No More Swiftboats: Keep Kerry in the Senate

Over the past few days there's been a raft of speculation floated by the media that John Kerry, the senior senator from Massachusetts, will be offered a cabinet position, either Secretary of State or Secretary of Defense.

Here's why that is a very bad idea.

First of all, if he gives up his seat in the senate, what are the chances that it will be picked off by the opportunistic Republican hack and recent loser Scott Brown? Given the closeness of this year's race, I'd say his chances are pretty good. We need to keep the senate in as many Democratic hands as possible, and work to increase that number. Sorry Senator Kerry, I know that you have ambitions beyond the senate, but you need to take one for the team.

Second, we don't need a redux of 2004's  Swift Boat Veterans for Truth Swiftboat Liars for Bush. I was a member of the Washington State Veterans for Kerry Steering Committee in 2004, with a front row seat to the show, and I don't want to go through that again.

The Swift Boat group, you may recall, was an astroturf organization which had at its head a guy named John O'Neill, who had apparently been carrying a hardon against Kerry since that time years ago that Kerry made him look like a fool on national television (Dick Cavett Show in 1971).

The fact that the video of Kerry testifying to Congress seemed to show that he had been involved in war crimes -- not so, he was speaking for veterans who had claimed that they had, reading from their testimony at the infamous Winter Soldier Investigation, and while it later appeared that some of them had not been truthful, Kerry had no way of knowing that in 1970, but act contributed to the perceived need to "get" Kerry with O'Neill and with some of the brass who had been above Kerry.

Combine that personal vendetta with a virtually unlimited amount of money to create a controversy where there wasn't one, and Kerry's apparently inability or unwillingness to fight that. I've personally met Kerry several times and one time I asked him about the whole Swiftboating episode; he said that it was one of the big regrets of the 2004 campaign that he didn't fight back immediately against the them, but he said that he didn't think that the voters would give any credence to their -- what seemed to reasonable people -- outrageous lies. Turns out he wasn't right about that...

When you drill down deep enough into the whole Swift Boat thing, you find that, although they were able to get a bunch of Navy Vietnam vets on board with their slander, the closer to Kerry you got, the fewer people you could find who were willing to join the Swifties. The men on Kerry's boat, who presumably knew him the best, almost to a man joined with Kerry and worked on the campaign. I also met several of these guys and they were effusive in their praise of their former commander. They were certainly under no compulsion to do that, and to a veteran like me, it means a lot that the men under his command were so supportive of him.

A Very Big Deal was made about Kerry's medals as well, but it must be kept in mind that a soldier can't just give himself a medal, and especially not one as prestigious as a Silver Star. There is a process of  nomination and approval that includes several layers above the rank of the recipient, and those people are career military who can't be "bought". With a Silver Star, it goes all the way to the Pentagon. In the Navy that was especially true, as verified by one of my closest friends who is a retired Navy Captain (the equivalent of a bird colonel in the Army) and is also a Vietnam vet.

So no, I don't want to refight that whole Swiftboat thing again. I lost a couple of "friends" last time around when they loudly proclaimed that Kerry didn't deserve his medals. Neither of them had been in the military service, of course, and I may have been a little too ... insistent ... in telling them that they were full of shit.

Oh Sure, NOW He's Fighting Back

I was pissed at John Kerry in 2004 for refusing to fight back against the Swift Boat Liars for Bush, and my humble opinion is this: That refusal is what cost him the election.

So now Texas windbag and oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens is strutting around saying that he'll give one million dollars to anyone who can disprove the allegations made by the lying cohort of Swifties in 2004, funded to the tune of some three million bucks by Pickens.

Shouldn't Pickens' current offer ought to at least match, if not exceed, what he poured into that scurrilous campaign?

But, that aside, now John Kerry has taken up Pickens' challenge and says he'll prove that the lying sack of crap John O'Neill and his pride of prevaricating pricks were wrong when they attacked his military service.

About fucking time, Senator. So where was that zeal, that energy, that outrage in 2004 when we really needed it?

But Pickens, in true Rethug form, says he "wouldn't consider giving Kerry the reward unless Kerry surrenders copies of his wartime journals, as well as movies he shot while on patrol and his complete military records for 1971 to 1978".

Movies he shot? Military records for years after he was in Vietnam? Jesus, what's next, his first grade report card?

Pickens it seems is already starting to backpedal, having shot his mouth off at some wingnut function, and now is worried that he might actually have to cough up the money. So he counters with what is essentially a gambling bet, that if Kerry can't prove the allegations wrong, he'll have to pull out his own checkbook and pony up his own million dollars.

To his credit, Kerry says he will donate Pickens' million to Paralyzed Veterans of America.

So this one, despite the fact that it's now almost ancient history, will bear watching, if only to see Kerry drag into the pig shit that overblown pompous windbag Pickens.

Former POW Speaks Out

Phillip Butler is a 1961 Annapolis graduate who was shot down over North Vietnam in 1965. He spent eight years as a POW, so his opinions ought to carry some weight.

He has an excellent opinion piece on Military.com about his POW experiences at the infamous Hanoi Hilton, and the fact that, despite the lies spewing forth from a small group of rightwing ideologues among his fellow POWs, the truth was that their captors never told them about John Kerry's anti-war activities. Butler was in the Hanoi Hilton with three former POWs who now claim the opposite.

"I remember. I was there," Butler says, echoing the statements made by the Swifties during the 2004 campaign against John Kerry (the difference being, of course, that Butler really was there).

Excerpts:

As a former prisoner of war in Vietnam, I read with great sadness a recent article authored by retired Air Force Col. George E. "Bud" Day, and released from the "Vietnam Veterans Legacy Foundation," a group that was formerly known as the infamous “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth." They may have changed their name, but they have not changed their tradition of lies and distorted facts.

* * * * *

[We were] stunned and sickened to see a small number of our former cellmates enter the political fray with the negative Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign against John Kerry. Regretfully, many of us remained silent as a multi-million dollar political smear campaign diminished and denigrated Kerry's service in Vietnam.

I agree with Butler: Those fuckers in Swift Boat Liars for Bush or whatever the fuck they are calling themselves these days DO NOT speak for me, and they DO NOT speak for the vast majority of the Vietnam veterans I know. Even John McCain has called the Swifties and their ilk "dishonest and dishonorable".

BTW, I am proud to note that Butler is also a fellow member of Veterans for Peace. If you are a veteran who is fed up with the war machine and everything that goes along with it, please consider joining us. Not a veteran? No problem, we'll take you, too.

T. Bone Chicken and the Issue That Refuses to Die

Okay, by now everybody knows how I feel about John Kerry and his refusal to fight back against the Swift Boar Liars for Bush.

But I also figure better late than never, so it is with uncontrolled glee that I see that ten of Kerry's shipmates from Vietnam are taking up T. Boone Pickens on his offer to give (cue music) one million dollars to anyone that can prove that the Swifties are wrong.

This ought to be a slam dunk, and it couldn't have come at a better time. Just when T-Bone is trying to gin up his media whores to slime Barack Obama, all of a sudden he has to defend himself against the lies of fours years back. It's a public-relations coup of unimaginable brilliance, and kudos to Kerry and his crew for getting the timing exactly right

And, unlike public figure John Kerry, these ten shipmates are not ineligible to file slander lawsuits against T-Bone and his ugly band of liars. But first they want to have that face-to-face sitdown with T-Bone, so they can make the fucker squirm in his underwear when they present to him the incontrovertible truth about what really happened during Kerry's nine months in Vietnam.

And this time he won't be able to weasel out of it by changing the rules in the middle of the game. I think these guys are really serious, and if it comes to the point where they need donations for their legal expenses, I'm all over it.

Kerry "a Hero", Faux News Ignores It

Yesterday a story came out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings on the nomination of a rightwing asshole named Sam Fox. Fox was -- surprise -- a big fundraiser for Baby Doc during 2004, and these types are generally rewarded with some minor diplomatic post somewhere where they can't do much harm; this time it's ambassador to Belgium.

So in the hearing John Kerry -- with a fighting spirit we did not see in 2004 -- ripped the guy on his $50,000 donation to the Swift Boat Liars for Bush. And he wrung out of him an admission that John Kerry was, in fact, a Vietnam War hero.

Bob Geiger over at OpEdNews.com has reprinted a lengthy excerpt from the interchange between Kerry and Fox.

Here's a link to all of the news stories covering the hearing, and in the vast majority of them, the "you're a hero" quote is prominently mentioned.

Not on Faux News, though. Here's a link to their coverage. No hero status for their favorite political victim from 2004 in their coverage, thank you very much.

Oh, and Sam Fox's excuse for donating the cash to the Swifties? "I didn't know about it and besides, everybody else was doing it."

Jesus, what is this, third grade? Kerry is right -- this guy has so many ethical shortcomings that he should be a candidate for remedial social studies, not for representing our country as fucking ambassador, for crissakes.

So Where are the POWs?

I was thinking about the 2004 campaign, and how John Kerry had his fellow Swift Boat crew members with him at nearly every appearance. Every member of Kerry's crew but one gave up many months of his own personal life to travel with him and campaign for him, and make himself readily available to the news media for "corrective interviews" whenever that nasty Swift Boat Liars for Bush bunch of assholes made noise about Kerry's service, his medals, etc.

So then I got to thinking about John McCain, and started wondering why I'm not seeing a single one of his fellow POWs with him at any of these campaign events. Not one.

Why the fuck is that? Do you think that maybe those guys who were with him at the Hanoi Hilton know something about him that he'd rather we didn't know?

I'm just asking, but it does seem more than a little odd, don't you think?

Blowback on Social Security

Okay, you all remember my post of yesterday about the Social Security tissue of lies email. Well, as I could have predicted, it produced a shitstorm of frothing at the mouth email replies, chief among them being that Snopes is run by a couple of liberal shills and you can't trust anything they say, as evidenced by their refutation of the Swift Boat Assholes for Lies.

So here's my broadside that I sent the group today. Eventually, I'm kind of hoping, they'll have enough smarts to take me off that list. On the other hand, I do enjoy this shit, and everyone needs a hobby...

A followup to the mini-shitstorm that my previous email stirred up:
To all of those who were so quick to the trigger with the claim that Snopes is a liberal-slant organization that lies about conservative causes, it appears to me that your talking points were taken from an anti-Snopes email circulating a couple of years ago. When even Snopes' chief competitor in the field of Urban Legends says that email was a lie (see http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/internet/a/snopes_exposed.htm) then it is apparent that you are working with ideas from the lunatic fringe.
And those of you who cited the whole Swift Boat thing as an example of Snopes liberalism, protecting Kerry, etc., well...all I have to say to you is that despite the fact that you /claim /you have done your own research, it is apparent that you have not. No, I don't want to bring up the whole Swiftboating thing for debate again -- it's ancient history now, so don't bother sending me your "proof". When even John McCain called the whole thing a bunch of scurrilous lies, you really haven't got a leg to stand on. Oh, but wait, I forgot: John McCain was the Manchurian Candidate from Hanoi who cooperated with the enemy to get a better deal as a POW, etc etc etc. How that traitor got to be a presidential candidate is beyond me. Except four years earlier it was another traitor who got to be a presidential candidate.
Don't you realize how desperately nutjob those theories sound?
That Swift Boat thing, though, is pretty much the only thing that the right wing can come up with as proof of Snopes "lying" to give a liberal slant to everything -- except of course for their even-handed treatment of Barack Obama (even-handedness being, of course, the hallmark of "flaming liberals"...). Despite the fact that pretty much every rational person on the planet who has /actually/ done any research and any /rational/ thinking on the topic knows that it was the Swiftboaters who were were the liars.
Go ahead and try to come up with some more examples of Snopes "lying" -- you can't do it because they don't do it.
Come on people, use a little common sense for once.
Everything that doesn't fit nicely into your preconceived world view doesn't have to be wrong, or a lie.
For the record, I am on Social Security myself, as well as Medicare, and, as with my VA Disability pension, I can't say anything bad about it. I'm glad that it's there for me and by all indications, despite the diabolical machinations of that wackjob from Wisconsin, it will remain there for me

.

More on John Kerry and the Swifties -- the Nightmare that Won't End

Being a student of history, I always watch a summer-replacement series on PBS called The History Detectives.

Last week's show had a segment on two black Civil War veterans being welcomed into the GAR somewhere in New York state, and ended with one of the "detectives", Wes Cowan, commenting on the state of veterans affairs since the Civil War, including the American Legion commander officially endorsing Benito Mussollini at the 1923 convention ("Do not forget that the Fascisti are to Italy what the American Legion is to the United States")-- which is not at all surprising for an organization founded to counter "communism" -- and ended up with a commentary on the Swift Boat Liars for Bush smearing John Kerry and probably costing him the election.

Well, that did it. The wingnut wackos came out swinging at the communists at PBS and Cowan's "gratuitous and unwarranted" attack on those paragons of patriotism, the Swifties.

You can read a sample of the vituperative and hate-filled letters on the KCTS television's PBS Ombudsman site, complete with a rebuttal by the producers that puts the whiny-ass complainers in their places.

Once again, the smear campaign of the wingnut noise machine rears its ugly head, and once again facts and logic are employed to put them down.

Alas, to no avail. Those fuckers aren't capable of seeing the truth if it came up and smacked them alongside the head.

I'm ashamed to see that Vietnam veterans could stoop so low as to resort to outright lies about one of our own. It's dismaying, appalling and disgusting. And it just goes to show you that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

Let's all keep an eye on that evil bunch of kool-aid-drinking fascists, and call them out every time they open those fat lying yaps of theirs.

Return of the Swifties. Again.

Just to show you that you can't keep a bad idea down, members of the infamous Swift Boat Liars for Bush are sticking their pointy snoots into the marketplace of ideas again, this time to discuss something they are calling "The Left’s Repeated Campaign Against The American Soldier".

Yeah, like it was "the left" that mismanaged the two-war-front, that sent men into battle without proper equipment, that underfunded the VA, that allowed Walter Reed to fall into such shameful state, etc etc etc ad infinitum ad nauseum.

Our good buddy George Bud (aka "The Liar", aka "Brain Damaged from NVA Torture") Day is again in the forefront of this movement, as is one US Rep Sam Johnson of Texas, who made a speech just the other day basically calling any attempt to curtail funding for the Iraq war "treason".

Apparently ole Sam just plumb forgot that he was one of the "traitors" of the right who supported withholding Bosnia funds in 1995. Yeah, he's a BIG supporter of "the troops", all right. Like I've said before, it all depends on who's yer preznit.

Fuck these assholes. They are beneath contempt, but the sad thing is that they are luring many of my fellow veterans into their snare, just like they did in 2004 and the Kerry smear campaign of lies.

The only thing we can do is fight back against the motherfuckers with everything we've got. You know, the way Kerry didn't fight in 2004.

Swift Boat Liars to Attack Murtha

Like the burning drip of a venereal infection that won't go away, the latest reincarnation of Swift Boat Liars for Bush is planning an attack on Rep. John Murtha (D-PA). Now they're going by the Orwellian-named Veterans for Truth, but it's still the same old gang of mouth-breathing wingnut assholes.

According to a UPI story from yesterday, this Pavlovian pack of butt-sniffing dick dogs, originally a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Rethug party set up to attack John Kerry's war record in 2002, will stage a "rally" targeting Murtha, an outspoken critic of the BFEE mishandling of the Quaqmire in the Sand. Murtha is "letting down" the troops in Iraq, according to these kool-aid drinking morons. Their pathetically ironic theme, "Redeploy John Murtha", I suppose is meant to somehow be clever but it's not -- it's just lame and weak and stupid.

This really doesn't come as a surprise. These fuckers got a little taste of corrupt power when they attacked a fellow veteran in 2002, and like a meth-head pimping his grandmother for one more nickle bag, they will slavishly do the bidding of their whip-wielding masters for just one more taste of blood.

But this time I think they've bitten off more than they can chew. Jack Murtha, a Korean War Marine veteran who also volunteered for duty in Vietnam, won't just lie down and take any lying crap off of these pricks. It's going to be fun watching the Old Warrior take off the gloves and bitch-slap the shit out of them.

Stay tuned.

Goddammit John, Just Say "No"!

John Kerry, you piss me off. I donated all of the profits from my book sales to your 2004 campaign, I was in a leadership position of the Veterans for Kerry Steering Committee in my state, and I worked my fucking ass off trying to get you elected.

You pissed me off when you refused to stand up to the Swift Boat Liars for Bush. You pissed me off when you didn't go for the jugular in the debates. You pissed me off when you caved in like a two-minute egg on the day after the election.

And now you're gonna piss me off one more time when you won't stand up and lead the filibuster against Alito. Way back in June 2003 you said "I am prepared to filibuster, if necessary, any Supreme Court nominee who would turn back the clock on a woman's right to choose or the constitutional right to privacy, on civil rights and individual liberties and on the laws protecting workers and the environment." (full story)

John, if that ain't Alito to a "T", then I'm a neo-nazi skinhead. So now the question is this: Are you going to keep your word and do it, or are you going to turn tail and slink away?

It's time, John. Put up or shut up.

Vietnam Veterans Against McCain

The name sounded good, so I checked out the website. Turns out that it's not such a great idea after all -- it was created and organized by a rightwing dickwad and professional MIA "activist" named Ted Sampley.

And Ted Sampley, for those who don't recall, was also an organizer of a similar group called Vietnam Veterans Against John Kerry back in 2004, which melded in with the Swift Boat Liars for Bush, and his tactics haven't changed much over the years. He's still issuing his scurrilous broadsides of lies, innuendo and outright slander against those he sees as his enemies. And that list would include, it would appear, pretty much everyone who does not agree with him (I fully expect that I'll show up on it eventually). He also runs a putative veterans website called The US Veteran Dispatch, which is a Pravda-like propaganda display for his toxic lies and inflamed hatred.

One of his most egregious claims about John McCain: That he is a "Manchurian Candidate" who was brainwashed by Soviet operatives in Hanoi and has been a mole climbing the rungs of the American government ever since his return. (I guess all we're waiting for is Angela Lansbury to turn over that queen of diamonds...)

Sampley says that he's a retired Green Beret (even his own bio states that he spent only ten years in the service, with just a few of them as an actual Special Forces member), whose main claim to fame up until 2004 was to pass himself off as a POW-MIA "activist" -- in reality it appears that he was nothing more than a manipulative greedy gadfly engaged in a perniciously dishonest campaign to extract money out of the pockets of both MIA families and the general public, in order to "learn the truth" about the missing Americans from the Vietnam War.

For an incisive look at Sampley's activities, as well as a ton of other information on the whole American POW-MIA issue, check out the worthy MIA Facts site, set up and run by Vietnam veteran Col. Joe Schlatter, who for nine years was assigned to various positions in the DOD POW-MIA office, including a two-year stint as Deputy Director.

Especially see his analysis and refutation of Sampley's outlandishly moronic claim of McCain as a Manchurian Candidate.

America's veterans have enough problems with Rethugs in general, and John McCain in particular, without having to rely on viciously slavering slander-pigs like Ted Sampley and his ilk. Don't fall for it, don't join him, don't send him money -- instead put all your efforts into the election of the Democratic candidate (i.e., Barack Obama) this November.

BTW, Sampley hates Obama as much as he hates McCain, so watch for him to go for his jugular as well, once Obama seals up the nomination.

Vietnam Veterans for What?

There's some malignant entity out there calling itself Vietnam Veterans for Academic Reform, and it first came to my attention in the 2004 election when it joined with the infamous Swift Boat Liars for Bush in spewing out baseless invective about the war record of John Kerry.

Now it is back in the "news", more or less, with a recent story on the rightwing Cybercast News Service, reprinted on a fundo Xian site calling itself Crosswalk, The Intersection of Faith and Life. There are also some articles originating with the VVAR on FreeRepublic and other sites of that ilk; you can pretty much tell where an "independent" organization lies by where they appear on the Internets.

The Fearless Leader of VVAR (and as far as I know, its only member), one dickwad "academic" named Leonard Magruder (who isn't even a Vietnam veteran!) is trying to shop around that same tired old lie that it was the media that "lost" the Vietnam War.

He also cites some 21 "standard histories and commentaries" to PROVE his allegations that the media snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

No, I have't examined the actual citations, but I'm pretty sure I don't need to. I am willing to bet good money, sight unseen, that they are of the same credibility and believability as those "scientific studies" that "prove" global warming is a hoax, a fraud, or worse.

My basis for this? Aside from its appearance only in wingnut media, this bogus outfit has, apparently, only one campus organization, and that at the University of Kansas.

You remember Kansas: Home of wacked-out homophobe Fred Phelps and a state school board that believes in fairy tales, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.

And, the final capper on the reliability and trustworthiness of this fine organization? They are also pushing for the public school indoctrination of the scientifically bankrupt concept of "Intelligent Design".

Need I say more? Whenever you hear the words "academic reform", you can just about bet that it's another Orwellian-named entity that is actually pushing just the opposite philosophy.

So about the only thing I have left to say is this: Fuck you, Magruder, and your phony wingnut organization. If you're not a Vietnam veteran, you've got no business heading an organization called Vietnam Vets for Anything.

Take That, Swifties!

News from the Federal Elections Commission today: The Swift Boat Liars for Bush have been hit with a $230,000 fine for their over-the-top campaign of deceit against Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry.

Raw Story has the details, along with the other guilty parties, including (regrettably) MoveOn.org.

But it was the Swifties who got the biggest hit, and deservedly so. Maybe this will be a lesson to the backers and hangers-on of the Swifties that they need to dial it back a little.

But chances are they won't. And why should they? When it comes right down to it, in their warped world view, a small fine is worth it to keep Baby Doc in power. Besides, the BFEE will I am sure open its vault and pay the Swifties back for the amount of the fine.

It's just chump change to those fuckers.