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The Weblog at The View from the Core - Tuesday, August 24, 2004
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Purple... Bronze... and Now Silver All Kerry's colors have... interesting... hues. Henry Mark Holzer and Erika Holzer take a look at unusual aspects of Kerry's Silver Star: Lane Core Jr. CIW P Tue. 08/24/04 08:08:00 PM |
Sobrino Looks at O'Neill & Corsi Catholic Analysis has a two-part review of Unfit for Command:
Lane Core Jr. CIW P Tue. 08/24/04 07:44:56 PM |
Ambushed! Well, that's what it looks like to me. Last Wednesday, the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star-Tribune ran a column by two of the Power Line bloggers; it was, as far as I know, the first major, detailed account in a mainstream-media publication of John Kerry's 25-Year-Long "Christmas in Cambodia" Lie. Frankly, I wondered why the Strib wanted to run that. We needed to wait only until Sunday to find out: one of Strib's editors responded with a hatchet-job the likes of which I've seldom seen. First, the bloggers. + + + + + On March 27, 1986, John Kerry took the floor of the U.S. Senate and delivered a dramatic oration indicting the foreign policy of the Reagan administration. As is his habit, Kerry drew on his Vietnam experience in explaining his opposition to the policy. "I remember Christmas of 1968, sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia. I remember what it was like to be shot at by Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge and Cambodians, and having the president of the United States telling the American people that I was not there." To emphasize the importance of this incident to his subsequent political development, Kerry asserted: "I have that memory which is seared seared in me, that says to me, before we send another generation into harm's way we have a responsibility in the U.S. Senate to go the last step, to make the best effort possible to avoid that kind of conflict." The story of his 1968 Christmas in Cambodia is one that Kerry has told on many occasions over the years. He invoked the story in 1979 in the course of his review of the movie "Apocalypse Now" for the Boston Herald. Most recently, Kerry told the story with remarkable embellishments involving a CIA man who gave him his favorite hat last year on separate occasions to reporters Laura Blumenfeld of the Washington Post and Michael Kranish of the Boston Globe. Certain elements of Kerry's Christmas in Cambodia story were incredible on their face. Kerry attributed responsibility for his illegal 1968 mission to Richard Nixon, despite the fact that Lyndon Johnson was president at the time. The Khmer Rouge who allegedly shot at Kerry during his "secret" mission did not take the field until 1972. Moreover, there is no record that Swift boats the kind of boat under Kerry's command were ever used for secret missions in Cambodia. Their size and noise make them unlikely candidates for such missions. Indeed, the authorized biographer of Kerry's Vietnam service historian Douglas Brinkley omits from his book, "Tour of Duty," any mention of a covert cross-border mission to Cambodia during Kerry's service. Over the past few weeks, the Christmas in Cambodia tale, a keystone of John Kerry's Vietnam autobiography, has been revealed to be fraudulent. On Christmas 1968, Kerry was docked at Sa Dec, 50 miles from Cambodia, in an area from which the Cambodian border was inaccessible. Last week, after the falsity of Kerry's Christmas in Cambodia account became public, the Kerry campaign issued a statement "correcting" the story. According to the Kerry campaign, the mission referred to took place in January 1969, when Kerry "inadvertently or responsibly" crossed the border into Cambodia. However, three of Kerry's Swift boat crewmates have denied entering Cambodia at any time, and no one has corroborated Kerry's claim. The suggestion that Kerry may have "inadvertently" strayed into Cambodia leaving aside whether that was even possible constitutes a complete retreat from the point of Kerry's original story: that he lost his faith in government because the president lied about having sent American troops into Cambodia. And, of course, it contradicts his story about ferrying a CIA man to Cambodia. Given the attention lavished on President Bush's service in the Air National Guard earlier this year, we thought that newspapers such as the Washington Post and the New York Times would want to devote comparable attention to John Kerry's Christmas in Cambodia story. We also thought they would want to consider what the falsity of Kerry's story might have to tell us about the uses to which Kerry is putting his Vietnam service in the current presidential campaign. To date, however, we have been wrong. Neither the influential mainstream newspapers nor the broadcast television networks have reported the meltdown of Kerry's Christmas in Cambodia story. Only readers of Internet blogs such as ours have kept current on the exposure of Kerry's tall tale. Or on the Kerry campaign's lame efforts to resurrect a version of the story that contradicts what Kerry has said for the past 25 years, but allows Kerry to continue using his Vietnam experiences, real and imagined, for his own political purposes. Whatever the reason and we have our suspicions when it comes to scrutiny of Sen. Kerry's veracity, the mainstream media are saluting, but they are decidedly not reporting for duty. John H. Hinderaker and Scott W. Johnson are Minneapolis attorneys and proprietors of the Web log "Power Line" (www.powerlineblog.com), one of 13 Web sites given credentials to cover the Republican convention in New York later this month. + + + + + Now, the editorial. + + + + + John H. Hinderaker and Scott W. Johnson had a jolly good time in a Wednesday commentary "fact-checking" Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry's statements about operating his Swift boat in Cambodian waters. When the checkers are acting as surrogate smear artists for the Bush campaign, however, it is necessary to fact-check them as well. What you'll find doesn't reflect well on Hinderaker and Johnson. The fraudulence of what they have written is easy to verify, for those with a mind to look and a desire to know the truth. They began by quoting a 1986 Senate floor speech in which Kerry said, "I remember Christmas of 1968, sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia. I remember what it was like to be shot at by Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge and Cambodians, and having the president of the United States telling the American people I was not there." H & J claim: "Kerry attributed responsibility for his illegal 1968 mission to Richard Nixon, despite the fact that Lyndon Johnson was president at the time." Fact: Indeed, at Christmas 1968, Nixon had been elected but wouldn't take office until January. The discrepancy is understandable, even the more after Kerry corrected the record to say he'd been in error; his runs into Cambodia came in early 1969. H & J have an accurate but niggling criticism Kerry was off by a month. H & J claim: Kerry biographer Douglas Brinkley omitted a mention of the Cambodian runs from his account of Kerry's life. The implication is, of course, they never happened. Fact: Brinkley, who had access to all of Kerry's journals, told the London Telegraph that, indeed, Kerry was wrong about Christmas 1968. But, Brinkley added, "Kerry went into Cambodian waters three or four times in January and February 1969 on clandestine missions. He had a run dropping off U.S. Seals, Green Berets and CIA guys." Brinkley said, "He was a ferry master, a drop-off guy, but it was dangerous as hell. Kerry carries a hat he was given by one CIA operative. In a part of his journals which I didn't use he writes about discussions with CIA guys he was dropping off." H & J claim: "The Khmer Rouge who allegedly shot at Kerry during his 'secret' mission did not take the field until 1972." Fact: The Khmer Rouge, military wing of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, began its armed combat against the government of Prince Norhodom Sihanouk in 1967, five years earlier than H & J claim. Such a sweet touch, too, by H & J, that use of "allegedly." H & J make much of the illegal nature of such trips into Cambodia to further imply they likely didn't happen. They also use loaded words like "embellishment" and snidely employ quotation marks to imply that Kerry made up the story. Aside from Brinkley's testimony, Kerry's story seems quite plausible to me, for a number of reasons. First, there was no established border. Both Vietnam and Cambodia claimed parts of the Mekong River delta, a watery area of rivers, tributaries and canals. It was quite easy to slip across, especially by boat (whether inadvertently or with a purpose perhaps both). Indeed, at the hands of a careless Air America pilot, I flew numerous miles, illegally, into a more northern area of Cambodia in 1971, and nothing was said. My commander, acting on an American POW sighting from one of the indigenous agents I oversaw, got an Air Force forward air control pilot to take him on a reconnaissance flight over the area, for which he received only a mild rebuke. That report generated a cross-border raid by a team from MACV-SOG a secret group drawn from every service for clandestine operations. They sought, unsuccessfully, to locate the POWS. Such clandestine trips by military and intelligence teams were common; they were the reason MACV-SOG existed. In 1968-69, their main goal in the Mekong probably involved stopping infiltration from Cambodia. H & J claim: Passage by Swift boats into Cambodia through the Mekong Delta from their base at Sa Dec was impossible. Fact: Clearly they have no knowledge of the delta. The Swift boats were stationed at Sa Dec precisely because of easy access to the Mekong River complex and the approaches to Cambodia. It should not be necessary to plow through all this minute detail about something that happened 35 years ago, wondering whether Kerry remembers it all with precise accuracy. But we must, because the Republican smear machine insists we do. Along with former and current Republican elected officials, Hinderaker and Johnson are serving as part of the effort to smear John Kerry, just as Republicans smeared Sen. John McCain in 2000, then-Sen. Max Cleland in 2002, and critics Richard Clarke and Joe Wilson in 2004. This serves two purposes: to sow doubts in voters' minds about Kerry and to divert attention from the serious issues that really should concern voters: health care costs, the anemic state of the American economy, the mess that is Iraq and the continuing, relentless Republican effort to shift the burden of paying for the federal government from America's wealthy to its middle class. As the old saying goes, "Politics ain't beanbag," but this Republican crew, including Hinderaker and Johnson, take the art of slime-throwing to levels of immorality seldom seen. Voters need to awaken to this tactic, and realize how much contempt it shows for the workings of democracy and for the intelligence they bring to the task of choosing this nation's leaders. Jim Boyd is at boyd@startribune.com. + + + + + The Blog from the Core asserts Fair Use for non-commercial, non-profit educational purposes. The bloggers have been following up at Power Line: The empire strikes back, The Challenge Is Issued, and A Further Response to Jim Boyd. [Follow-up: Ambushed! Redux.] Lane Core Jr. CIW P Tue. 08/24/04 05:40:39 PM |
"On a Bumblebee" One of my poems has a birthday today.
On a Bumblebee Lane Core Jr. CIW P Tue. 08/24/04 08:04:57 AM |
What We Can Do For Terri II Lane Core Jr. CIW P Tue. 08/24/04 07:46:53 AM |
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