B and B: Post sinks to new low on the Smear Campaign

August 22, 2004

Post sinks to new low on the Smear Campaign

Just when I was starting to think the Washington Post had been doing a decent job lately on campaign coverage, they publish a front-page article that dares to suggest that Kerry and the Swift Boat Smear Campaign are on equal footing with their claims. Just look at this abominable headline on ther website: "Both Sides Flawed On Swift Boat Accounts". This after a week in which each new day brought up yet more evidence that virtually every anti-Kerry claim by the Smear Campaign is completely unbelievable. No documentary evidence backs them up, plenty contradicts them directly, and their claims are inconsistent their very own past stories.

Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly has a good, brief roundup of some of the changing stories. Plenty of other blogs have also been providing excellent coverage of this, including Atrios at Eschaton, Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo, and Digby at Hullabaloo.

The Post article by Michael Dobbs is pathetically incomplete, not even bringing up the fact that these guys are changing their stories, much less the strong connections this group has to the Bush campaign. It is such a pathetic article that it even takes this following claim seriously.

Much of the debate over who is telling the truth boils down to whether the two-page after-action report and other Navy records are accurate or whether they have been embellished by Kerry or someone else. In "Unfit for Command," O'Neill describes the after-action report as "Kerry's report." He contends that language in Thurlow's Bronze Star citation referring to "enemy bullets flying about him" must also have come from "Kerry's after-action report."

O'Neill has said that the initials "KJW" on the bottom of the report "identified" it as having been written by Kerry. It is unclear why this should be so, as Kerry's initials are JFK. A review of other Swift boat after-action reports at the Naval Historical Center here reveals several that include the initials "KJW" but describe incidents at which Kerry was not present.

Other Swift boat veterans, including Thurlow and Chenoweth, have said they believe that Kerry wrote the March 13 report. "I didn't like to write reports," said Thurlow, who was the senior officer in the five-boat flotilla. "John would write the thing up in longhand, and it would then be typed up and sent up the line."

Even if Kerry did write the March 13 after-action report, it seems unlikely that he would have been the source of the information about "enemy bullets" flying around Thurlow. The official witness to those events, according to Thurlow's medal recommendation form, was his own leading petty officer, Robert Lambert, who himself won a Bronze Star for "courage under fire" in going to Thurlow's rescue after he fell into the river. Lambert, who lives in California, declined to comment.

In a telephone interview, the head of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, retired Adm. Roy Hoffmann, who commanded all Swift boats in Vietnam, said he believed that Kerry wrote the March 13 after-action report on the basis of numerical identifiers at the top of the form. He later acknowledged that the numbers referred to the Swift boat unit, and not to Kerry personally. "It's not cast-iron," he said.

The proper response to these people should be to laugh them out of the office. That such slurs can be published now in major newspapers merely on the say-so of a handful of credibility-challenged, partisanly-motivated individuals with a grudge, even when the only evidence directly contradicts their claims, and not be called out as the liars they are should be an embarrassment to everyone.

We all need to write the Washington Post and any other media organization that pushes these slurs and hold them to account.

And when we do this, we also need to mention that Bush, for allowing his surrogates to trash honorable men with lies, is a coward. As Josh Marshall puts it,

He's a coward because he has other people smear good men without taking any responsibility, without owning up to it or standing behind it. And when someone takes it to him and puts him on the spot to defend his actions -- as McCain does in this [new Kerry ad] -- he's literally speechless. Like I say, a coward.

This editorial from the Boston Globe puts this new attack in an appropriate perspective:

IMAGINE IF supporters of Bill Clinton had tried in 1996 to besmirch the military record of his opponent, Bob Dole. After all, Dole was given a Purple Heart for a leg scratch probably caused, according to one biographer, when a hand grenade thrown by one of his own men bounced off a tree. And while the serious injuries Dole sustained later surely came from German fire, did the episode demonstrate heroism on Dole's part or a reckless move that ended up killing his radioman and endangering the sergeant who dragged Dole off the field?

The truth, according to many accounts, is that Dole fought with exceptional bravery and deserves the nation's gratitude. No one in 1996 questioned that record. Any such attack on behalf of Clinton, an admitted Vietnam draft dodger, would have been preposterous.

Yet amazingly, something quite similar is happening today as supporters of President Bush attack the Vietnam record of Senator John Kerry.

Imagine!

August 22, 2004 in Media Political Coverage | Permalink

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