Well, if that is how you decide to vote, you are pretty damn weak. As I’ve said before, you should know right and wrong. Vote your conscience and quit fucking sniveling.
Or maybe the escalation isn’t entirely Bush’s. The story isn’t about Kerry’s 1968 war record as much as it is about Bush’s 2004 campaign approach. NBC quoted “an unnamed official in the Kerry campaign” (yeah, I know) confirming that Kerry wants to keep the smear effort in the news for a while longer, to keep Bush from getting any momentum going into the RNC. That could be overplaying *his * hand, but it beats the hell out of being Dukakised.
Alternatively: the Kerryistas were naive. They already knew about the swift boat guys, more or less, they weren’t anything all that new. They reviewed all the evidence at hand, figured there was no way the Pubbies could make anything out of such weak tea. Kerry’s anti-war stance was long known, and all the “Hanoi Jane” crap had gotten nowhere.
But they didn’t figure that anyone would actually go after his war record in terms of his courage, etc. Nobody stoops that low, right? Besides, Nixon had already tried that, sicced Sec of Navy Warner on him, and he came up smelling like a rose! They didn’t figure on dirt being dug up because they knew there was none to dig up! Like I said, naive.
They underestimated the impact that can be built by innuendo founded upon supposition and buttressed by half-truths. They underestimated Darth Rove, and wish to God they hadn’t.
Question now is: will John McCain pucker up one more time, and kiss the ass he longs to kick? Or will he tell them to Cheney?
So Bob Dole might actually be a deep mole for Kerry?
I like it, and it rhymes! 
’luci, I really don’t think any vertebrate mammal could be *that * naive, certainly not after witnessing the Great Clinton Hunt. Rather, *knowing * that the Swiftees’ lies would come up again, because of *knowing * that Rove couldn’t resist using the “insinuendo” approach because of his own character and because of thinking that Kerry=Dukakis, the Kerry campaign more likely just made sure Bush got caught in his own trap and is now making sure everyone knows it.
As for McCain, I don’t see how he can say anything at all anymore during this campaign. Kerry has now neutralized him as a net advantage for Bush, since McCain can no longer appear in public without getting questioned on his change of heart towards Bush’s campaign tactics. McCain now looks like a simple partisan who only objects to smears when they’re targeted against him. No, that’s not fair to a fine man, and it will be interesting to see if he and Kerry maintain their personal friendship after this, but as Tip O’Neill liked to say, “Politics ain’t beanbag.”
H^ is what happens when to hit backspace in a terminal that doesn’t support it.
Kerry has faced these sorts of attacks before. They almost always backfire. Now that it looks like these are starting to backfire, the mainstream GOP seems ready to jump ship. The Kerry campaign has scored some major hits: they put McCain in a very tight spot with their ad refercing his own very pointed complaint that Bush had stood on stage with someone who had attacked McCain’s service and record on veterans, they had Edwards directly challenge Bush’s leadership over the issue leaving Bush with little room for weaseling out. The fact that this is being done by basically the Texas inner circle of the Bushes, meaning that all it would take is a Bush phone call to put an end to it if they really cared, doesn’t help. This is not going well for the Bush team.
Help defeat Hillary in 2008, vote Kerry!
Do de name “Jeb Bush” ring a bell?
There are no invertebrate mammals, except for maybe Joe Lieberman…
Love to think so. But if they don’t think its going well for them, why are they raising the bet? They could cut and run, and take with them whatever points they already scored, and then GeeDubya takes the moral high ground with somber declarations of dismay at what those terrible people have done.
They can force Kerry to spend precious Federal money defending himself, while they coast on the “soft” money. But I wouldn’t think that would be worth the risk if this actually did blow up in their faces.
But would they be pushing this if they didn’t think it was breaking their way?
Generally the strategy is to secure your base early and pursue the swing votes later.
So far, Bush/Rove have operated with a different playbook. They focus almost exclusively on their base (by banning the unenthusiastic from their rallies for example) while repressing their opponent’s turnout (by going negative early and often).
To complicate matters, the NYT reports that the Republican convention will be a veritable orgy of moderation. I’m not sure how that decision fits in.
Still, I’m intrigued that the Repubs are creatively breaking with tradition here. Too bad about those smears.
Are you auditioning for the next SWVFT ad?
The only known legitimate published photo of Fonda and Kerry does not show them “hanging out.” They are both seated at at rally in 1970. He is sitting four or five rows behind her. There is nothing abnormal in his appearance. There is another faked photo that has circulated, but that one was debunked at Snopes.com.
The real photo was made prior to her trip to Hanoi – something which she has admitted was poor judgment and a mistake on her part. She was just another war protestor then – only more famous.
But at least no one ever accused her of lying in order to subvert the democratic process.
Liberal, in 1967 at the War Tribunal in Sweden and Denmark, there was a report presented from Cambodia detailing activities of American and South Vietnamese forces in Cambodia. That report was presented before the time period that Kerry claimed to have been in Cambodia. Officially, we certainly weren’t supposed to be there, but as you know there was a lot going on that we did not know about until later.
Although Kerry did talk about Nixon as if he were the Chief Executive, he never actually referred to him as such. It could have been that he was misremembering. Nixon was sworn in within a month’s time. I know that Kerry referred specifically to Christmas, but do we know how much longer he was there?
When did he make these statements about being in Cambodia? Was it recently or was this something he testified to before the Senate? Another time perhaps?
I wish I had seen the Wallace interview. I was aware that Bill O’Reilly wasn’t buying into their story and that made my eyes cross.
Chris Matthews grilled one of the SBVFT (last name started with a T) who admitted that he had no evidence, but countered with something to the effect of “…this isn’t a courtroom.” The same man claimed that Kerry went in with a plan to get 3 Purple Hearts and get out fast. When Matthews asked him how he knew that, he said that he had been told that by another member of the group.
May I interest you in this small WHOOOOOOSH!?
Look at the whole post (and laigle’s posting history).
Is it possible that the staged rallies and isolation from feedback via newspapers have convinced Bush that all is well? What if it’s just one of his stubborn snits? Or maybe he wants to take full advantage of the SBVFT ads through the convention before calling for an end to them.
And there was this from CNN yesterday:
oh.
that.
(tail between legs again…)
Yeah, but did you know that Woodstock was attended by 140 million people? If I had a dime for every false claim of attendence at that known-to-have-existed festival, I’d… Well, I’d have a lot of dimes. Maybe of the half-million or so American troops in Vietnam at the time, it just so happened that this particular guy, John Kerry, was put on a super-secret assignment to take a small boat into Cambodian territory and… I don’t know, rev the engine or something?
In fairness to Kerry, though, the latest twists on the story are coming from his run-amok campaign staff. He should tether them at the ankles or something because they’re making him look ridiculous. They’ve morphed it from being in Cambodia at Christmas to being in Cambodia “sometime”, which is what they told Fox News. But they told ABC News that Kerry was in the Mekong Delta, and was on the Cambodian side of demarcation, saying that the delta “consists of the border between Cambodia and Vietnam, so on Christmas Eve in 1968, he was in fact on patrol”. Unfortunately, the Mekong River doesn’t border the two countries, but flows from Cambodia into Vietnam, and the Mekong Delta is at the Pacific Ocean and nowhere near Cambodia. (Cite.)
Here’s my take. Kerry was one of many melodramatic war protestors (I was one, so I know how we were), who decided that this would be his avenue into politics. No big deal. Bush got in on Daddy’s coattails. Everybody has to have some way in. I think it was a combination of deliberate exaggerated rhetoric and false memory compouned by incessant repitition until eventually, he himself believed it. By 1979, he was telling the story in public, and even wrote a letter to the editor of the Boston Herald. “I remember,” he said, “spending Christmas Eve of 1968 five miles across the Cambodian border being shot at by our South Vietnamese allies who were drunk and celebrating Christmas. The absurdity of almost being killed by our own allies in a country in which President Nixon claimed there were no American troops was very real.” The absurdity, of course, is that President Nixon didn’t say that until 1971. (Cite: op cit.)
It’s clear to me that his goons are lying about the whole thing just as much as Bush’s goons are lying about his bronze star. That’s the advantage of being nonpartisan — you don’t have to pretend that shit doesn’t stink when it comes out of one guy’s ass as opposed to the shit that comes out of another guy’s ass.
Libertarian, party members don’t have to pretend either. They are not automatically partisan. That’s why a lot of Republicans are being pretty square about why they are not supporting their party’s candidate. And it’s why I have supported Republican candidates for the Senate a couple of times.
I will need to read your link before responding to it, but I am willing to be openminded to the fact that they may be contradicting themselves like crazy.
I do not find this contradictory:
What if he had inserted the word later before the word claimed?
“…The absurdity of almost being killed by our own allies in a country in which President Nixon later claimed there were no American troops was very real.”
Maybe…And I think that that is what he was getting at. If Nixon was denying that we had gone into Cambodia in 1971, he wasn’t about to admit to our being there since 1967. Or it could have been that he simply confused which President was denying that we were in Cambodia at the time.
And don’t forget, there were about half a million people at Woodstock. Sometimes people aren’t lying to you when they make that claim.
I’m going to check out your links now. Thanks!
Well, what if my grandmother had balls? She’d be my grandfather. 
Yeah, but those people have showed me their ticket stubs.
So you would believe Kerry and entirely retract your position that one party is as bad as another if the Mekong delta extended into Cambodia and the Mekong river is not near the Pacific Ocean, but instead flowed into the South China Sea?
It isn’t absurd at all. It is a perverse use of Kerry’s words to infer that he claimed to recall thinking of Nixon in 1968. Instead the meaning in standard English is plainly from the perspective of 1979, it is absurd that I was shot at in a country which Nixon claimed we were never in. It is not at all difficult to understand. The alternative interpretation is perverse.
Number [1] is a distinction without a difference. I said that the Mekong flows into Vietnam from Cambodia, so obviously it extends into Cambodia. Number [2] is nitpicky. “The South China Sea encompasses a portion of the Pacific Ocean…” (Cite.) And which Kerry story are you asking me to believe? The already retracted one about Christmas 1968, or one of the newer versions?
Well, I reckon it all depends on what your definition of is is.