John Kerry the Braggart: Unfit For Command, Part 4

[Ming]

Yes I do... it's the pot calling the kettle black. To imply one sides lies more than the other is a joke. Politicians are liars... it's that simple.

[DinoDoc]

When did you get demoted to Minion, Ming?

[Ming]

Originally posted by DinoDoc
When did you get demoted to Minion, Ming?

I been a minion for years now... ever since I accepted the mod job

But officially, it's been in my title for awhile now... back when we all got more personalized titles.. You might have notice it because I recently just shortened it from something much longer.

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

Originally posted by Ming
Yes I do... it's the pot calling the kettle black. To imply one sides lies more than the other is a joke. Politicians are liars... it's that simple.

Ohh comeon now Ming. Surely Kerry must be twice the liar as he takes twice the amount of positions

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

John O'Sullivan Editorial

September 07, 2004, 10:59 a.m.
The Song of the Kerry Boatmen
Part Deux.



Vladimir Bukovsky, the great anti-Soviet dissident, once reproved me for quoting the old joke about the two main official Soviet newspapers: "There's no truth in Pravda [Truth] and no news in Izvestia [News.]" He pointed out that you could learn a great deal of truthful news from both papers if you read them with proper care.


In particular, they often denounced "anti-Soviet lies." These lies had never previously been reported by them. Nor were they lies. And their exposure as such was the first that readers had been told of them. By reading the denunciation carefully, however, intelligent readers could decipher what the original story must have been. It was a roundabout way of getting information — but it worked.

That is exactly how intelligent readers now have to read the New York Times and most of the establishment media — at least when they are reporting on the "anti-Kerry lies" of the Swift-boat veterans.

When I first wrote on this topic three weeks ago, I pointed out that the main media outlets were ignoring the story that 254 Swift-boat veterans were accusing Senator John Kerry of being, in effect, a liar and a blowhard. But I doubted this suppression could be sustained for long since the unpaid voluntary freelance journalists of the "blogosphere" on the Internet were examining it in detail — and uncovering damaging evidence that at least some of the Swiftvets' charges had substance.

In the event it was sustained for exactly one week. Then the Kerry campaign quietly withdrew the senator's claim — a claim he had made repeatedly in speeches and articles for 20 years — that he had been on an illegal secret mission inside Cambodia on Christmas Eve 1968. Suddenly, however, that claim was — what was the Nixonian term? — "inoperative."

Kerry's own Cambodia incursion was still operative in the establishment media, though. His campaign's admission of error was not reported the next day either in the New York Times or in the Washington Post. True, the Washington Post did carry an editorial supporting Kerry against the Swiftvets. But it ignored the only new piece of news, presumably because that supported the Swiftvets rather than Kerry and would thus have undermined the point of the editorial.

A handful of other newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, joined the Post in writing editorials or columns supporting Kerry. Still the New York Times maintained a dignified silence.

Then Senator Kerry delivered a major speech on the following day [Thursday the 19th of August] denouncing the Bush campaign for secretly (and illegally) orchestrating the Swiftvet allegations. At which point the NYT finally realized there was a legitimate story here.

On Friday, August 20, it reported the Kerry speech in a front-page story that sought both to undermine the Swiftvet's accusations and to endorse the Kerry charge that President Bush was orchestrating their advertising campaign.

Here then were the denunciations of the "anti-Kerry lies" that would finally enable NYT readers to get the news — even if through a glass darkly. At long last they could be told what 57 percent of Americans (according to a poll) had already learnt from the Internet, talk radio, a handful of conservative papers and magazines, and other samizdat outlets.

Even so, in order to get an accurate picture, the reader had to interpret the Times's report with especially close attention. For instance, towards the end of its long analysis — in its 62nd paragraph, to be precise — the Times conceded the existence of the Cambodia story, stating that this was the one Swiftvets accusation that Kerry "had not been able to put to rest."

In fact this was the one accusation that the senator had put to rest by admitting that his oft-repeated claims were unfounded. All the other accusations remained in the limbo of charges still disputed by both sides.

The Times was no less ingenious in seeking to demonstrate collaboration between the Swift-boat veterans and the Bush campaign. It produced no actual evidence of orchestration — nor did the Kerry campaign — but pointed out that some of those helping the veterans were Texas Republicans who knew other Texas Republicans who knew political consultants who knew people in the Bush campaign who knew Karl Rove. Gotcha!

It illustrated these sinister connections with a chart, boxes, arrows, linking diagrams, and helpful notes on the relationships of those cited such as "married" and — still more sinister — "formerly married." There were no actual links to the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group, the Council on Foreign Relations, or the Black Hand Gang. Doubtless these had been held back by the paper's hotshot Conspiracy Correspondent for the special Election Day edition.

Here was journalism that combined the political commitment of Howell Raines with the journalistic techniques of Jayson Blair. If the Bush campaign could be convicted of secretly "coordinating" with the Swift boaters on such evidence, then the Kerry campaign could well end up being held responsible for the vastly larger $60 million ad campaigns organized by independent "527" organizations hostile to Bush and even for the publication and distribution of the New York Times itself!

After all, the timing of the paper's Bush conspiracy theory — just the day after the Kerry campaign had unveiled that very same conspiracy — was distinctly fishy.

Yet all this solicitousness towards Kerry by the establishment media may have ended up harming rather than saving him. For when the Sunday Washington Post published a full and fair-minded account (by Michael Dobbs) of one disputed incident for which Kerry had received a Bronze Star, the net effect was favorable to the Democratic candidate.

The accounts of both the Kerry veterans and their Swiftvet opponents were fully examined and fairly weighed. The "fog of war" was taken into account. Some of the Swiftvets' memories were upheld as consonant with the evidence. But the final cautious verdict was that Kerry's claim of heroism on this occasion had not been disproved. He probably deserved his Bronze Star.

The force of this verdict came from the fact that — unlike almost all the other establishment media stories — this one was not a "whitewash." It did not dismiss the Swiftvet claims as utterly unfounded — it examined the evidence for them and found it wanting. It criticized the Kerry campaign (and one Swift-boat veteran) for not releasing his full medical records when these might settle some of the disputes once and for all. It routed the accusation that the Swift-boat veterans were Republican stooges — their campaign, said the Post, was inspired by their anger at what Kerry had said when he returned from Vietnam in 1971. But it ultimately came down on Kerry's side.

If other establishment media outlets had devoted the same time and energy to investigating the Swiftvet allegations, it is possible that the other charges against Kerry would have been judged similarly unproven, or entirely baseless, or containing some truth.


BRAVE AND BRAGGART
My own sense of the matter is that Kerry both behaved bravely in Vietnam and yet also exaggerated and embroidered his bravery. If the establishment media had honestly reached that conclusion after proper investigation, it would have been far better for Kerry than the continual drip-drip-drip of accusations that the press first ignores, then denounces, and is finally forced to investigate by discoveries made by bloggers. Why, however, did the media treat this story like radioactive material?

The high-minded dismissal that there is no story there — advanced, for instance, by the Boston Globe's Thomas Oliphant — is simply absurd. When more than two hundred retired naval officers support serious accusations against a fellow-officer, that alone is a story. And when they include eyewitness accounts and other supporting evidence, there is at least a case to answer in law and a fortiori in journalism.

Partisan bias is one obvious explanation for their being MIA. Elite media journalists are overwhelmingly liberal and Democratic and so not disposed to embarrass their party's standard-bearer in an election year (especially when George W. Bush is his opponent.)

This hypothesis is strengthened by the report in Editor and Publisher that journalists believe this story has gone on quite long enough and will shortly expire. It is eerily reminiscent of earlier episodes of media navel-gazing when the topics were "Were we too tough on Clinton?" (Answer: Yes) and "We were too soft on Reagan?" (Yes, again.) All these reveal a — well, a liberal bias.

But why should a reluctance to damage Kerry politically dictate a failure to investigate the Swiftvet allegations if Kerry is as plainly innocent as establishment journalists maintain? Here we enter the murky waters of psychoanalysis — and in particular psychoanalysing the liberal mind: Maybe at the back of their minds they feared he was guilty.

After all, one of the most marked features of this controversy has been the high ratio of anger, hostility, and shouting to information on the part of the Kerry defenders.


HARDBALL
Television debates in particular have illustrated this odd disparity. Chris Matthews, for instance, shouted down Michelle Malkin and threw her off Hardball because he was unaware of a staple argument in this debate: Namely, that a "self-inflicted wound" means an unintentionally self-inflicted wound not a deliberately faked injury. Matthews thought Malkin was alleging dishonorable conduct by Kerry when she was merely trying to point out that in military law a medal cannot be awarded for such a wound.

Even at this late stage of the debate, the establishment media continues to get quite simple points wrong. Both the Los Angeles Times (in a front-page report) and The New Republic (in an editorial) have claimed in recent days that all those who served on Kerry's swift-boat support his version of events.

Almost right. One such veteran, Stephen Gardner, is among those veterans attacking Kerry. He may be mistaken or lying, of course, but he exists. Indeed, he appears in the forthcoming third Swift-boat advertisement. As media scolds say on these occasions, "almost right" is not good enough — especially when Internet "bloggers" stand permanently at the ready to check and chuckle over these errors of the "old" media.

Now, something is afoot when people rage and storm over charges of which they remain ignorant and even positively incurious. Usually some sort of denial is at work. And the simplest theory of denial here is that Kerry's journalistic admirers fear he has something to hide.

That, however, can only be speculation. Besides, a deeper and wider denial is almost certainly at work too.

What the Swiftvets have done is revive the debate over the Vietnam War. Was it a moral war? Was it winnable? And if it was winnable, who lost it? And why?

Commentators from different points on the political spectrum have agreed on half the explanation: that the Vietnam War remains the grumbling appendix of American politics. It is an unhealed wound, a persisting trauma, a nightmare that every now and then erupts into our waking hours. But why? Neither the Second World War nor Korea is still traumatic, even though the latter ended in an unsatisfactory draw.

The second part of the explanation is that Vietnam was also an American moral civil war in which the antiwar counterculture, led by the establishment media, defeated the rest of America. The war was settled on the counterculture's terms — Saigon fell and "Amerika" was humiliated. And to clinch the permanence of this victory, the counterculture labored to ensure that its own history of the war would become the Authorized Version.

It succeeded. Vietnam is now almost universally described as an immoral and unwinnable war. Despite occasional attempts to correct the historical record by Henry Kissinger, Norman Podhoretz, Michael Lind, and Peter Braestrup — and despite Ronald Reagan's assertion that it was a "noble cause" — it is the counterculture's version that has prevailed in public discourse. The establishment media, of course, helped ensure this. It is victor's history.

But the Authorized Version was never accepted by the majority of the American people who became anti-war only in the sense of being war-weary and who resented the constant repetition of America's unique guilt. In particular it was never accepted by the great majority of Vietnam vets. Thus, the Authorized Version of Vietnam was always a fragile consensus maintained by media power. At some level the establishment media sensed this and discouraged any but the most ritualistic discussion of it.

Then Senator Kerry made his Vietnam service the centerpiece of the Boston Convention.
That risked over-turning the Authorized Version in any event. What made the debate especially dangerous for the media is that Kerry was a leader in their own domestic anti-war campaign in the seventies. And though there may be disputes about his heroism in Vietnam, there are none about his leadership of the antiwar campaign in the U.S.

In those days he alleged — from hearsay, he now says — that the U.S. armed forces were daily carrying out the most horrendous war crimes in Vietnam with the knowledge of their military commanders at all levels. He is captured on film saying this publicly to the U.S. Congress. His testimony is occasionally shown in full on C-Span. And it reminds all Americans, but in particular veterans, that the anti-war campaign was more a rejection of America than an embrace of a free Vietnam (about which the anti-war movement cared nothing once it had disappeared into the prison camp of totalitarianism.)

An authentic war hero might have the status to condemn other veterans as Kerry did. But if his heroism began to be questioned, then his testimony would be examined more skeptically — and the entire countercultural mythic version of Vietnam might tumble down. The establishment media, sensing this, shied away from any such examination.

But events escaped their control via the new alternative media. Kerry's account of himself as a war hero received at least flesh wounds. It was enough to make people listen when excerpts from his testimony appeared in the second Swiftvets television advertisement, interspersed with comments from Vietnam POWs who complain that they were tortured by the North Vietnamese to get them to say what Kerry said for nothing.

Well, not for nothing exactly. Kerry's congressional testimony was a large stepping-stone to his present eminence. But the contradictions of being a war hero and an antiwar hero have finally caught up with him.

That is why the Swift-boat veterans will ignore pleas from Bush or anyone else to halt their campaign. And why that campaign will dominate the election for some time yet — whatever the papers say.

Or don't say.

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by Ned
Ah, come on Ming. The Dems have a couple of example of Bush lying, but they don't hold water under close inspection.

Contrast that record to being impeached, fined and disbarred at all levels for lying.

You equate the two? Really?

So, what Nixon never lied?


And exactly how far away was he from being impeached?

Oh, can anyone say presidential pardon?

And when St Reagan of the Celluloid Nightmare claimed to have filmed the death camps in Europe had he actually done so?

Or when he angrily retorted to his critics in the European Parliament that he had been in Nicaragua and they hadn't, was he being slightly economical with the truth, given that the Gipper's feet had not pressed down on Nicaraguan soil?

And George Bush Sr.- even if we just read his lips, his promises aren't worth the mangled English they're made of (a family trait, it seems...) .


Republican politicians- Democrat politicians


Six of one, half a dozen of the other....

[Ned]

The problem with Nixon is that he never said anything that was true. Even I, when I was listening to him, winched.

Reagan? Ah shucks. He didn't lie. He just didn't remember.

But we get to slick Willie of the Open Zipper, and we have a whole new level of deceit, do we not?

I am not going to say Owl Gore was a major liar; but his claim to have invented Internet was pathetic. Ditto his claim that every heat wave, cold front or tornado was a sure sign of global warming. Pathetic.

Now we have Hanoi John Kerry who is both a war hero and an antiwar hero. John, you cannot have it both ways. How can a traitor be acclaimed also as a war hero? Do we honor Benedict Arnold for being a great general?

Pathetic.

[Ming]

Originally posted by Ned
But we get to slick Willie of the Open Zipper, and we have a whole new level of deceit, do we not?

NO

Just more of what we have come to expect from politicians... again, trying to paint one party as worse liars than the other is just plain silly...

One last time...

BOTH SIDES LIE

[Ned]

Ming, both sides exaggerate, true. But lie? I just do not accept that premise that all politicians lie. When a politician says he will bring heaven on earth to America, is that a lie or just bull****? Is there a difference in your view?

[Ming]

Yes... thre is a difference... but that doesn't change the fact that the majority of politicians are lying scumbags.

Both sides lie... Both sides are corrupt... it's a fact.

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by Ned
The problem with Nixon is that he never said anything that was true. Even I, when I was listening to him, winched.

Reagan? Ah shucks. He didn't lie. He just didn't remember.

But we get to slick Willie of the Open Zipper, and we have a whole new level of deceit, do we not?

Yeah, Slick Willie sure is worse than the man who helped scupper Paris Peace talks.



I can't believe you so blithely dismiss Nixon, but then you're both Republicans, so ....

The same with Reagan.

You don't 'misremember' to use a Bushism, whether you filmed Nazi death camps, especially when talking to Simon Wiesenthal or the President of Israel.

He couldn't tell fact from fantasy, and this is a point in his favour?




Give me a break, Ned.

[Ned]

Molly, you and Che are constantly referring to some spiking of the Paris peace talks by Nixon/Kissinger. Che even goes so far as to say that there was a peace plan on the table when Nixon intervened.

Wtf are you guys talking about? The only thing being discussed in Paris 'til Nixon took office was the shape of the table. Thereafter, the "peace plan" placed on the table by the commies was for the US to unilaterally withdraw.

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by Ned
Molly, you and Che are constantly referring to some spiking of the Paris peace talks by Nixon/Kissinger. Che even goes so far as to say that there was a peace plan on the table when Nixon intervened.

Wtf are you guys talking about? The only thing being discussed in Paris 'til Nixon took office was the shape of the table. Thereafter, the "peace plan" placed on the table by the commies was for the US to unilaterally withdraw.

As I've said before, you clearly have never heard of Anna Chennault.

And I'm not doing your homework for you.

[Whaleboy]

Can someone please tell me what the point of this thread is? I've read a load of it and it just seems like you're all wasting precious time arguing a topic about which no-one will care in 18 months

[Ned]

Originally posted by molly bloom


As I've said before, you clearly have never heard of Anna Chennault.

And I'm not doing your homework for you.

"Berman does confirm a number of events or policies that are of more than passing interest, namely, that prior to the November 1968 US presidential elections, Taiwan conspired to undermine Huber Humphrey's election bid by talking South Vietnam's President Nguyen Van Thieu into withholding his presence at the Paris peace talks which had been initiated by the Democrats.

The instrument of this conspiracy was Anna Chennault, the widow of General Claire Chennault of Flying Tiger fame and a close confident of Madame Chang Kai-check. Anna Chennault, one of the most vocal members of the China lobby in Washington, convinced General Thieu that he would get a better deal under Nixon that with a Democrat president. Thieu thus stonewalled the talks until after the election of Richard Nixon, which led one of his associates to comment that "we deprived the Democrats of their electoral victory".

http://www.atimes.com/se-asia/CH29Ae03.html

I also read excepts from Hitchens libel of Kissinger. There he states that "four years later the Nixon Administration tried to conclude the war on the same terms that had been on offer in Paris."

Nowhere in the Hitchens spiel does he provide the reader any more definition than this.

The only thing the parties at the Paris peace talks discussed prior to Nixon taking office was who was going to sit at the table. The Rep. of Vietnam objected strongly to having the NLF at the table IIRC. There was no other offer.

When the negotiations first got underway after they settled the table-shape issue, the NV presented a demand for a unilateral US withdrawal and no further aid whatsoever to the SV. If this is the "same offer" that Hitchens is talking about that we tried to get in '73, I would respond that that was no offer at all, but simply a demand for surrender.

"In any event, only one question was ever put to me by the Nixon organization. Early in October 1968, Bill Buckley introduced me to John Mitchell, then Nixon's campaign manager. Mitchell asked me if I thought the Johnson administration would agree to a bombing halt in Vietnam in return for the opening of negotiations before the election. I replied that I seem to me highly probable that the North Vietnamese want a bombing halt on those terms, and that they would seek to commit both candidates to it. Therefore I believed that Hanoi was likely to agree to it just before the election. I advised against making an issue of of it. Mitchell checked that judgment with me once or twice more during the campaign. At one point he urged me to call a certain Mr. Haldeman if I ever received any hard information, and gave me a phone number. I never used it. My limited impression of the Nixon staff was of a group of totally immersed in mechanics of the election, deferring issues of substance until the campaign was over, a not uncharacteristic attitude for the staff of any presidential contender." Kissinger, "White House Years" Little, Brown & Co. 1979, at page 10.

In summary, there is no evidence that Nixon contacted Theiu other than the ravings of Clark Clifford, who is renown at conspiracy theories. But, even if he did, all that happened was that Johnson called a bombing halt just prior to the election in order to provide a boost for Humphrey, but the SV refused to show up because the NLF was going to be there as well.

The real cheater here is not Richard Nixon, nor Henry Kissinger, but Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey who tried to game the system to elect Humphrey.