Kerry volunteered, he went, he served [two tours of duty], he got wounded [three times] and earned a Silver Star for Bravery. He then came home to try and tell the truth about the war, risking his war-hero political capital.
Bush got every possible advantage [skipped to the front of a waiting list for a guaranteed safe stateside unit], and then went AWOL [blowing a million dollars worth of pilot training], and avoided all consequences.
If someone can explain why I should think about it any other way, I'd love to hear it.
Monday, August 09, 2004
Politics: Swift Boat Vets Counterpoint
I'm combining [and adding to] two comments from a thread at Digby's into the perfect response to all this Swift Boat Vets Against Kerry nonsense:
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3 comments:
It's your sister, E. I heard of these guys on NPR but am not well-informed on the topic--what exactly is their argument against Kerry? Do they say that his accounts of his service in Vietnam are untrue? What's their deal? Have you read any of Kerry's War Journals? There was a link from his homepage to an article written about him that included several excerpts, but I'm not sure it's still there. Amazing. Chilling. It helps one appreciate the courage it took for him to return from war as a young man and to speak out publicly as he did...
Yeah, they say he's a liar, his medals are bogus, etc. The author of the book is a guy named John O'Neill whose only claim to fame in life seems to be emerging from the woodwork to defame John Kerry.
Thirty years ago, he was recruited and sent-out by Richard Nixon to "take-down" Kerry who was then reaching prominence as a Anti-War activist. He even debated Kerry on the dick Cavett Show, and he's been popping up up ever since.
The basis of O'Neill's arguments rest on a lot of "he said/she said" scenarios where no one can definitively prove what happened. Since this guy has spent his life as a political hit-man, I don't give him much credence. Kerry seems to have a lot more guys with much more believable accounts as well as military records and everything else backing him up.
Me again, (E.) I believe I saw footage of that guy and Kerry on the Dick Cavett show. He was all outraged that Kerry was portraying all American soldiers as villians for the terrible things he had done "over there." Though Kerry qualified what he said as not representative of every soldier but as things he had seen or known of...I heard some Swift boat guy on a radio program last night irate that Kerry has gotten so far in life based on "lies"--he is insisting that there was not enemy fire at the time that Kerry pulled the man aboard. Of course, he wasn't there--but as a former Swift boat guy himself he argues that their primary mission was to DO the firing to "clear the area" and to "draw out the enemy." The man's argument was that Kerry is a liar and has a "bad" character. When the host of the program (I don't know what I was listening to) asked him if it also bothered him to know that George Bush can't account for months of his own "service" and quite probably has covered up records that would reveal his own evasion of duty--the guy just kept saying, "I don't care! That has nothing to do with this..." Isn't it funny when people who weren't there act like they know best what happened?!
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