Again, how do you know that? It’s not at all obvious.
I hadn’t heard of him, but I just read his wiki page.
Yeah. He’s a hero.
Both Kerry and Thompson threw away medals. Both testified in front of congress. But only Thompson actually saw something wrong happening in front of him and did something about it. Kerry was just repeating rumors.
Yes, both those things will invoke some ill will from certain members of the military, but that’s about where the similarity between them ends.
Which goes to show that most people have no idea what honor actually is. You dishonor the military by committing the sort of atrocities Kerry spoke about, not by exposing them. If defending the honor of the military, police, or anything else means hiding misconduct and shaming those with the courage to expose or put a stop to it, then there’s not actually anything worth protecting about it.
Because that’s what they said? I’ve posted the quote from his commander. The ads they ran were focused on his testimony mostly.
What do you think got the swift boat veterans so riled up at Kerry? I didn’t think the cause of their anger was in dispute. It wasn’t a secret.
Was he lying? Were they lying, the guys who testified at the Winter Soldier meeting? None of this shit ever happened? Should they have shut up about it, not disturb our illusions with ugly truth? Cover up the pile of innocent dead with a flag? A really big flag.
What, exactly, do you think he should have done?
Word. Preach it.
Unfortunately, there’s a historical record, easily retrievable.
Yes, there was some stuff in their campaign of lies about Kerry’s postwar activities. But the majority was indeed about his service itself. And it is well-established that it was an orchestrated campaign of factual lies with an obvious goal, not merely fact-irrelevant opinionating about the honor of denouncing a war that, by that time, was generally thought by the public to be deeply immoral in both intent and conduct. The latter would have been defensible (though weakly) argumentation, the former was not, but the former was what dominated the campaign.
“Some ill will”? My, what an artful bit of wordplay! Krakatoa was loud. Scarlett Johannson is kinda hot. There was some ill will.
I remember the ads pretty well. I don’t agree with the part of your post I’ve underlined above.
His commander wasn’t the lead Swifty. Corsi and a few others were.
I don’t think that really matters. What matters is what the campaign was about. It’s not at all clear that it was mostly about his post-war activity.
Wrong. He was repeating what he had been told *by the participants themselves *- who had then chosen him as their spokesman.
This is absurdly false.
In addition to the evidence refuting it that others have posted, it doesn’t fit at all with those purple heart bandaids that were the hit of the Republican convention that year. So the purple heart bandaid represents… his testimony before congress?
ETA, it was this issue that made me stop listening to NPR. Specifically, they described Kerry’s service in Viet Nam as “controversial.”. His post war acts had nothing to do with the Swift boating campaign.
Although my memory of the election agrees with you, your source suggests that (with the exception of the Cambodian christmas) the focus of the ads really was on his post-war activities. Ads 2 and 4 sounds like they’re almost entirely post-war. Ad 1 seems fairly generic (I know him and he’s a bad guy). Only Ad 3 is focused on during war activities (Cambodia).
I think, but can’t be sure, that this is the complete set of ads. Anyone want to view them and report back? I’ll decline that “privilege”.
I don’t know if we have any way of determining how many times each ad was run, but that would be necessary, too, in order to determine what their “primary focus” was.
But we’re not talking about whether or not fairness is enforceable. We’re talking about whether it’s measurable.
OK. How do you measure it?
So basically, the SBVs argued on two main points:
- Kerry’s testimony after the war about the atrocities his comrades had witnessed were wrong, dishonest, and dishonorable
- The record of actions leading up to Kerry winning medals was false and he did not deserve those medals; he was not the war hero his history would claim him to be
You know what? Even assuming you’re right, we know that this is a right-wing front group. And we know exactly which of those two claims is likely to have more impact on the average modern citizen (especially given the massive change in perspective with regards to war protesters, of Vietnam in particular) and which, as a result, got considerably more play by the right wing. So excuse me if I consider all this handwaving about the Swiftboaters to be a completely pointless exercise. It doesn’t matter that most of what they said had to do with Kerry’s postwar record. That wasn’t the stuff that stuck. That wasn’t what mattered.
No kidding!
I think you need to read your cites before posting them, Elvis, since that cite backs up my claim rather than disputing it.
What’s this mean, exactly? Are you disputing that many actual veterans from Vietnam were in the group? That they didn’t like Kerry very much? Sure, Republicans were happy to pay for the ads giving these guys a microphone, but this wasn’t a “front group” unless you define that very loosely.
Ad 1 was about his service entirely. And you omitted the book, which also was mostly about his service.