WAR STORIES

The mask is off. Further denials are useless. After the events of the past seven days the ingrained leftist, pro-Democratic Party bias of the nation’s mainstream media has been fully exposed. All it took was for a certain Vietnam veteran to write a book daring to question the war hero status of Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry. Media lips are now drawn into a permanent snarl; the knives are out and the scent of blood is in the air. Circle the wagons and may the effort to protect the Democratic candidate proceed.

To make this scenario as clear as possible, I ask you to remember one basic difference between George Bush and John Kerry. George Bush is not running on his record of military service during the Vietnam War. John Kerry is. John Kerry is not running on the basis of his recent service as an elected official. George Bush is.

Now … turn back the calendar to earlier this year. George Bush was asking the voters of this country to reelect him on the basis of his previous four years as president and commander in chief. Suddenly Democratic detractors come forward with questions about Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard over 30 years ago. Democratic sycophants were using words like “AWOL” and demanding investigations. Blood had been thrown in the water with the media sharks and the White House press briefings immediately turned ugly. Reporters wanted details – all of the details – of Bush’s National Guard service. They wanted pay records, dental records, medical records, flight records and statements from fellow guardsmen confirming Bush’s participation. The AWOL word had been used and it was George Bush’s job to provide all of the information necessary to prove that it wasn’t so.

If you think back I’ll wager you can’t remember one single story from any of the alphabets (ABC, NBC, etc.) questioning the motives or the honesty of the people who brought the AWOL charges. Their motives were assumed to be worthy and pure. It was the president on the spot, not the detractors.

Now … let’s turn the calendar pages to early August, 2004. A group of Vietnam veterans step forward with some questions and charges about John Kerry’s record of service in Vietnam, the very record that John has presented to the American people as the sole and exclusive reason (save for their hatred of George Bush) that he should be the 44th President of the United States. If the media’s treatment of the George Bush AWOL charges were a guide, we would expect to see an immediate feeding frenzy from the mainstream media. Demands would be made of the Kerry campaign that records, documents and any and all other available evidence be presented to prove Kerry’s claims of heroism.

The Kerry campaign would be handling multiple demands from The New York Times, the Boston Globe, ABC, NBC and the rest of the locusts for all of the medical records pertaining to Kerry’s second and third Purple Hearts. Apologies would be demanded of the Democratic and Kerry lawyers who referred to Dr. Louis Letson, the physician who applied the band aid to Kerry’s first Purple Heart wound as a “phony” physician. Maureen Dowd would be opining about obscene Republican operatives daring to question the medical credentials of a man who undoubtedly had saved far more lives in Vietnam than John Kerry. Obviously, it hasn’t happened exactly that way. We haven’t heard one objective reporter asking Kerry to defend his lawyer’s name-calling. Change the fact situation just a tad. Have Dr. Letson make a statement supporting Kerry’s claims, and have a Bush lawyer refer to him as a “phony” physician. I don’t have to tell you how outraged the media would be, do I? I didn’t think so.

And what of the people supporting Kerry’s detractors? One columnist referred to a Houston homebuilder who had made a donation to the Swift Boat veterans as a “mysterious Republican moneyman.” Mysterious? A Texas homebuilder is mysterious? I think a Hungarian financier who finances Moveon.org and The Media Fund, both Kerry surrogates, might qualify as mysterious, but has anyone seen dark hints about the money behind these organizations?

If anyone else out there has a plan to write a book exposing liberal media bias in America, they should consider applying their efforts to another cause. The media is doing all too good a job of exposing itself.

Kerry Spot I highly recommend this site for updates on the Kerry-In-Cambodia story
jim geraghty reporting

Unfit for Command rides atop the Amazon sales list. [Order it through National Review Book Service.] ¾ THROUGH 'UNFIT FOR COMMAND' [08/15 11:28 AM]

So, while flying down to Hilton Head, I read through the first three quarters of “Unfit For Command.” Impressions so far:

Book reviews won’t do justice to the charges in this book. Excerpts, the free chapter distributed online by Regnery, blog discussions… none of them can really give a full and comprehensive picture of the case that John O’Neill and Jerome Corsi lay out in these 185 pages. If you really want to understand the depth and breadth of their argument, you’ll have to pick it up yourself.

We’ve heard and read a lot about Kerry’s third purple heart. According to the testimony collected in this book, all of Kerry’s medals were given under questionable circumstances, with citations describing much more intense and dramatic battle scenes than the memories of the men there. On his first Purple Heart, there’s scant evidence from testimony that Kerry’s wound was a result of enemy fire. (In fact, the authors note that even in the account in the Boston Globe biography, it’s not all that clear that there was enemy fire, and they note that Kerry refused to be interviewed about that incident.)

Kerry’s Silver Star citation is for “personally leading a landing party ashore in pursuit of the enemy… attacking a numerically superior force in the face of intense fire.” Men who were with him say his combat consisted of killing one wounded teenage Viet Cong, fleeing with a rocket launcher that may or may not have been loaded. Many men had fought around him and before he had grounded his boat in the shoreline and charged with his rifle, but only Kerry got the Silver Star.

Chapter Four, “War Crimes,” portrays Kerry as being reckless and trigger-happy. (Odd little note: Did you know Kerry’s call sign was “Boston Strangler”?)

Again, many of these men’s testimony directly contradicts Kerry’s records, commendations, and diary entries. To those who would wonder why they didn’t object to inaccurate record keeping and allegedly undeserved medals the time, the authors and the sailors quoted describe the reaction to Kerry’s third purple heart as largely, “Great, now we’ve got that guy out of our hair.”

Then there are the sections about Kerry’s anti-war testimony, and his allegations of war crimes, and how the North Vietnamese used his testimony in attempts to break the spirit of POWs, and tried to get the prisoners to admit to war crimes. In light of this, Kerry is lucky that these men, whose ordeal in the hands of the enemy was exacerbated by Kerry’s overheated antiwar rhetoric and secondhand allegations, are merely calling him unfit to be commander in chief, instead of tracking him down and beating the heck out of him.

For a certain segment of the population, O’Neill, Corsi, and the 250some other Swift Boat Vets will always be dismissed as nuts, Karl Rove’s hypnotized zombies, cynical liars trying to take down a man who has surpassed them in life, etc. For another segment, every word they say is God’s honest truth.

Then are those of us in the middle, who wonder how Kerry could have been such a lousy sailor, such a lousy leader, such a self-aggrandizing, glory-hogging, lying jerk and yet somehow establish an entire political career based on a reputation as a war hero. There are those of us who wonder if the Swift Boat Vets’ memories are reliable, if some of this is present perceptions altering recollections of the past. Who wonder how, if all of this is true, the dozen or so “band of brothers” could publicly praise a man who was nothing like the war hero he has repeatedly portrayed himself as.

But O’Neill and Corsi have laid out their detailed case in the form of this book. And the Kerry Team’s response has been that Corsi is a bigot, based on what he wrote on FreeRepublic.com. Having had a few phone conversations with Corsi earlier this year, I buy into the idea that he’s a strongly opinionated, sharp-tongued, hyperbole-inclined conservative, whose skin crawls when he hears John Kerry speak. But “opinionated” is not the same as “dishonest.” Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

If the Kerry camp were smart, they would fill out Standard Form 180 and release all of Kerry’s military records, then go through this book, and address each allegation, refute each charge, offer his side to every story. If O’Neill and Corsi are the liars that the DNC and the Kerry backers charge, then it shouldn’t be that hard to prove it.

The Swift Boat Vets contend that fewer than 10 percent of the Vietnam Vets they contacted refused to sign on to their cause. This means either they were very careful and specific in their invitations, or the vast majority of men who came in contact with Kerry during his Vietnam days shared their low opinion of him.

Between the Brinkley book and the O’Neill book, the American public has been given two completely contradictory portraits of Kerry’s four months in Vietnam. The voters deserve to know which one is right.

If you recall the media tried to give FL to Gore in 2000
VNS was a private consortium owned by
ABC News, The Associated Press, CBS News, CNN, Fox News, and NBC.
4 of the 5 of the networks and cable newsrooms
(only ABC waited till both time zones closed)
"announced" Gore had won
BEFORE the 2nd time zone in FL had closed.
This cost President Bush votes in the FL panhandle.

I was at a friends house and the State of FL election website results showed President Bush was winning

In fact, the networks which called Florida for Gore did so early in the evening—before polls had even closed in the Florida panhandle, which is part of the Central Time Zone. NBC called Florida for Gore at 7:49:40 p.m., Eastern Time. This was 10 minutes before polls closed in the Florida panhandle. Thirty seconds later, CBS called Florida for Gore. And at 7:52 p.m., Fox called Florida for Gore. Moore never lets the audience know that Fox was among the networks which made the error of calling Florida for Gore prematurely. Then at 8:02 p.m., ABC called Florida for Gore. Only ABC had waited until the Florida polls were closed.

About an hour before the polls closed in panhandle Florida,
the networks called the U.S. Senate race in favor of the Democratic candidate.

The premature calls may have cost Bush thousands of votes from the conservative panhandle, as discouraged last-minute voters heard that their state had already been decided;
some last-minute voters on their way to the polling place turned around and went home. Other voters who were waiting in line left the polling place. In Florida, as elsewhere, voters who have arrived at the polling place before closing time often end up voting after closing time, because of long lines. The conventional wisdom of politics is that supporters of the losing candidate are most likely to give up on voting when they hear that their side has already lost. Thus, on election night 1980, when incumbent President Jimmy Carter gave a concession speech while polls were still open on the west coast, the early concession was blamed for costing the Democrats several Congressional seats in the West, such as that of 20-year incumbent James Corman. The fact that all the networks had declared Reagan a landslide winner while west coast voting was still in progress was also blamed for Democratic losses in the West; Congress even held hearings about prohibiting the disclosure of exit polls before voting had ended in the any of the 48 contiguous states.

Even if the premature television calls affected all potential voters equally, the effect was to reduce Republican votes significantly, because the Florida panhandle is a Republican stronghold. Most of Central Time Zone Florida is in the 1st Congressional District, which is known as the "Redneck Riviera." In that district, Bob Dole beat Bill Clinton by 69,000 votes in 1996, even though Clinton won the state by 300,000 votes.

So depress overall turnout in the panhandle,
and you will necessarily depress more Republican than Democratic votes.

A 2001 study by John Lott suggested that the early calls cost Bush at least 7,500 votes,
and perhaps many more.

At 10:00 p.m., which network took the lead in retracting the premature Florida win for Gore?
The first retracting network was CBS, not Fox.

Over four hours later, at 2:16 a.m., Fox projected Bush as the Florida winner,
as did all the other networks by 2:20 a.m.

At 3:59 a.m., CBS took the lead in retracting the Florida call for Bush. All the other networks, including Fox, followed the CBS lead within eight minutes. That the networks arrived at similar conclusions within a short period of time is not surprising, since they were all using the same data from the Voter News Service. (Linda Mason, Kathleen Francovic & Kathleen Hall Jamieson, “CBS News Coverage of Election Night 2000: Investigation, Analysis, Recommendations” (CBS News, Jan. 2001), pp. 12-25.)

The big 5 media TV and Cable newsrooms are the real threat to the 2004 election.

..."Early on Tuesday, November 7th 2000, TV stations and various media based in Florida reported that Gore has won Florida which was a big surprise for everyone because of strong republican support. Bush's brother Jeb is governor there and Florida usually gives support to the Republicans. Some of them questioned that and during the night CNN showed 52% Bush's lead over 46% for Gore. It is almost impossible to believe that media could have been that blind and biased to report Gore's victory."...

ABC CBS CNN FOX NBC

Why do the TV and Cable Newsrooms
hide Hanoi Kerry's past?

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