Surplus Parts

Jeff Fecke at Blog of the Moderate Left serves up a capsule summary of the left's response to the Swifties' expose of John Kerry.

To be fair, Jeff doesn't do any worse in answering the Swifties than any other leftyblogger has done. To be accurage, that is called "damning by faint praise".

So right now in the right hemisphere of the blogosphere, the Biggest...Scandal...Ever! is raging unabated. This is not to be confused with Pantsgate--the Sandy Berger scandal that was the previous Biggest...Scandal...Ever!

So is the idea that we have to pick just one scandal and stay on it until it's resolved before moving on to the next one?

Then we'll be backed up until 2060!

No, this scandal is about the Swift Boat Vets Against Kerry, who have alleged that Kerry:

* Was a bad commander.
* Used minor injuries to get out of Vietnam.
* Wasn't in Cambodia on the exact date he said he was.

Actually, Jeff is trying to minimize a rather important point. It's not about bookkeeping; it's about Kerry making up entire swatches of his wartime bio, for purely political purposes. * Killed a member of the Viet Cong just to watch him die.
* Raped goats.
* Stole women.
* And...a lot of other bad stuff!The giggles are a form of strawman that, again, is no worse than what Josh "ua Micah" Marshall has deployed in terms of reason and logic. Yes, that's more of that damnation with faint praise stuff.

Of course, there are a few holes in the SBVAK story. First off, none of the Swifties served under Lt. Kerry's command.

As has been exhaustively explained, that's not a hole at all, merely a desperate Democrat dodge. Swift boats had crews of six men. They operated in teams of several boats, to mutually support each other. The teams of boats were close-knit because they had to be; if they didn't fight as a well-oiled team, they died.

All of them were angry that Kerry came back and became an anti-war protestor.

And this invalidates their stance exactly how?

A few managed to shred their credibility beyond all recognition: Lt. Comdr. George Elliot (Kerry's CO in Vietnam) praised Kerry in 1996, signed an affadavit that Kerry didn't deserve the Silver star in May of 2004, retracted his affadavit in a Boston Globe interview, then retracted the retraction. So which is it? Who knows?

Who knows? Elliot knows! Jeff - the Kranish "retraction" story was debunked over a week ago.

SBVAK has laid out what seems like a reasoable case, but of course, there were reasonable, well-researched books by Arkansas state troopers showing how Bill Clinton was running cocaine while sleeping with hookers, too.

Strawman. There weren't 250 Arkansas State Troopers, and Clinton didn't leave a thirty year trail of easily verifiable documentary evidence of his perfidy. Those books, like this one, were published under the Regenery imprint--the imprint of Richard Mellon Scaife, the George Soros of the right, if Soros was a meglomaniac who owned media companies.Soros is a megalomaniac who destroys nations, but that's irrelevant.

Who cares who publishes the book? Debate the facts. If you can.

SBVAK is financed by John O'Neill, who was tapped back in the early 70's to be Nixon's foil to Kerry. Building your entire career around destroying one man will tend to lead one to hate that man.

If someone had built his career on the bodies of my fallen comrades, by doing the things that O'Neill and his 200-odd cohorts of all ranks and rates claim, I'd feel a bit peevish about Kerry, too.

His co-author, Jerome Corsi, is a denzien of Free Republic, who has said of "John F*ing Commie Kerry," "After he married TerRAHsa, didn't John Kerry begin practicing Judiasm? He also has paternal grandparents that were Jewish. What religion is John Kerry?"

As entertaining as the ad-hominem sidelines might be, they have nothing to do with the substance of the charges.

So we're not talking about a balanced group leading a calm, reasoned investigation into Sen. Kerry's background. We're talking, instead, about a right-wing hatchet group.

No. We're talking about a group of veterans with bones to pick with John Kerry. Some are Republicans, most have never identified their affiliations, but they have reasons to be upset at Kerry's rank exploitation of their experience.

And why don't we invoke the "You never served" clause here? Nobody who wasn't in 'Nam has any right to question the Swifties!"

As to the financing - they need it to get their voice heard. And their financing comes to a grand total of about $150,000 so far from the likes of Scaife.

Which is not to say it's not money well spent; the Swifties have gotten more traction with their $150K than "Air America" has with its millions from Soros.

Now, Larry Flynt has been making noise about publishing an account that George W. Bush paid a woman to have an abortion back in the '70's. The book, by all accounts, appears well-researched and informative. But it will be dismissed out of hand--and should be. Why? Because Flynt is well-known as a left-wing bomb-thrower, and the book is tainted irrevocably by his invovement.

And because it is very old news (Flynt's been bruiting this book about since 2000), and because the President never built his entire campaign on being abortion-free. But Vietnam is John Kerry's only accomplishment. It was the only meaningful point raised during his convention speech. It is John Kerry!

And, if the Swifties are to be believed (and large parts of their story are coalescing nicely), it is a lie.

So it is with the SBVAK. Their backbone is right-wing bomb-throwers. (You don't pick a freeper to co-author your book if you want balance). Anything that comes out of their organization is instantly suspect, and subject to higher standards of proof than, say, a CNN report.

So invoke that "standard of proof", and disprove the book's points.

You do that by showing, via empirical evidence, that John Kerry was in Cambodia. Ever. By producing a SEAL or a hatless CIA guy who says "The Navy sent a hotshot ninety-day-wonder Yalie in a fifty-foot boat that sounds like a top-fuel dragster deep into neutral territory, right after an international incident involving an inadvertent violation of Cambodian neutrality, on a black-bag operation that neither his biographer nor any of his crewmen ever recalled".

You don't do it by quibbling about Cpt. O'Neill's political pedigree, or Corsi's remarks in a completely unrelated context, or liberal superstitions about big, bad Regnery Books.

This is not to say that SBVAK can't find the truth, just that they're unlikely to.

Really?

Why?

I mean, in terms of objective, empirical evidence?

There's a perfect analogy here: the Bush National Guard records. The Bush National Guard story was circulating since at least 1999. But nothing was pursued until 2004.

Jeff? Where wereyou in 2000? The story was played out all over the media.

And the analogy is lousy, for one key reason: The President never made "I was a fighter pilot" the mainstay of his campaign. Again - without Vietnam, John Kerry would be an assistant commerce commissioner living in Framingham.

Why? Not because of Michael Moore, who popped off about Bush "deserting" in February.

Today, the Swifties are raising this issue, but it isn't going to go anywhere until relatively high-ranking Republicans take up the banner. And that isn't bloodly likely. Thanks to every Democrat's favorite Republican, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), it's politically untenable for the right to jump on board with the Swifties' allegations.

First: McCain never served on Kerry's boat, either. And it's ironic - it's largely McCain's fault that small groups need to go through big baaad 527 groups to be heard at all.

Second: The Trent Lott story was politically untenable, too. For a while.

And so, here we are. The Swift Boat story is already dying, there doesn't appear to be anything that will bring it back. And so the right side of the blogosphere spins and spins, trying desperately to focus on whether John Kerry was in Cambodia, or forty miles east, on December 24, 1968. Anything to avoid focusing on November 2004.

And that is the most cynical bit of DNC spin of the lot; the Democrats probably achieved their tie in 2000 by leaking the bogus "Bush DWI story" the weekend before the election; it's probaby the only thing that kept Gore as close as he got.

This is about November; we don't want a lying weasel like Kerry anywhere near the nuclear football, anywhere close to the reins of power.

Jeff got one other thing wrong: The only reason this story isn't above the fold on page one of every paper in the country - as the "Bush was a Deserter" and "Bush DWI" and "Bush Abortion" stories all were - is because of the active, complete bias of the major, partisan media. If the situation were reversed and it were Bush's credibility being savaged, editorial pages across the nation would have declared his credibility cold and on the slab last Tuesday.

And that is the real story.

Posted by Mitch at August 17, 2004 07:49 AM | TrackBack