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August 21, 2004
Not Politics
Kerry's response to the latest Swift Boat vets ads is as absurd as it is evasive.
Chad Clanton, a spokesman for the Kerry campaign, said the new TV commercial "takes Kerry's testimony out of context, editing what he said to distort the facts. He testified as a 27-year-old Vietnam veteran. He opposed a war that, at that point, cost over 44,000 lives of the 58,245 names that are on the Vietnam Memorial wall. It says a lot that the president refuses to condemn this smear."
Here's the transcript of Kerry's testimony. Here's the commercial. And more importantly, here's the transcript of the 1971 O'Neill/Kerry debate on the Dick Cavett show, in which Kerry says
Well, I have often talked about this subject. I personally didn't see personal atrocities in the sense that I saw somebody cut a head off or something like that. However, I did take part in free fire zones and I did take part in harassment interdiction fire. I did take part in search-and-destroy missions in which the houses of noncombatants were burned to the ground. And all of these, I find out later on, these acts are contrary to the Hague and Geneva Conventions and to the laws of warfare. So in that sense, anybody who took part in those, if you carry out the applications of the Nuremberg principles, is in fact guilty.
Taken out of context? I think not.
I'm not sure whether Kerry just doesn't understand or if he's deliberately trying to misdirect, but for the Swift Boats vets this isn't about politics at all. It's personal. As O'Neill said in the 1971 debate
Mr. Kerry is the type of person who lives and survives only on the war weariness and fears of the American people. This is the same little man who on nationwide television in April spoke of, quote, "crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command," who was quoted in a prominent news magazine in May as saying, quote, "war crimes in Vietnam are the rule and not the exception," unquote. Who brought 50 veterans down to Washington to testify about alleged atrocities in April, the same 50 who after they had appeared on every major news network refused to provide any depositions or provide any details of any kind.
Never in the course of human events have so many been libeled by so few.
That, my dear readers, is what this is all about.
It isn't politics at all.
Posted by Rita at August 21, 2004 07:19 AM