Mark Steyn: Kerry’s quagmire

The Spectator (U.K.) ^ | 08/28/04 | Mark Steyn

[Pokey78]

Mark Steyn says the Democratic contender has made a big mistake in campaigning on his Vietnam war record

I have no views on whether one or more of John Kerry’s bemedalled wounds from the Mekong Delta 35 years ago were self-inflicted — though the Kerry campaign, in its second big concession to his chastisers, now says his first Purple Heart-earning wound might have been ‘unintentionally self-inflicted’. But there’s no doubt every wound from the last 35 days is self-inflicted, beginning with the candidate’s disastrous decision at the Democratic Convention to play up Vietnam and play down Iraq, 9/11 and anything else that happened in the last 30 years. Since then Kerry’s shot himself in the foot so many times he ought to put in for a good dozen more Purple Hearts.

The flaw in the Senator’s strategy to run for president as a plucky 24-year-old Swift boat lieutenant was an obvious one. The argument that his Swift boat command demonstrates his superb qualities of leadership falls apart once you notice his striking lack of the first ingredient of leadership: followers. Aside from the three or four Swiftees who’ve been persuaded to travel around the country with him, all the hundreds of other Swiftvets loathe him, and many of them are determined to stick to him like DNA to Monica’s dress. This was entirely foreseeable — I’ve been getting emails from aggrieved veterans for two years now, so I’d guess the Democrats have too.

But the party that likes to sneer that Bush never had a plan to deal with Iraq’s inevitable insurgents doesn’t seem to mind that Kerry never had a plan to deal with the Swiftees’ equally inevitable insurgents. A guy awash in gazillions from Barbra Streisand and co. who can’t see off a couple of hundred middle-aged ‘liars’ and their minimal ad-buy? Is that really the fellow you want to put up against al-Qa’eda, the ayatollahs and Kim Jong-Il?

The Kerry campaign’s bumbling ineptness this last month is a bit of a stunner to those of us who followed Bill Clinton for eight years. The Democrats may not know how to run a school district or a highway department, but they’re supposed to be able to run scandals.

Consider, by way of comparison, James E. McGreevey, Democratic Governor of New Jersey. A couple of weeks ago, Governor McGreevey turned up for a 4 p.m. press conference with his wife loyally standing by his side and declared, ‘My truth is that I am a gay American.’

The following day it emerged that other folks’ truth is that McGreevey’s a corrupt sexual predator who got the hots for an Israeli poet, put him on the payroll as the state’s $110,000-per-annum homeland security adviser, a position for which he had no obvious qualification, and allegedly forcibly performed oral sex on him as well as other acts, one of which may or may not have been responsible for the Governor mysteriously breaking a leg on the beach this summer.

I thought McGreevey’s moment-of-truth press conference performance was completely revolting, even before it emerged that ‘I am a gay American’ was a phrase ‘developed’ by the Governor in consultation with a gay rights group that tested it in focus groups.

At one level, this is utterly contemptible. But at another it’s magnificently professional. The New Jersey Dems have arranged things to deny the people an early chance to vote on McGreevey’s replacement and, by the time they do get their say, the hack machine pol who’ll be taking over from him will be running as an established incumbent.

Dealt an unpromising hand, Garden State Democrats nevertheless defined the scandal on their terms. That’s how I figured Kerry would handle the Swift vets problem. He’d be shameless but effective. He’d have focus-grouped some weaselly form of words that would put him beyond reach, and the whole business would have dribbled away. But instead, cosseted away with Teresa, he’s apparently been running the fightback himself, disastrously. First, he got his heavies to send out menacing letters of empty threats to TV stations considering running the Swift vets’ ad. Then he demanded that his lawyers write similar missives to stores carrying the Swiftees’ book. Imagine if Bush did that every time Michael Moore or Al Franken released yet another lame Bush-bashing tract: the shelves would be half empty. If anything, the buyers for the big chains underestimated the demand for the Swift book because they fell for the Boston Globe/New York Times spin that no one was interested in these embittered old losers. Now the store managers are reeling under a barrage of customers who think the unavailability of the book is due to Kerry’s political muscle rather than incompetent ordering.

Still, that’s no reason not to dig yourself in a little deeper. On Monday, Kerry called Bob Dole. Dole had gone on TV on Sunday and unburdened himself of some musings on the unusual circumstance of a war protester running as war hero: ‘One day he’s saying that we were shooting civilians, cutting off their ears, cutting off their heads, throwing away his medals or his ribbons. The next day he’s standing there: “I want to be president because I’m a Vietnam veteran.” Maybe he should apologise to all the other 2.5 million veterans who served. He wasn’t the only one in Vietnam.’ Dole, of course, is a visibly scarred second world war vet, and he was out there a lot longer than four months.

But Kerry was hopping mad about this breach of senatorial clubbability and rang the old boy to complain. Dole refused to apologise and recounted his subsequent conversation with the candidate to Sean Hannity’s radio audience a couple of hours later. Here’s the bit I like. Kerry is whining about this and that, and Dole says to him, ‘Everybody likes quiet heroes, John. Everybody knows you were in Vietnam and the less you say about it the better.’

It’s a bit late to try that approach now. Last week Kerry dusted off his blustery primary-season slogan — if Bush wants to make this campaign about service in Vietnam, ‘I have three words: BRING — IT — ON!’ After a couple more days dodging questions, Kerry decided it was time to try out another three words and sent Pretty Boy John Edwards to lay down the gauntlet to the President. ‘This is a moment of truth for George W. Bush,’ said Edwards. ‘We want to hear three words: Stop these ads.’ Having decided to hoard his campaign cash through August for the big ad-buys of September, Kerry changed his mind and blew a pile of dough on a new commercial demanding Bush repudiate the Swiftees and ‘stop these ads’.

Swift Boat Veterans For Truth is what they call a ‘527’ advocacy group, the latest predictable loophole from the latest round of idiotic ‘campaign finance reform’. There are no formal connections permitted between 527s and political candidates, so Bush can’t call a halt. Nonetheless, he responded to Kerry and Edwards with his own three words: sure, why not? ‘I don’t think we ought to have 527s. I can’t be more plain about it,’ said Bush, saying that he was opposed to ‘that ad’ and ‘every other ad’. ‘I hope my opponent joins me in condemning these activities of the 527s.’

Er, well, that’s not quite what Kerry was hoping for. Nine of the top ten 527s are anti-Bush groups — moveon.org and similar — funded by the likes of George Soros. The way Kerry’s chums at the New York Times have been trumpeting links between the Swiftees and ‘prominent Republicans’, you’d think ‘prominent Republicans’ were the Mafia. In fact, 19 of the top 20 individual donors to 527s are prominent Democrat supporters. If the 527s got yanked from the air, Kerry would be clobbered far worse than Bush, which is all the more reason not to be a big whiny ninny about one lousy ad running in a couple of states.

As the coup de grâce, Bush added, ‘I think Senator Kerry served admirably, and he ought to be proud of his record. But the question is who’s best to lead the country in the war on terror ...I think we ought to be looking forward, not backward.’

Bush didn’t bring it on. Kerry brought it on himself. All that Senator Weenie has achieved by his stumblebum responses is to amplify the charges and broaden the field of attack against him. Take Dole’s sardonic characterisation of Kerry’s ‘wounds’: ‘Three Purple Hearts and never bled that I know of. I mean, they’re all superficial wounds ... Never spent one day in the hospital ... And boasting about three Purple Hearts when you think of some of the people who really got shot up in Vietnam....’ Dole is the only political heavyweight visibly war-wounded enough to be able to say such things about Kerry, and he wouldn’t have done so if Kerry’s goons hadn’t started smearing the Swiftvets as ‘liars’.

But now Dole’s said it, he’s made it easier for others. I haven’t written much about Kerry’s medals, because if you come from a country in the British military tradition, the whole Purple Heart thing is hard to get your head around. ‘You mean, most of his medals are for being wounded?’ said my wife in amazement, her father and uncles having gone off to war in 1939 and two thirds of them having returned in far worse shape than Dole, never mind Kerry. ‘And if you get three of these Purple Hearts they send you home?’

Well, no. They don’t send you home. But you can choose to leave. And that’s what Kerry did. He got three scratches and went home eight months early. Despite the convention speech about how ‘we were all in the same boat’, the commander left his men in the boat and cleared off back to Massachusetts. That’s the essence of the Kerry military record, and the more the clumsy Democrat operatives insult anti-Kerry veterans, the easier it is to summarise the candidate as devastatingly as Bob Dole does.

The risk in running on biography is that voters won’t find your life story as compelling as you do. They might be churlish enough to be more interested in, say, health care or terrorism than what you were doing in 1968. That risk becomes a certainty when your appealing soft-focus narrative comes under attack and your campaign degenerates into a defence of your biography. The minute you start running ads demanding that voters ‘tell George W Bush to stop telling lies about what a weally weally big war hero I am’, you sound ridiculous. Especially when your opponent is a guy who’s never complained about anything – not the ‘Bush is Hitler’ stuff, not the ‘Bush knew about 9/11 in advance’ stuff, not even the comparatively mild Michael Moore slur that he’s a moron so paralysed without his minders that he continued reading My Pet Goat to Florida grade-schoolers for a full seven minutes on September 11. Kerry himself made sneering cracks about the pet goat business, and Bush didn’t whine about it.

Happily, the boys on the bus are still doing their bit for Kerry. Editor & Publisher had an hilarious headline this week: ‘Campaign Journalists: Has Swift Boat Story Gone On Too Long?’ Too long? It took two weeks before the New York Times could bring itself to say a word about it. Nonetheless, ‘it probably has had too long a life,’ said Frank James, a Chicago Tribune reporter. ‘We wish someone would put a stake in this vampire.’

If Frank’s getting a little bored on the campaign plane, why not ask to see the hat Kerry told the Washington Post he travels with all the time and which he claims was given to him by a CIA guy on one of his ‘secret missions’? If he produces the hat, ask if you can have it carbon-dated to see if it dates from the late Sixties. Many of us would indulge the Mad Hatter in his wacky fantasies if he’s gone to a lot of trouble to get the period details right.

Here’s an interesting Rasmussen poll of likely voters from the end of last week — i.e., a point at which the big networks and agenda-setting newspapers were still insisting, in the words of the Boston Globe’s Thomas Oliphant, that the story ‘does not meet basic standards’ for coverage in the mainstream media. In other words, the circulation of the story was confined to the Internet and ‘right-wing talk-radio’, and already the numbers looked like this:

‘About his service in Vietnam, is Kerry...
Telling the truth 39%
Exaggerating the truth 31%
Lying 15%’

A Kerry guy spun that to me as great news: hey, only 15 per cent think he’s lying about his service record! Hang on, man, 46 per cent think he’s exaggerating or lying. Your boy’s negatives outweigh his positives on the sole issue you’ve chosen to define the man and his candidacy. Among independents — i.e., all those critical swing voters — 34 per cent think he’s telling the truth, and 48 per cent think he’s either exaggerating or lying.

He’s got a week off now for the Republican convention. If the Swift vets are still hounding Kerry by mid-September, he’ll be mired in a Vietnam quagmire of his own making. And, unlike the original, no matter how many hits you take, there’s no early release.

[Dog Gone]

His plan was to let the media bury the story.

The media tried. And they'd still be trying except that Kerry couldn't handle the criticism and elevated it to a national story which he continues to keep alive.

Even the media can't save a bad candidate from himself.

[Ole Okie]

As Hannity told Marty Meehan last night:

You can dish it out but you can't take a hit.

And from Meehan's expression, that shot hit the target.

[Ichneumon]

He wants everyone to focus on Vietnam. He does not want anybody talking about his 20 years in the Senate! Very Clintonesque. Very dangerous. We are being played.

If that's his play, then he's a complete idiot. Kerry might not want to bring up his Senate record, but you can be damned sure that *Bush* and his people will, repeatedly.

Kerry's walking into a two-front PR war, with himself as the creamy center. He'll be roasted on his Vietnam puffery by the Swiftvets on one side, and lambasted by on his Senate record by Bush on the other. He'll have nowhere to run.

[Ichneumon]

I don't know but he WAS in Vietnam.

Are you sure? This is the first I've heard of it.

[jla]

fyi

[Enterprise]

LOL - John Kerry:

BRING IT ON!

A short time later:

CALL IT OFF!

[ClearCase_guy]

I'm not a reporter, so I don't quite count -- but I did put this compilation together. By the way, the MLK thing isn't here, because Kerry seems to have been off the coast of Vietnam in April 1968, so his statement, while somewhat misleading, is not completely false.

Christmas in Cambodia –

Kerry now admits that he lied about spending Christmas in Cambodia in 1968 and claiming that Nixon was President at the time. He’s told the story for decades – said it was “seared” in his memory – and it was a lie.

Flying Dog –

Kerry has said that in the incident that won him a Bronze Star (see below for more), when the mine went off under his boat, his dog (“VC”) went flying overboard and was thought to be lost. The dog was later recovered by another boat. Only problem – a mine did not go off under his boat. The story is a lie.

Throwing away the medals –

Kerry has said that he threw away his medal in a famous public demonstration.
Kerry has said that he only threw away his ribbons in a in a famous public demonstration.
Kerry has said that he actually threw away another man’s medals at that famous public demonstration.
Kerry has said that he never threw his medals away.
Kerry filed paperwork to get new medals (guess he lost ‘em somewhere).

The evidence of the need to get new medals is highlighted by the signatures on the citations:

Kerry's multiple Silver (3) and Bronze (2) star citations: Two of the five were signed by John Lehman who was Secretary of the Navy in the Reagan Administration 5 Feb 1981 - 10 Apr 1987. There are three Silver Star citations supplied by Kerry. One was signed by ADM Zumwalt, one by ADM Hyland, and one by Secretary Lehman. The Bronze Star citations were signed by Zumwalt and Lehman.

Purple Hearts --

From: "Unfit For Command"

Dec. 2, 1968: Kerry was awarded his first Purple Heart for a tiny piece of shrapnel in his left arm, above the elbow. (Self inflicted.) p.34

Feb. 20, 1969: Kerry was awarded his second Purple Heart after sustaining a minor shrapnel wound in his left thigh. (Self-inflicted, according to his crew.) p. 78

March 13, 1969: He was awarded his third Purple Heart for a contusion (minor) of the right arm sustained in the incident when another boat, PCF 3, detonated a mine. He also fraudulently claimed that the shrapnel in his buttocks, sustained when he and Rassmann blew up a rice cache on land that morning, occurred in this incident. (Contusion doesn't qualify for a PH and shrapnel was self-inflicted.) p. 88

Bronze Star –

Wins Bronze Star for fleeing the scene of a mine explosion.

13 Mar 1969 - Five Swift Boats are sent to raid a Vietcong village: Kerry PCF-94, Droz PCF-43, Pees PCF-3, Chenoweth PCF-23, and Thurlow PCF-51. Special Forces Lieutenant Rassman goes along for the ride on Kerry's boat. They depart the LST anchored offshore at 7:30 am, cruise about 11 miles up the Bay Hap River, then about 3 miles up the Dong Cung Canal, and get to the village at 8:15 am.

1. The village is deserted. As they are returning to the boat, Kerry and Rassmann decide to blow up a five-ton rice bin. They climb on top of the huge pile and dig a hole in the rice. On the count of three, they toss their grenades into the hole and run. Kerry doesn't run fast enough. He gets hit in the butt by some pieces of rice.

2. As the five boats are returning down the Bay Hap River, they come to a fishing net stretched across the middle of the river. As PCF-94 is going around the fishing net to the right and PCF-3 is going around it to the left, a mine explodes under PCF-3.

3. Simultaneously: (a) Kerry goes to full throttle, which causes Rassmann to fall overboard, and flees down the river with all his guns firing at the shore, and (b) the other three boats go to help PCF-3 with all their guns firing at the shore.

4. After 40 seconds, PCF-43, PCF-23 and PCF-51 cease fire, but Kerry keeps on firing and fleeing down the river.

5. PCF-43, PCF-23 and PCF-51 work together to rescue the crew of PCF-3 and keep PCF-3 from sinking.

6. Kerry finally turns around, comes back, and fishes Rassmann out of the water.

7. As PCF 23 is leaving the area to take the three seriously injured men from PCF-3 to the Coast Guard cutter offshore, Kerry jumps in PCF-23 and goes with them.

8. PCF-94 (without Kerry) tows the badly damaged PCF-3.

9. Kerry writes the after-action report that portrays him as a hero. He does not mention the fact that he abandoned the other boats and fled from what he thought was a battle, or that he abandoned his own boat and rode home with the wounded.

Silver Star –

Kerry won this award for shooting a wounded man in the back. That’s not necessarily an improper action (the man was apparently holding a rocket launcher). But the Silver Star is our nation’s third highest award. It is not usually given out for administering a Coup de Grace to a wounded enemy.

Additionally, Kerry’s Silver Star apparently came with a V citation. But Silver Stars never come that way, so there is either a lie buried in there, or else a file clerk made an error (which could happen easily enough).

[blanknoone]

It is funny how BRING — IT — ON!’ has become ‘stop these ads’. You could say Kerry planned for a war but had no plan for peace.

I would love to see a short 15 second ad....Kerry's BRING - IT - ON! followed by Edwards' STOP - THESE - ADS!

[baseballmom]

Thanks, Pokey78. Steyn nails it as usual.

[Bahbah]

"And from Meehan's expression, that shot hit the target."

Hehe, I saw that. There is a great piece by Mark Steyn up on FR today that I think you would enjoy. I'll go find it and ping you to it, if I may be presumptuous.

[Bahbah]

Never mind, this is the piece. LOL, I need more coffee or less reading.

[NonValueAdded]

Kerry was in the Senate?

Excellent, Big Daddy!!! Mind if I adopt that for my new tagline?

[bmwcyle]

bump

[baraboolaw]

I hope you are right. This whole mess starts to smell a lot like Lewinski. Bush can't get his message out because all the noise about Nam. The Swifties have succeeded in destroying any post convention bounce Kerry might have had. For that they are heros. But the story needs to morph to VVAW,which they have done, Fonda (which is coming) Ramsey Clark, Nuclear freeze, Nicaragua, Panama, every position he has taken since 1970 has been directly against American interests. We need to move beyond Vietnam.

[Logic n' Reason]

SWEET!!

Ought to be on the front page of every major newspaper in the country...and all of the minor ones also.

Yeah, I know....no chance.

But still. . . "BUDDA BOOM! BIG BUDDA BOOM!"

[Alberta's Child]

Mark Steyn ping.

[goldstategop]

John F*ckin' never retired from Vietnam. He simply took a three decade leave of absence.

[Logic n' Reason]

Wasn't he in the Senate or something for 20 YEARS?

From your lips to God's (AND EVERYBODY ELSE'S) ears!

[MeekOneGOP]

See this group of Swift Boats patrolling together? They are NOT SERVING together!!! Only the ones on the SAME BOAT are serving together! Each group of personnel on each boat know ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about the personnel on the other boat, PERIOD !! If they say they do, they are Republican LIARS !! Unless the one talking is a DemocRAT. Then he is telling the truth, of course.

This idjit needs to release HIS MILITARY RECORDS!

Help the Kerry Campaign With Its paperwork!
Email Them a Standard Form 180 Now!

---

Click here to donate to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth!

[Logic n' Reason]

We need to move beyond Vietnam.

You're 100% right; allow the vets (of which I proudly am one) continue with their agenda. Let the rest of us move on a parallel path with the liar's miserable senate record.

I love the smell of a landslide in November!