Posted on 06/06/2014 3:12:46 AM PDT by markomalley
As the Bowe Bergdahl prisoner swap has curdled from presumed triumph to public-relations nightmare, the White House and its defenders have cast about for excuses to explain why the administration’s negotiating brilliance has gone unappreciated.
White House staffers told NBC’s Chuck Todd that they were taken aback at the “swift-boating” of Bergdahl by his former comrades. That’s a reference to the attacks on John Kerry when he was the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee by the troops he served with in Vietnam.
Rightly understood, “swift-boating” shouldn’t be a pejorative — it’s what happens when men in uniform feel betrayed by a comrade and tell the public what they believe to be the truth about his service. But for Democrats and the media, swift-boating is about the most heinous thing that can happen to someone.
Bowe Bergdahl thus joins Kerry as a victim of a partisan smear campaign — except, unlike the secretary of state, Bergdahl doesn’t have any prestigious medals to throw away (or pretend to throw away) at an anti-war protest.
Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, tweeted, “Really sad to watch Obama haters attack this kid who CHOSE to fight to protect the rest of us, just to score political points.”
On CNN, Van Jones said that “the airwaves are being filled mysteriously with former solders just trashing the guy.” Ah, but it’s not so mysterious, after all. “It turns out,” Jones intoned, “that there are Republican operatives who are working behind the scenes to get some of those guys on television — this is an orchestrated smear campaign.”
He was alluding to former Republican official Richard Grenell putting a few of the troops together with journalists. Evidently, these guys should have waited until former White House spokesman Robert Gibbs offered to hook them up, and otherwise kept to themselves their silly stories about what they went through in Afghanistan after Bergdahl’s disappearance.
More than half a dozen of Bergdahl’s former comrades have said he deliberately walked off his base in 2009 after becoming disillusioned with the war, and that soldiers were killed looking for him.
Let’s stipulate that — given the fog of war — these accounts might exaggerate the harm done by Bergdahl’s disappearance. But there is no doubt that they are sincere, and the anger is real. What are the odds that Bergdahl happened to get assigned to a platoon full of highly politicized soldiers who waited years for the opportunity to use the circumstances of his capture as a cudgel against President Barack Obama?
As the pseudonymous blogger Allahpundit points out, if there were comrades who would vouch for Bergdahl, or who were witnesses to him being snatched while lagging behind on patrol (as Bergdahl maintained in a video after his capture), we would presumably have heard from them by now.
The conspiracy against Bergdahl is so vast that it encompasses Afghan villagers. Some of them told the Washington Post that they saw Bergdahl after he walked away from his base, heading for Taliban strongholds and ignoring their warnings that he was in danger.
None of this necessarily means that the trade for Bergdahl was wrong, or that we shouldn’t have wanted him back. But it makes the deal harder to defend, which is why the initial White House spin about Bergdahl was so positive — until the facts got in the way. In the space of about three days, he went from serving with “honor and distinction,” per National Security Adviser Susan Rice’s initial assurances on the Sunday shows, to “innocent until proven guilty,” per Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Martin Dempsey’s comment about a potential court-martial.
The top Taliban officials released from Guantanamo Bay to get Bergdahl back were last seen hugging and kissing supporters in Qatar, where they are supposed to be watched for a year. Even the president admits that they could return to the fight. Huffy complaints about swift-boating and partisanship aren’t going to put to rest all the questions about this deal.
‘How Swift Boat Veterans, POWs and the New Media Defeated John Kerry’
by Scott Swett and Tim Ziegler
Sen. John Kerry’s 2004 presidential bid became the catalyst for an unprecedented political movement by Vietnam veterans who had long resented his false 1971 testimony that American troops routinely committed war crimes.
Despite the best efforts of the Democratic Party and its old media affiliates, they succeeded in reaching out to the public and turning the presidential campaign upside down.Here, for the first time, is the complete story of how - and why - they did it.
http://www.tosettherecordstraight.com/
Despite this book, however good it might be, the fact remains that if you do an Internet search of swift boating and 2004 election you will come away with the impression that the Swift boat veterans for truth were exposed as liars and John Kerry was vindicated.
The media today might not be as powerful as it was in the 1970s when it had exclusive domain of news outlets but it is still able to distort the truth.
It’s the same media that trumpet something so antithetical like The Affordable Care Act.
MEGYN KELLY’S POWERFUL INTERVIEW WITH SIX MEMBERS OF BERGDAHL’S PLATOON
Combat zone or not, his sending off of personal effects in the days before leaving strongly indicates that he intended to not return. Coupled with his emails, a strong case for desertion should be able to be put together fairly quickly.
I guess all the private security reports are lies too.
If fellow soldiers exposing a deserter/possible collaborator is “swiftboating” then they're saying Kerry adventures was on par with that. In addition this isn't 30+ year old history. The facts of this case are relatively current. These soldiers are going to get their say, likely in hearings. In addition the military has already done an investigation of this event and there can be little doubt what conclusion they came to and it will be made public in time. Calling them liars may not be so wise this time after all the chips are laid bare. In fact there could be a pretty big backlash to it.
It occurred to me that there may be a less sinister for Bowe Bergdahl leaving his post. Maybe he left to buy some drugs and got caught after his connection (an Afghan military officer) was killed.
My suspicion has been that he’s a heroin addict.
That's why the pejorative of calling someone a swiftboater is so bad. it's not just about first-hand accounts from fellow military veterans who have earned the same hero status that we're being asked to presume about Bergdahl. It's about slandering the honor of those who served with distinction in order to preserve the facade of honor of the person being foisted on us.
-PJ
“The future is too good to waste on lies,” Bergdahl wrote his parents. “And life is way too short to care
for the damnation of others, as well as to spend helping fools with their ideas that are wrong. I have seen
their ideas and I am ashamed to even be American. The horror of the self-righteous arrogance that they
thrive in. It is all revolting.”
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