Wednesday, March 16, 2005

Honorable vs. Dishonorable Conduct

The American Enterprise interviews the Swift Boat Veteran's John O'Neill:

O'NEILL: The one who conceived of this was Admiral Roy Hoffmann. He began contacting many Swift Boat people in January and February last year. At that time, I was in the hospital. I had given my wife a kidney for a transplant.

I became a part of it in early to mid March. I was motivated by several things, the first and most important being a genuine fear of what would happen to our country, our national security, and our armed forces if John Kerry became Commander in Chief.
The reason we had our press conference on May 4 was that we thought if we could come forward quickly, we might be able to prevent John Kerry from becoming the Democratic nominee and allow the Democratic Party to pick someone else, in which case we could all go home.

TAE: At the Swift Boat veterans' May 4 press conference you had an open letter calling Kerry unfit to be Commander in Chief. It was signed by virtually all of John Kerry's commanders in Vietnam. Yet the story fell flat. The media ignored it. How did your group react to the media blackout?

O'NEILL: We were shocked. We couldn't believe it. I haven't been involved in politics or media relations, and I thought the job of the media was primarily to report the facts. It was obvious to me that many hundreds of his former comrades coming forward to say that he lied about his record in Vietnam and that he was unfit to be President would be important information for Americans. I only then became aware of the bias of the media.

TAE: How do you explain the media's response?

O'NEILL: The establishment media was very pro-Kerry. They were opposed to any story that was critical of Kerry, and I believe that they were captured by their own bias. We met with one reporter around that time. We told a story to him relating to Kerry's service. He acknowledged it was true and terribly important. And he told us he would not print it because it would help George Bush. That's when we began to realize we had a real problem on our hands.

TAE: Is there anything other than pro-Kerry bias to account for the establishment media's attitude to the story?

O'NEILL: Perhaps a second factor is that there are very few veterans in the established media. It makes it very difficult for them to understand the story or to care about it. That's very different from the situation 40 or 50 years ago when most people had served in some fashion in the armed forces or had uncles or brothers who had.
(There is a lot more, and I recommend you read the rest).

Now, compare and contrast with these statements by John Kerry, reported by P.J.O'Rourke recently, as Kerry sets himself up to run in 2008:

"We learned," Kerry continued, "that the mainstream media, over the course of the last year, did a pretty good job of discerning. But there's a subculture and a sub-media that talks and keeps things going for entertainment purposes rather than for the flow of information. And that has a profound impact and undermines what we call the mainstream media of the country. And so the decision-making ability of the American electorate has been profoundly impacted as a consequence of that. The question is, what are we going to do about it?"

Translation: We the people are too stupid to see through the lies and deceit of the evil sub-media, even though the brave and capable REAL media discerned the truth and tried to tell us how wonderful John Kerry was.

New Sisyphus points out the following salient points in his critique of Kerry's incredible comments:

You may be surprised to hear that the MSM “did a pretty good job of discerning” over the last year, given that the New York Times, CBS and the BBC all had to fire lead personnel over the fact that they just damn well made stuff up out of whole cloth in service to an obviously partisan political agenda. But then, if you’re reading this, your part of a dangerous sub-culture, aren't you?

And what, Senator, are we going to do about these dangerous people that keep disagreeing with the MSM and have the nasty habit of not keeping their ill-informed, non-making-stuff-up mouths shut? Here we see the cold iron of the liberal’s tendency to want to shut their opponents up that lies behind the calm façade and the Birkenstocks.

Read both the O'Neill interview and the Kerry comments. Ask yourself which person--O'Neill or Kerry--calls for silencing free speech? Ask yourself, who wants to stop the flow of information? Ask yourself, who does not want to compete in a free market of ideas?

You watched the same campaign that I did in 2004. Did the Swift Boat Veteran's get a shot at defending their position in the mainstream media? Did John Kerry respond to their accusations? Has John Kerry to this day ever filled out the Form 180 for the complete release of all his Vietnam records, including his medical records (in spite of MULTIPLE promises that he would do so--even one recently on Meet the Press)?

Ask youself, why it was important that a document purporting to come from one person who commanded Lt.George Bush in the TANG (and who was conveniently deceased) during the Vietnam war was considered a "critical" news story; while the sworn affidavits of 274 living veterans, including ALL the superior officers of Lt.John Kerry, was not?

John Kerry thinks he is going to run for President in 2008. But I think the American public is on to his scam. As part of that dangerous "sub-culture" Kerry is so opposed to, I intend to frequently remind everyone of the con artist the Democrats nominated in 2004.

I am forever thankful this dishonorable, pitiful, self-obsessed human being did not become the President of the United States.

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