I’m with you 100% on this. There’s also another element to it.
Let’s say you support someone who really is a boy scout and never manipulates or lies. This person is now the POTUS. He’d get eaten alive by Putin, and just about every other world leader.
There’s a saying locally, that I bet other regions have as well: You can’t be a nice guy and be mayor of Boston.
You’ve got to be tough, and able to lie from time to time to be an effective leader. Every president does. Being 100% honest would make you unable to effectively do the job.
If I’m following you, there should be a cite of several of them claiming they witnessed Kerry self-inflicting his wounds in a bogus attempt at being honored with a Purple Heart? I’m not aware any of them actually made that claim, but perhaps I’m just ignorant of it. Can you provide a cite of them offering eyewitness testimony they claim Kerry self-inflicted? Thanks in advance.
Good question. I’ll see what I can find. But I’m not aware of who or how many of the 100+ vets who signed the letter specifically claimed to have knowledge that led to this specific allegation.
I suspect it’s just rumor mill stuff. In the years after the war these guys kept in touch, and all shared a hatred of Kerry. That gives stories time to spread. But that’s just a guess on my part.
The primary purpose of virtually all discussions about politicians is their relative standing compared to other politicians. It’s unspoken generally, but it underlies virtually all such discussions. When you discuss what some politician - or other political actor - did or does, it’s assumed as a matter of course that the implications of the discussion are whether you should support or vote for them versus some other politician/group - this is the primary reasons such issues have relevance to begin with.
In light of this, to insist that a discussion of the foibles of some politician or group that you oppose focus on that person’s actions in a vacuum, without allowing any discussion of what rival politicians or groups do or have done, is being disingenuous. It’s an attempt to falsely create the inference of a relative moral/ethical failure on the part of your opponents, as compared to your favored politicians and causes. (In addition, it also better enables you to take inconsistent positions as regards to these issues based on your broader ideological positions.)
In this case, what’s even more telling is that the discussion started about the Swiftboaters in particular. A poster expanded that to a comparison of other alleged Republican lapses of this sort, and Really Not All That Bright had no problem with that - to the contrary, he himself raised another incident of this sort. It was only when the discussion began to encompass a comparison to Democratic lapses that RNATB suddenly objected.
Thanks. If you can’t find it, would you then be prepared to not ‘take them at their word’ and place their insinuation closer to the “lying liars” category?
No one claims to have witnessed Kerry inflicting his own wound. Apparently the basis of the claim is the assertion by a more senior officer who claims to have been present on the boat. He says there was no enemy fire, from which it follows that the wound must have been self-inflicted. (Apparently Kerry’s position is that there was enemy fire but that he’s not sure what caused the injury.)
Of note: That officer’s version is contradicted by a couple of other witnesses, and possibly by himself. (He was also a Bush supporter, FWIW.)
Interestingly, that officer named Schachte isn’t a member of the SBV. He says he “admires” them but isn’t a member. Nonetheless, it looks like it’s his claim that the SBV’s ran with and turned into one of their accusations.
Reading his account and Kerry’s account in that Boston Globe article it sounds to me like they both remember the event similarly but a bit different. I wouldn’t say either of them is lying about that night.
It is not convincing enough for me to think Kerry actually self inflicted any wound. I do think that their dislike of Kerry clouds the judgement of the SBV’s and they are too eager to accuse him of anything they think might stick. I’m not going so far as to call them liars, but they shouldn’t have made this accusation. I was wrong in my assumption that some of the SBV’s saw Kerry do something first hand.
On another note: Good job with that cite, Fotheringay-Phipps. It is relevant. It adds value to the thread. It fights ignorance. It says what you think it says. You summarized it nicely. Other people in the thread should take notes. That’s how it’s done.
The use of the term “self-inflicted” was a rather scummy attempt to imply that Kerry deliberately injured himself without actually doing it. The claim is that Kerry and a couple of other crewmen fired on smugglers at night, fired on them, chipped some rocks(IIRC) and was scratched by the “shrapnel” caused by this.
The argument is that since Kerry wasn’t injured by “enemy fire”(if the story is true) he didn’t deserve the Purple Heart.
Of course, the military during that time gave out plenty of Purple Hearts to people injured by friendly-fire so even if the story is true, I don’t see the issue.
Medal inflation was a huge issue during the Vietnam War and people regularly got medals for relatively pedestrian actions. I suspect Kerry benefitted from this when it came to the Bronze and Silver Star he earned, but he wasn’t the guy who decided to start throwing around medals like candy to raise morale and good publicity.
Also, on second thought “suspect” is way too strong a word for how I feel.
More like, I wouldn’t be surprised if he benefitted from medal inflation and received medals for actions that in Korea or WWII would not have been rewarded with them.
I also don’t think it reflects poorly on him if true.
Interesting NYT Op-ed from 2004. The guy summarizes some of the evidence and ends off by saying that
But ISTM that the characterization of “stretched the truth” versus “lie” is a highly subjective one.
The two examples noted by this columnist seem more like lies to me. Firstly, Kerry claimed that he volunteered for Vietnam because “it was the right thing to do”, when in reality he did his best to get out of it, and only when this didn’t work, signed up for what seemed at the time to be the safest possible area of service (he saw combat through an unforseen turn of events). And the other was the Cambodia story. I would characterize both of these as lies because Kerry himself made a big deal of them, and I imagine the SBVT saw it that way even more so, because these issues were more important to them. But it’s a subjective judgement call.
No, apparently the rejoinder to this guy is the engineman who was definitely there, stating that Schachte definitely wasn’t even on the boat on the date in question.
Even if we believe Kerry completely he was in a boat right next to Kerry. He claims to be in the same skimmer with Kerry. They were both shooting at the shore in both accounts. This sort of detail can be an honest mistake by either of them years later.
You throw a flare at the shore in darkness and think you see something. You start shooting. Your buddies start shooting. I can see it being difficult to say later whether there was actually any enemy present at all. Fog of war.
I agree 100% with that quote. I don’t want to hear someone arguing about what did or did not happen 30 years ago. There is an official record, and I see no reason that we "laymen’ should doubt it. Dredging up some 30-year-old grudge (if it’s even that) is of no interest to me in a political campaign.
That is, however, the subject of this thread, to which you have posted numerous times despite your lack of interest. It isn’t about what *you *think, anyway, but about the total of *all *the people influenced by smear campaigns, and their net effect on election results, and about what and whether we voters have a responsibility to do in response. If your view is that you have no responsibility whatever, that’s your view, and you should expect it to get the respect it merits. But remember that lack of action has consequences as surely as action does - all that is necessary for the triumph of evil etc.
:rolleyes: It’s of no interest to me in a political campaign. We’re asked in this thread what we think, and that’s what I think. Discussing why I think that is perfectly on topic. You are free to skip over my posts if you don’t like them.
And yes, it is about what I think, and what others on this MB think. I don’t see anything in the OP about “the total of all the people influenced by smear campaigns”. That’s what you want the thread to be about. If you want to talk about that, fine. Don’t pretend that we all have to be interested in whatever you happen to be interested in.
Another interesting account from 2004, this one from the WP.
Pretty good article generally for those interested in the details (my apologies if this has already been cited upthread), but in addition there’s also one subtext I hadn’t realized. Apparently, Kerry’s short tour of duty was the result of him receiving 3 Purple Hearts. In light of that, and combined with his reluctance to be in Vietnam to begin with, the issue may have been in part whether these Purple Hearts were part of a deliberate attempt by Kerry to get as many Purple Hearts as soon as possible in order to qualify for a discharge sooner. You could see where this might rile up some fellow soldiers.
That’s true. But the real significance is whether Kerry later tried to foist these medals as evidence of his heroism on a public who did not appreciate the historical medal inflation that you describe. Which is why clarifying the circumstances of these medals and whether they were the result of medal inflation became significant.
IOW, had Kerry ran for president with no mention by him or his campaign of the fact that he had all these medals lying around the house somewhere, then it’s unlikely that his character would have been attacked based on some guys’ claims that he had finagled some medals based on shaky qualifications. But when he tried to present these medals as evidence of his great heroism, it triggered a reaction from people whose memories were in conflict with this.
The absurdity of that charge, as well as its groundlessness, will no doubt dawn on you soon enough.
Would that also apply to his Silver Star? :dubious:
Wrong. He would still have been a Democrat running against a Republican incumbent in an election in which the war the incumbent started, and getting out of it, was the central issue. His service and courage would have been smeared, just as you have done right now, no matter what he said or did. It would have been foolish for him to let himself be McGoverned, would it not?
IOW, whose memories had completely reversed themselves since their earlier, presumably fresher, public statements to the contrary.