The Last Attack on the Swiftees
The Newsweak
piece is out, and it's pretty much par for the course, except for the rather startling news that
John Kerry met with North Vietnamese TERRORISTS in Paris.
The hatchet job starts early:
Nov. 15 issue - The attack of the Swift Boat vets did not catch the Kerry campaign by surprise, not entirely at least. Kerry's operatives had worried from the beginning that some right-wing group would try to use his old Vietnam antiwar speeches against him.
It's just some right-wing group. Of course, three of the leaders of the group (Lonsdale, Hoffman and Elliot) were men that supported Kerry in the past. For some reason this fact always comes up as a reason to discredit the Swiftees, and yet nobody ever seems to notice that it also discredits the notion that they're a bunch of right wingers.
The Swift Boat ads—a first round charging that Kerry had lied to win his medals, then a second batch accusing him of betraying his mates by calling them war criminals—were misleading, but they were very effective.
Misleading how? Of course, Newsweak never bothers to explain how, and indeed if you read the article, it quickly becomes obvious that the ads were not misleading, for the simple reason that the Kerry campaign could not point out the misleading parts.
In early August, when the Swift Boat story started to pick up steam on the talk shows, Susan Estrich, a California law professor, well-known liberal talking head and onetime campaign manager for Michael Dukakis, had called the Kerry campaign for marching orders. She had been booked on Fox's "Hannity & Colmes" to talk about the Swift Boat ads. What are the talking points? Estrich asked the Kerry campaign. There are none, she was told. Estrich was startled.
There were none, because Kerry was guilty as charged. Newsweak doesn't want to admit it, but it's not hard to read between the lines.
There is a great deal of discussion of how saddened the Kerrys were by the attacks against them; no mention of the decades of sadness for the Vietnam Vets caused by Kerry's speeches in 1971. Kerry's rebuttals are about as nuanced as Lawrence O'Donnell's:
"It's a pack of f—-ing lies, what they're saying about me," he fairly shouted over the phone.
