -- under no hail of enemy gunfire -- to retrieve Rassmann from the river only seconds before another boat was going to pick him up.

Kerry campaign spokespersons have conflicting accounts of this incident -- the latest one being that Kerry's boat did leave but only briefly and returned under withering enemy fire to rescue Mr. Rassmann. However, none of the other boats on the river that day reported enemy fire nor was anyone wounded by small arms action. The only damage on that day was done to boat three -- a result of the underwater mine. None of the other swift boats received damage from enemy gunfire.

And in a new development, Kerry campaign officials are now finally acknowledging that while Kerry's boat left the scene, none of the other boats on the river ever left the damaged swift boat. This is a direct contradiction to previous accounts made by Jim Rassmann in the Oregonian newspaper and a direct contradiction to the "No Man Left Behind" theme during the Democratic National Convention.

These ever changing accounts of the Bay Hap River incident by Kerry campaign officials leave me asking one question. If no one ever left the scene of the Bay Hap River incident, how could anyone be left behind?
http://www.swiftvets.com/article.php...40819100856500

Zeld2.0

Anything more to add other than constantly posting articles of stuff that has been or is getting debunked or retracted every day now?

Them articles themselves are meaningless

filtherton

No shit. Might as well be posting from newsmax. The swift boat veterans are a political organization. Truth is of little consequence to them. They're getting paid good money to calk shit about kerry.

onetime2

And why aren't these supposed differences the mainstays of the Kerry campaign?

Missile defense is a difference but it is far from a standard bearer. You claim that missile defense is impossible but protecting ports is not, how many shipping containers and ships enter our ports on a daily basis versus how many missiles we would see coming at us in an all out missile attack? Protecting our ports is probably more impossible than the missile defense shield.

Putting a new person in charge of Intelligence will not solve our problems. In fact the disarray caused by the transition to this form of leadership would virtually incapacitate our intelligence services when we need them the most.

And as far as the environmental argument, again, how do you think Kerry will accomplish these things with a Republican controlled Congress? How will he specifically remove the mercury from fish?

I never said they were the same only that the differences and what they can realistically achieve are not significant in reality and even less significant to voters. That is precisely the answer to the question I posed at the start of this post.

__________________
Strive to be more curious than ignorant.

Superbelt

Environmentally, Kerry will keep the Republicans from making things worse. Senate could go Democrat this year. House is possible in two.

I guarantee you that any viable missile attack on American will be successful. First the system still doesn't work. But Bush started installing it anyway (even though he promised not to until it was ready). Secondly, in any fantasy world where it DID work, any non-retarded country would send a volley of rockets to overwhelm.
I'll take the better odds of improving port and border security.

The 9/11 panel seems to think, after spending a damned long time studying it, that a new Intelligence Director is a good idea. So does Kerry and Bush. The difference is Kerry wants to actually make him a boss, while Bush just wants him to be... there.