Guilty (18 page)

Liberal commentator Lawrence O'Donnell offered the most hilarious reaction to the Swiftees. Appearing on MSNBC's
Scarborough Country
with John O'Neill, the author of
Unfit for Command,
O'Donnell spent two segments shouting down O'Neill as a “liar,” a “creepy liar,” a “lying writer” with a “pack-of-lies book”—and similar variations. In a nutshell, it went like this:

Liberals threw so much mud at the Swiftees that anyone who wasn't willing to devote four hours of research to getting the facts would be left with the impression that the Swiftees had been discredited. As the ombudsman for the
Washington Post
put it—a few weeks before the
Post
would begin printing Kerry's retractions and clarifications, “My sense in reading those stories is that, while they found holes in both sides, the most serious holes were poked in the case made by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.”
⁶⁸

It would require the labor of Will and Ariel Durant to document all the attacks on the Swiftees, but two examples will give the flavor of the objections: One of the commanders on the mission leading to Kerry's disputed Bronze Star was Lieutenant Donald Droz. He was the only commander—other than Kerry—not to contradict Kerry's version of what happened but only because he wasn't around to object, having been killed in action. So liberals produced Droz's widow, a San Francisco lawyer and Vietnam War protester, to say that she distinctly remembered her husband telling her what happened that very day. She told the
Boston Globe
that her husband had told her about the March 13 action during a leave a few weeks later, when they met in Hawaii, and … it matched exactly what Kerry had said!
⁶⁹
So we could not trust the memories of three commanding officers and eleven crewmen who were part of the action that day, but we could trust the memory of a deceased commanding officer's widow, who was not there but was an antiwar activist and Kerry supporter.

The George Soros–funded group Media Matters for America quickly produced a document titled “The Lies of John O'Neill.” Among O'Neill's heinous lies was his claim on CNN's
Crossfire
that he
had had “no serious involvement in politics of any kind in over 32 years.” To this, Media Matters retorted, “In fact, O'Neill has made more than $14,000 in federal contributions to Republican candidates and causes since 1990; most people would consider giving $14,000 a ‘serious' involvement.”
⁷⁰
LIAR!
While I'm not sure how to fact-check what “most people” think, I doubt whether “most people” would consider political donations of about $1,000 a year proof of “serious political involvement.”

While the Swift Boat Veterans went back to their lives after the 2004 election, happy to have defeated the mountebank Kerry, liberals never moved on from defaming the Swiftees and their supporters. They never quit. In 2007, ABC News matter-of-factly referred to 294 Vietnam War veterans as the “the slanderous Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.”
⁷¹
That same year Senate Democrats rejected Bush's nominee to be ambassador to Belgium, Sam Fox, because he had donated to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. In the committee hearings, Kerry harangued the nominee, accusing him of contributing “to that very group that is smearing and spreading lies.” It's perfectly acceptable for a U.S. president to have donated to Trinity United Church, but not for an ambassador to have donated to 294 military veterans.

A 2008 op-ed in the
New York Times
explained that the reason “it took some weeks for the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign against Senator John Kerry to have an effect on his standing in the polls” was that a “false statement from a noncredible source that is at first not believed can gain credibility during the months it takes to reprocess memories.”
⁷²
Note the March Hare tenacity of the American liberal. Four years after the Swift Boat Veterans ran their ads, liberals were still feverishly writing articles for the
Times
that nonchalantly called 294 military veterans a “noncredible source.”

On the bright side, after four years of maligning the Swiftees, the
Times
finally coughed up how exactly liberals believed the veterans had been “discredited.” On August 13, 2008, a
Times
article said O'Neill's book,
Unfit for Command,
had “included various accusations that were ultimately undermined by news reports pointing out the contradictions.” In a parenthetical the
Times
article explained, “Some critics of Mr.
Kerry quoted in the book had earlier praised his bravery in incidents they were now asserting he had fabricated; one had earned a medal for bravery in a gun battle he accused Mr. Kerry of concocting.”
⁷³

That was pretty thin gruel after years of hysterical denunciations of the Swiftees. First of all, even if we accept the dubious assumption that “news reports” are more accurate than 294 Swift Boat Veterans, a “contradiction” is not proof of error; it's proof of a contradiction. Second, the
Times's
objections were noticeably limited to claims in the book and had nothing to do with the four television advertisements run by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. But most important, the fact that some Swiftees had once praised Kerry and one had received a Bronze Star for the same action that Kerry did reflected only the fact that Kerry had written his own vainglorious After Action Reports. It was only when Kerry began running for president based on his undaunted military valor that the facts about his service came under scrutiny.

Larry Thurlow was the Swiftee who, according to the
Times's
account, “earned a medal for bravery in a gun battle he accused Mr. Kerry of concocting.”
⁷⁴
But Thurlow didn't think he had won his medal for coming under enemy fire for the simple reason that there had been no enemy fire. What happened was the first boat in the five-boat convoy, PCF-3, hit a mine that blew up the boat and tossed the sailors into the water. The Swiftees fired on the shore as a precautionary measure, but stopped when they realized there was no return fire. That is according to eleven crew members and three commanders on that mission—or all living commanders, except Kerry.

Thurlow thought he got the Bronze Star for rescuing men from the boat that struck a mine. As he explained between interruptions on
Hardball,
“I felt like I got the award because I saved some people's lives and saved the boat.” Kerry had nothing to do with saving the boat that had been hit because—again according to the accounts of all three living commanding officers, except Kerry—Kerry fled on his boat the moment the first boat hit a mine. It wasn't until Kerry was running for president that Thurlow saw the After Action Report and realized Kerry had claimed that the boats had come under enemy fire.

On
Hardball,
Thurlow said he knew Kerry had written the After
Action Report because the report mentioned “none of the action I took about saving the men or the boat,” but recounted in glorious detail how Kerry himself had come back and pulled James Rassmann out of the water. Rassmann had apparently fallen off Kerry's boat as a result of the rocking from the mine explosion. Kerry's boat, Thurlow said, “was the central figure in the report. The 3 boat was the one that was mined and badly damaged, but yet the report tells about John Kerry coming back to get Rassmann under intense fire and only casually mentions anything else that even happened that day.”
⁷⁵

Until Kerry's self-aggrandizing After Action Reports came under scrutiny and were promptly hooted at by eyewitnesses, the only source of information about Kerry's military service were the After Action Reports he wrote himself. In the military, writing After Action Reports is like getting latrine duty. But apparently, Kerry was always the guy saying, “I'll do it!” The reports weren't passed around and checked for accuracy. The sheer number of medals Kerry won during a short three and a half months in Vietnam—one Silver Star, two Bronze Stars, and three Purple Hearts—raises a strong suspicion of chicanery.

Although the media briefly tried disputing that Kerry had written the report testifying to his own valor the day he won the bronze medal, it was soon proved by the DNA evidence of military code that Kerry was the author. The report's author was someone designated: “TE 194.5.4.4/1.” The inventer of that military code explained that “194” referred to Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, commander of U.S. naval forces in Vietnam; “5” meant Roy Hoffman's Swift Boat command; the first “4” referred to Adrian Lonsdale's command; the next “4” was Captain George Elliott's Swift Boat base; and the “1” narrowed the sender down to some officer other than the mission commander. A Navy communications expert determined that the report was sent at 11:20 P.M., the night of the mission from the U.S. Coast Guard cutter
Spencer.
The only officer on board the Spencer at 11:20 P.M. was John Kerry.
⁷⁶

As for the
Times's
claim that some “critics of Mr. Kerry quoted in the book had earlier praised his bravery in incidents they were now asserting he had fabricated,” that is also explained by knowing just a few facts. The Swiftees who appeared to have changed their minds about
Kerry were his commander, Captain Elliott, and the commander of shoreline operations, retired Coast Guard Captain Lonsdale. Their positive comments about Kerry were made during his 1996 Senate campaign in response to
Boston Globe
columnist David Warsh suggesting that Kerry's Silver Star may have resulted from his committing a war crime.
⁷⁷

Elliott, Lonsdale, and other veterans leapt in to defend Kerry from the asinine accusation that it would be a “war crime” to kill a wounded enemy soldier. Even then, Elliott admitted that while he had written the draft of Kerry's Silver Star citation, he had no firsthand knowledge of the action: “The recommendation left over my signature. I was not an eyewitness…. I had no reason to question his motives or his actions.” Nor was Elliott portraying Kerry as Audie Murphy: “There was a dead guy there and John had a weapon. That's the way it is sometimes…. I took the stories down, what I considered to be corroboration … There may have been another guy. You try to spread the glory around. It's hard to describe what you try to do with decorations. It's part hype, part leadership.”
⁷⁸

Only when Kerry ran for president and his After Action Reports came under scrutiny did Elliott realize he had been scammed. Kerry had written in the After Action Report that his own “daring and courageous tactic surprised the enemy and succeeded in routing a score of enemy soldiers.”
⁷⁹
But Kerry's crewmen, including those who supported him, said Kerry had killed only a single, already wounded, enemy troop. Elliott and Lonsdale didn't think Kerry had committed a war crime, but they didn't think he deserved a Silver Star for it either. None of the other Swiftees who had gone ashore that day in the same action and killed many more enemy combatants than Kerry had received Silver Stars. As O'Neill wrote in
Unfit for Command,
“Kerry did follow normal military conduct and displayed ordinary courage, but the incident was nothing out of the ordinary and to most Swift and Vietnam veterans, Kerry's actions would hardly justify any kind of unusual award.”
⁸⁰

After four years of looking, the best liberals could come up with to discredit the Swiftees were “contradictions” that were not contradictions
at all once you knew the details. Ten days after the
Times
finally gave even this scintilla of specificity to the claim that the Swift Boat Veterans had been proved to be liars, the paper went back to simply asserting that the advertisements of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth included “allegations since discredited.”
⁸¹
The legends of Willie Hor-ton and the Swift Boat Veterans prove only that liberals will never, ever concede the most thoroughly proved facts. Soon liberals will be refusing to communicate in the English language.

THE VERY REASON THAT SHOCKING FACTS ARE LIKELY TO COME out about Democrats, but not Republicans, during a presidential campaign is that the Media Attack Machine has inevitably given the Democrat a free ride for his entire political career, while a Republican can't run for town clerk without reporters poring through his divorce records and youthful high jinks.

Everything changes when a Democrat becomes a candidate for president. Media bias alone can no longer censor inconvenient facts about the media's pet politicians—especially with the existence of the new alternative media. This is precisely why, in 2008, Democrats chose a presidential candidate with a thin record. A presidential campaign prompts people to do research and they will start to notice little things like a history of calling U.S. troops war criminals or a candidate's foaming-at-the-mouth spiritual adviser.