So says A group of former officers who commanded John F. Kerry in Vietnam.
These officers - a LOT of them, have signed a letter to the effect that John Kerry is not fit to be POTUS. Something like 14 of 17 of his immediate superiors in Vietnam, for instance. And they aren’t partisan shills - there are Democrats as well as Republicans in the group, and they have stated that they’d have no problem with another Democrat were Kerry replaced.
So… Opinions? Is this damaging to Kerry?
From the article:
and
So, yeah, if all people hear is the accusation and not the context or rebuttals, some harm will be done.
Also, maybe I’m missing something, but if we are supposed reject a certain candidate solely on the basis questions about his Viet nam-era record, how the heck did GWB ever get elected?
"and said Kerry should be denied the White House because of his 1971 allegations that some superiors had committed ‘war crimes.’ "
Well that sort of explains it. A bunch of old war horses who have decided to take personal offense about statements made 30+ years ago and often debated on these boards. They have apparently been harboring hurt feelings since 1971. Strange they should all get together now.
Well, to be fair, it is John Kerry who made Vietnam an issue. So far, Kerry’s major campaign theme is, “Vote for me, I was a hero in the Vietnam War”. He’s constantly telling stories of his swift boat days, and working analogies into general conversation that involve his command skills in Vietnam.
If he wants to be judged on his Vietnam record, then he has to stand on the entire record. He doesn’t get to choose which parts of the story to tell.
I’ll take an unknown like Kerry over a known evil like Bush any day. Sure, Kerry may well indeed make an incompetent Commander in Chief.
But better a 90% chance of incompetence over a 100% chance of incompetence, dishonesty, and outright malevolence.
Just because he tries to make it a campaign issue doesn’t mean it should be. What a guy did 30 yrs ago is not a good indicator of how he would act today.
I don’t know how old you are, but I think you were around during those years. I was a very young adult at the time, but it was horribly divisive in the US. That war damn near tore the country apart. It does not surprise me in the least that extreme and sometimes emotional positions were taken by people involved in that war.
I agree that this looks more like a grudge being carried across the years than a realistic analysis of the Kerry of today.
You indicated in other threads that you thought Kerry would be a disaster on foreign policy as president, but you didn’t say exactly why. What specific things are you worried that Kerry would or wouldn’t do (as opposed to what Bush has done or will do)?
What the bloggers are rebutting with…
One of these guys (O’Neill) replaced Kerry after he left Vietnam, was used by Nixon to debate Kerry, and has been against him for 30 years. We should not be that surprised…
This seems to be a quite transparent effort to move the debate about the 2004 election off of events that have happened, well, between 2001-2004, and to events that happened in 1971. Perhaps it is because one side in the debate looks pretty miserable when it comes to events, you know, that have happened in any relevant time frame.
Sam Stone:
Do you feel that anyone who has ever protested a war is then unfit to lead a country? Wouldn’t that go against a basic principle of free speech, expression, and a right to gather? Do you feel that this is what these guys are trying to state? Or do you think it revolves around Kerry’s use of the terms “war crimes” and “atrocities” (something to my mind he has backed right off of – he doesn’t make those claims anymore to my knowledge).
Gee, Sam what took you so long? These guys hit the blogosphere days ago, the Freepers are all over this, and National Review Online is publicly wetting itself!
So whadda we got here? A whole bunch of public minded citizens, first and foremost Mr O’Neill, who seems to have appointed himself Mr. Kerry’s personal Betty Noyer since The Nixon first blessed him. Veterans incensed with rage and fury over Mr. Kerry’s publicly unpatriotic anti-war stance, as all right thinking 'Nam vets are. Of course. The ones I knew must have been some bunch of oddballs, which would explain why the lived in Minnesota. Yeah, that must be it.
Oddly enough, thier relentless civic virtue lay rather dormant throughout the years when Kerry was stalking, Lurch-like, through the Senate, strangling defense budgets a-borning. “Bwah-ha-ha-ha” he cackled.
Yet they remained silent, a mere Senator not inspiring enough, one must assume.
So, yeah, I’ve been kind of keeping a bemused and sardonic eye on this the last several days. I do recall seeing some other print about this, probably in connection to some blog, wherein at the time at least one of these Very Unusual Suspects had signed a letter of commendation Lt. (j.g.) Kerry. But I’m too lazy to go searching, and besides, this thread heats up somebody will ferret it out.
Also, something passed about how they demanded that Kerry release his military records again because the first time they passed through his office and they were suspicious that perhaps…get this, this is where it gets really, really good…perhaps some documents were missing!!!
No, really! I’m not making this up!
So, OK, let ‘er rip, Sam, bring it on! Let’s see what they got. They say they got a letter signed by everybody who ever even used the same latrine (head?) as Kerry, all swearing what a lump o’ shit he was. Has it been released yet? Names been checked out? Been a few days now, is there some sort of problem?
Not partisan? The organization is represented by a prominent Republican PR firm, and many of its leaders and organizers work for Republican-affiliated firms, or have worked on Republican campaigns. Put more than a first brush scratch in the supposed simple backgrounds of these people, and you find Nixon stoolies, people working for Bush family firms, and more such goodies.
Plus it was launched at the same time as a deceptive WSJ editorial in which a pull quote declares that the author served on Kerry’s ship: implying that he was actually there with Kerry and saw him firsthand, when in reality he was simply on the same ship after Kerry had left.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_05/003846.php
The Daily Howler takes on some of their claims, which just so happen to be controverted by documented facts:
http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh050504.shtml
At base, these people mostly seem angered that Kerry said that atrocities had been committed (and Kerry says his language went too far, though it never went as far as lying Elliot paraphrases it as going), which sullies their reputations somehow, since they were slightly overstated.
I wonder how that’s going to play in a media environment where Tony Blair’s personal human rights envoy to Iraq now says that U.S. soldiers who detained an elderly Iraqi woman last year placed a harness on her, made her crawl on all fours and rode her like a donkey. Or when human rights violations are the very thing that justifies the war against Saddam.
As opposed to Bush, who’s record unarguably still DOES have key records missing (you know, just the ones people had actually asked to see, as opposed to the irrelevant smokescreens ones he kept releasing), despite him having claimed to have released everything, and then later, releasing some more documents and then saying he had released everything.
So?
George Dubya is not fit to be commander in chief, and we let the dummy start two separate wars.
Hard to see how Kerry could do much worse than that, short of launching a surprise cruise missile assault on London or something…
Four More Wars!
Dubya’s the One.
Now More Than Ever.
Tired of the constant attempts by Bush and his stooges to muddy the waters of this election? Then check out these two sites:
Still, they were able to get Kerry’s commanders and many of his peer officers on board.
If a buddy of mine from the Navy (and I am a veteran) was running for office, and a group like this came to me asking me to get on board, I’d tell them to go screw themselves. The sheer fact that they have so many people organized who knew Kerry in Vietnam is telling.
This isn’t a simple political disagreement, to me. The language they used is quite stunning - “unfit to serve.” If Bob Kerrey, another Democrat war hero, were the nominee, they couldn’t get away with language like this.
John Kerry can spin all he wants, but this can’t do anything but damage him. Whether a lot or a little, we’ll have to see.
I doubt it will have any real affect at all. I find it hard to believe that they can support a lying weasel who avoided Vietnam via the National Guard and then couldn’t even be bothered to show up for duty most of the time against Kerry. To me, that alone, says this is just another Bush smear attempt and intelligent people will ignore it.
And strangely enough, it was pointed out on Joe Scarborough that all of the people who signed this document are from the boss ranks, while virtually all of the enlisted men who worked under Kerry are supporting him directly or not saying anything. It seems that the boss people were a lot more pissed off that Kerry broke ranks and let the cat out of the bag about all the nasty things that happen in war. Usually, the most vocal people in a group are the one’s with the most to hide. Hmmm, I wonder what these guys might be hiding from?
Wow. Look at this. I remember during the last election cycle, and for a long period after, you lefties used to complain about threads which were critical of Bush being “hijacked” with Clinton comments - and rightfully so. But here we find a thread about Kerry rapidly becoming overrun with Bush comments.
So much for standing on principle.
O’Neil’s past from MediaMatters (run by David Brock by the way):
I don’t know whether or not he would be a good commander in chief. Clinton wasn’t. Carter wasn’t. Nixon wasn’t. Johnson wasn’t. Bur right now, a good commander in chief is not what we need. We need a good guardian of our civil liberties. Kerry might not be too great at that either, but it is for damn certain that Bush sucks at it.
UncleBeer: I remember during the last election cycle, and for a long period after, you lefties used to complain about threads which were critical of Bush being “hijacked” with Clinton comments - and rightfully so.
Hmm, so you’re now saying you yourself shouldn’t have pulled this sort of stunt in, e.g., this Nov. 1999 thread?
I’m not saying that it is a good thing to hijack threads with tu quoque retorts about the other guy (although when the issue revolves around making an electoral choice between them, I think comparisons are often relevant). I’m just amused that a past master of the technique like UncleBeer is now the one tut-tutting about how wrong it is.
This one is really simple. His former commanders say he is unfit for leadership. Well, he led under their leadership. Surely their evaluation of his unfit leadership skills is documented somewhere. Did they provide any records of their evaluations of him at the time? Surely someone has found the opinions within his record or elsewhere of this “impressive” array of “leaders.”
And how about the guy in this group who defended Kerry a decade ago regarding his silver star?
Does this group reflect honor and brotherhood, or are they lying two-faced weasels? This is nothing but a “band of mutha’s.”