Swift Boat Veterans For Truth Ad
Posted on 08/23/2004 12:43:16 PM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Swift Boat Veterans For Truth Ad
..........And Kerry's testimony portrayed soldiers serving in Vietnam as either helpless victims, conscientious foes of the war, or potential psychopaths.
“The country doesn't know it yet, but it has created a monster, a monster in the form of millions of men who have been taught to deal and to trade in violence, and who are given the chance to die for the biggest nothing in history; men who have returned with a sense of anger and a sense of betrayal which no one has yet grasped,” he said.
He predicted in that testimony that the American role in the war would be seen in 30 years as "a filthy, obscene memory" unless he and other vets could “search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbarous war” and help Americans “conquer the hate and the fear that have driven this country these last 10 years.”
He said, "We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of that service."
But “memories of that service” are precisely what is at stake in the furor over the Swift Boat Veterans book and ads.
Kerry built much of his campaign persona on the image of being a Vietnam combat veteran. The Democratic convention in Boston last month was a celebration of Kerry’s four months in Vietnam.
"We fought for this nation because we loved it,” he declared in accepting the nomination. “I defended this country as a young man and I will defend it as president."
But Kerry never gave equal time — or any time at all in his ads — to his other identity as an anti-war crusader who said Americans had "personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads..."
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
........John Kerry, of course, did exactly this, first in Vietnam Veterans Against the War and eventually in the U.S. Senate. From the moment he arrived in Washington, Kerry promised that "issues of war and peace" would remain his passion. And, from the start, this meant that he would criticize Ronald Reagan's war against communism, especially when it was fought through proxies in the jungles of Central America. In 1985, he traveled to Nicaragua to meet with the Sandanista government, telling The Washington Post, "I see an enormous haughtiness in the United States trying to tell [the Sandinistas] what to do." Soon after his return, he pressured Congress into investigating the administration's illegal funding of the Contra rebels, opening a trail that culminated in the exposure of the arms-for-hostages deal with Iran. And, a few years later, in the late '80s, he repeated this success, launching an investigation that revealed that another of the administration's favorite anti-communists, the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, had been deeply enmeshed in drug-trafficking. Kerry was also skeptical enough of U.S. power that he voted against authorizing a popular intervention -- the Gulf war -- and opposed a 1995 resolution that would have allowed the arming of Bosnians. ........***
Vietnam...Today***..........But that claim has been proven false by the experience of the last three years, Smith argues. Vietnam's treatment of dissidents and religious minorities has gotten worse, not better, since diplomatic and trade relations with the United States were normalized in 2001. The Vietnam Human Rights Act "would be law right now if it hadn't been for Kerry," Smith says, "and some of those dissidents would be out of prison." By blocking the sanctions bill three years ago, Kerry ensured only that Hanoi's repression would continue unabated.
Will he block it again this year? The Kerry campaign hadn't replied to an inquiry as of late Friday, and Smith claims no inside knowledge. "But I know this much," he said the other day. "The best and brightest and bravest people in Vietnam are in prison, persecuted by the government for their opinions or their faith. And you don't do people who are suffering immeasurable cruelty any kindness by aiding a dictatorship."***
Click the logo to donate to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.
"The New Soldier" electronic adaptation can be found here
The New Soldier (the book that John Kerry doesn't want anyone to read)***Here's your chance to own a first edition copy of The New Soldier by John Kerry. Three copies availabe from $727.95 to $2,502.95 Or you can read the book at Winter Soldier.com.
John Kerry testifies before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by William Fulbright, in April 1971. Photo UPI
November 11, 2002 - John Kerry Speaks at the Vietnam Wall in Washington ***.....Today we come here to remember and to memorialize forever all that was Vietnam. In doing so we do not just read the names and remember those who gave their lives. We remember and celebrate what they were and remain part of -- a great nation committed to peace, individual liberty, freedom for all -- a nation which outlined in the writing of a constitution fundamental rights which belong to every one of its citizens and which we remember today are worth dying for. Today -- because of those engraved forever on these black panels - we celebrate rights and aspirations that are bigger than any individual and which each of us as individuals are willing to defend with life itself.
We celebrate the nobility of young Americans willing to go thousands of miles from home to fight for the notion that in the final measurement someone else's freedom was connected to our own.
It doesn't matter that politics got in the way. It doesn't matter that leaders remained wedded to their own confusion. Nothing -- not politics, not time, not outcome -- nothing will ever diminish one iota the contributions of these brothers and sisters, nothing can ever lessen the courage with which they waged war. Nothing reduces the magnitude of their sacrifice, nothing can take away the quality of their gift to their nation.....***
Viewed from the other side of the ideological divide, Kerry has a lifetime rating of six from the conservative American Conservative Union, which uses a similar methodology to rate lawmakers according to a perfect conservative score of 100. Kerry's rating is the same as Leahy's and New York's Charles Schumer's, although it is slightly less liberal than Kennedy's lifetime rating of three.
On the issue of showing up for Senate votes, CQ found that Kerry's fellow senators running for president, John Edwards and Joseph Lieberman, also missed a significant number of votes, although far fewer than Kerry did. According to the CQ analysis, Edwards was present for 53 percent of the recorded votes in which the president took a position, while Lieberman was present for 45 percent.
Most senators were present for more than 90 percent of the votes.*****
When Mr. Reagan sent Marines into Grenada in 1986, Mr. Kerry described it as "a bully's show of force." When Mr. Reagan was sending aid to anti-Communist forces in Nicaragua, Mr. Kerry called it "haughtiness." He also was one of the signatories in a "Dear Comandante" letter to Nicaraguan leader Daniel Ortega, asking the murderer to play nice with the United States in defiance of Reagan administration policy. .....***Kerry on Reagan
Will voters decide that none of this — neither Kerry's service nor his anti-war crusading — really matters very much today?Voters ultimately decided Bill Clinton's draft-avoiding activities as a college and grad student were not a disability that would keep him from becoming president.
If voters don't judge Kerry harshly for alleging war crimes as a 27-year old veteran, then perhaps they wouldn't harshly judge President Bush as a 26-year-old, if he missed part of his National Guard service. The National Guard allegations were already in the press during the 2000 campaign and Bush won the election despite it.
This article starts out with an attempt to present another side to the issue, one that the general public does not know about, but then it degenerated into a comparison of Kerry's actions with the old Bush-avoided-real-military-service lie. But hopefully the careful reader will begin to understand why veterans of those years are so determined today to continue to present their message.
"In an interview on NBC's "Meet The Press" last Sunday, Kerry was asked about statements he made about Vietnam War atrocities during an interview with the same program in 1971, when he was a leader in the antiwar movement:"
"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 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," Kerry said in 1971.
Excerpt from CNN http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/04/25/hughes.kerry.vietnam/
11 posted on 08/22/2004 11:38:13 AM PDT by tobyhill (The war on terrorism is not for the weak!)
The "filthy, obscene memory" I have is of the VVAW and Kerry's testimony. My current nightmare is that he will be elected President.
The truth is coming out.
The spokesman for Vietnam Veterans for Kerry said on Fox News Sunday (Aug 22, 2004) that Kerry stands by his statements to the Fulbright Committee.
That would be a living nightmare.
How did he come by such "knowledge" w/only 3 months service there (actually 2 months since he had 1 month of training in Swiftboating)?
No doubt from his close association with Ted Kennedy and John Kennedy's speech writer, Adam Walinsky, who helped write his LIES spoken in front of the Fulbright Committee.
Robert Kennedy's speech writer, Adam Walinsky,....
I've read (sorry, don't remember where) that Kerry denied that Walinsky wrote his 1971 speech. BUT Walinsky admitted that he did. What number lie is this one?....I'm losing count.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
