Kerry in Sex scandal!!!!

[Ned]

According to ABC Radio News at 8 Pacific, Kerry will be on at least one talk show tomorrow morning to address the Drudge report.

Drudge says the show is Imus in the Morning - a show appearing on MSNBC beginning at 6 am, Eastern Standard Time.

[Tingkai]

Originally posted by Ned
Bravo for Kerry! He testified before Congress to the many, many warcrimes of our soldiers in Vietnam. It is because of Kerry, and almost solely because of him, that the average American spat on returning GIs.

So the guy who tells the truth is evil, but the ones who committed the crimes are not to blame. And of course, Nixon isn't too blame for dragging on a useless war.

Yup, Kerry is the reason why millions of Americans opposed the war. Kerry was responsible for all the anti-war protests.

Yup, Blame Kerry.

And you know Kerry is actually a Canadian. Yup, he plays hockey so he must be a Canadian.

[Ned]

Originally posted by Tingkai
American politics is a joke.

Making up excuses to invade another country is okay.

Going AWOL is okay.

Pushing the economy into a recession is okay.

Having sex is evil, evil, evil.

Accusing the average GI in Vietnam of being a war criminal is, what, typical of the world?

Well, come to think of it, Kerry would fit in well in France.

[Ned]

I suspect that Kerry's candidacy will not survive this scandal. But if it does, I will do everything in my power to see him defeated. I cannot stand the SOB because of what he did and said as leader of the Vietnam Veterans against the War. He simply cannot pass that off as some youthful mistake.

Indeed the war was a mistake. But the problem with the war for America was not so much war crimes against the enemy. It was that Americans were being killed in an no-win war that was more than a meat grinder. To anyone who was alive then, Kerry is the ultimate evil of the anti-war movement that Jane Fonda also amply represents.

Traitor!!!!

[Capt Dizle]

Originally posted by Ned
According to ABC Radio News at 8 Pacific, Kerry will be on at least one talk show tomorrow morning to address the Drudge report.

Drudge says the show is Imus in the Morning - a show appearing on MSNBC beginning at 6 am, Eastern Standard Time.

I am sure that the major media outlets have been scrambling to find a way to deal with this story. Kerry is in a desperate place and here he is trying to get out early in the morning. This is a smart move.

Instead of potentially taking broadsides all day with an escalation over the weekend, this forces the media to respond to him. But this is a big gamble and I would say that what he says in the morning, and how he says it, will decide his political future.

[Imran Siddiqui]

But the problem with the war for America was not so much war crimes against the enemy

I would think committing war crimes against the enemy is a ****ING BIG DEAL!

[Ned]

Imran, there were incidents. Senator Kerrey was accused one. But the average GI was not a war criminal as John Kerry alleged.

Kerry fanned the flames of hatred of American soldiers as his method of getting us out of Vietnam.

[Imran Siddiqui]

But the average GI was not a war criminal as John Kerry alleged.

Cite that he alleged that?

[Sava]

Kerry fanned the flames of hatred of American soldiers as his method of getting us out of Vietnam.

wow did you find this bull**** in the RNC guidebook? why don't you stop embarassing yourself with that ****? nobody is going to buy your lies.

[MrFun]

Originally posted by Ned
Imran, there were incidents. Senator Kerrey was accused one. But the average GI was not a war criminal as John Kerry alleged.

Kerry fanned the flames of hatred of American soldiers as his method of getting us out of Vietnam.

I find it difficult to swallow the possibility that veterans would turn so viciously against other veterans.

Even veterans who disagree with a war that other soldiers are involved in, would not stoop down to espousing hatred for their comrades in arms.

[Capt Dizle]

John Kerry, we know, is running against John Kerry: his own voting record. But there is another record that John Kerry is running against, and this has to do with his very emergence as a Democratic politician: Kerry, the proud Vietnam veteran vs. Kerry, the antiwar activist who accused his fellow Vietnam veterans of the most heinous atrocities imaginable.




John Kerry not only served honorably in Vietnam, but also with distinction, earning a Silver Star (America's third-highest award for valor), a Bronze Star, and three awards of the Purple Heart for wounds received in combat as a swift-boat commander. Kerry did not return from Vietnam a radical antiwar activist. According to the indispensable Stolen Valor, by H. G. "Jug" Burkett and Genna Whitley, "Friends said that when Kerry first began talking about running for office, he was not visibly agitated about the Vietnam War. 'I thought of him as a rather normal vet,' a friend said to a reporter, 'glad to be out but not terribly uptight about the war.' Another acquaintance who talked to Kerry about his political ambitions called him a 'very charismatic fellow looking for a good issue.'" Apparently, this good issue would be Vietnam.

Kerry hooked up with an organization called Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). Two events cooked up by this group went a long way toward cementing in the public mind the image of Vietnam as one big atrocity. The first of these was the January 31, 1971, "Winter Soldier Investigation," organized by "the usual suspects" among antiwar celebrities such as Jane Fonda, Dick Gregory, and Kennedy-assassination conspiracy theorist, Mark Lane. Here, individuals purporting to be Vietnam veterans told horrible stories of atrocities in Vietnam: using prisoners for target practice, throwing them out of helicopters, cutting off the ears of dead Viet Cong soldiers, burning villages, and gang-raping women as a matter of course.

The second event was "Dewey Canyon III," or what VVAW called a "limited incursion into the country of Congress" in April of 1971. It was during this VVAW "operation" that John Kerry first came to public attention. The group marched on Congress to deliver petitions to Congress and then to the White House. The highlight of this event occurred when veterans threw their medals and ribbons over a fence in front of the Capitol, symbolizing a rebuke to the government that they claimed had betrayed them. One of the veterans flinging medals back in the face of his government was John Kerry, although it turns out they were not his medals, but someone else's.

Several days later Kerry testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. His speech, touted as a spontaneous rhetorical endeavor, was a tour de force, convincing many Americans that their country had indeed waged a merciless and immoral war in Vietnam. It was particularly powerful because Kerry did not fit the antiwar-protester mold — he was no scruffy, wide-eyed hippie. He was instead the best that America had to offer. He was, according to Burkett and Whitley, the "All-American boy, mentally twisted by being asked to do terrible things, then abandoned by his government."

Kerry began by referring to the Winter Soldiers Investigation in Detroit. Here, he claimed, "over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command."

[Capt Dizle]

It is impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in Detroit, the emotions in the room, the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam, but they did, they relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do.
They told their stories. At times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.

[Capt Dizle]

This is quite a bill of particulars to lay at the feet of the U.S. military. He said in essence that his fellow veterans had committed unparalleled war crimes in Vietnam as a matter of course, indeed, that it was American policy to commit such atrocities.

In fact, the entire Winter Soldiers Investigation was a lie. It was inspired by Mark Lane's 1970 book entitled Conversations with Americans, which claimed to recount atrocity stories by Vietnam veterans. This book was panned by James Reston Jr. and Neil Sheehan, not exactly known as supporters of the Vietnam War. Sheehan in particular demonstrated that many of Lane's "eye witnesses" either had never served in Vietnam or had not done so in the capacity they claimed.

Nonetheless, Sen. Mark Hatfield inserted the transcript of the Winter Soldier testimonies into the Congressional Record and asked the Commandant of the Marine Corps to investigate the war crimes allegedly committed by Marines. When the Naval Investigative Service attempted to interview the so-called witnesses, most refused to cooperate, even after assurances that they would not be questioned about atrocities they may have committed personally. Those that did cooperate never provided details of actual crimes to investigators. The NIS also discovered that some of the most grisly testimony was given by fake witnesses who had appropriated the names of real Vietnam veterans. Guenter Lewy tells the entire study in his book, America in Vietnam.

Kerry's 1971 testimony includes every left-wing cliché about Vietnam and the men who served there. It is part of the reason that even today, people who are too young to remember Vietnam are predisposed to believe the worst about the Vietnam War and those who fought it. This predisposition was driven home by the fraudulent "Tailwind" episode some months ago.

The first cliché is that atrocities were widespread in Vietnam. But this is nonsense. Atrocities did occur in Vietnam, but they were far from widespread. Between 1965 and 1973, 201 soldiers and 77 Marines were convicted of serious crimes against the Vietnamese. Of course, the fact that many crimes, either in war or peace, go unreported, combined with the particular difficulties encountered by Americans fighting in Vietnam, suggest that more such acts were committed than reported or tried.

[Ned]

MORE TROUBLE FOR KERRY

Earlier this week, I noted that John F. Kerry's post-Vietnam behavior was likely to cause him some problems. I was right about that, and in fact quite a few people have been criticizing it. But that's all been eclipsed, for the moment at least, by a scandal about sex.

The buzz of the blogosphere has been this report from Matt Drudge that Kerry is at the center of an exploding infidelity scandal. (Though in fact the blogosphere beat Drudge by nearly a week in reporting rumors that this was being investigated by major news outlets.) Is it true? Beats me, though politicians being what they are, that's probably the way to bet. (Mickey Kaus has more.)

I have to say that, to me, how Kerry would do on the war is a lot more important than what (er, or who) he's doing in the sack. I'm not a fan of Presidential infidelity -- though what do you expect with a guy who goes by the initials "JFK?" -- but plenty of previous Presidents seem to have managed to do a good job despite infidelity.

But then there's Bill Clinton. Clinton's infidelities weren't what turned me against him -- it was more the '94 and '96 crime bills that did that. His hypocrisy in signing draconian sexual-harassment legislation, then moaning about the injustice of public inquiries into workplace sex, made his behavior especially pathetic. (Then there's Clinton's support of the "Defense of Marriage Act," which is surely one of history's great ironies.) I don't mind people saying that workplace sex is just part of life, and that sexual behavior between consenting adults is no big deal, but if they really think that then they shouldn't be supporting, and signing, legislation that takes a different tack.

I don't know where Kerry stands on that subject, but I think that his biggest problem won't be hypocrisy, but exhaustion. Rather than face another round of Clintonesque scandals, voters or Party leaders may hustle him to the exits, as the Edwards and Dean campaigns are clearly hoping. On the other hand, it may actually work in his favor, as so many people -- even among Republicans -- are dreading a rerun of the Clinton years, perhaps enough to let the story die.

Kerry's single biggest asset has been the "electability" issue. As Will Saletan noted recently, Democratic voters like Kerry, not because of his stands on the issues, or his personality, but because they think he can beat Bush. The minute that sentiment erodes, he's likely to face a catastrophic loss of support.

Will that happen? It's way too early to tell, of course. But it's certainly helping to keep this primary season exciting for political junkies and pundits. In the meantime, here's a roundup of reactions. Stay tuned, as they say.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3395977/

[Capt Dizle]

Kerry gave credence to the claim that the war was fought primarily by reluctant draftees, predominantly composed of the poor, the young, or racial minorities.

The record shows something different, indicating that 86 percent of those who died during the war were white and 12.5 percent were black, from an age group in which blacks comprised 13.1 percent of the population. Two thirds of those who served in Vietnam were volunteers, and volunteers accounted for 77 percent of combat deaths.

(jt-now this is pretty shocking isn't it)