As I gather the standard of evidence for charges against the military service of your political opponents is essentially non-existant, let’s review Dear Leader’s service record.
A) As Atrios notes, all his recent troubles began when he lied about his military service in his autobiography. He claimed that he served out his term as a pilot in the Texas Air National Guard (TANG). This is a lie. He received a transfer to Alabama, at some point after April 1972, after which point the record becomes murky.
B) The story of his “service” after April 1972 is summarized here by Walter V. Robinson of The Boston Globe:
Although he was trained as a fighter pilot, Bush ceased flying in April 1972, little more than two years after he finished flight school and two years before his six-year enlistment was to end, when he was allowed to transfer to an Alabama Air Guard unit. The records contain no evidence that Bush performed any military duty in Alabama. His Alabama unit commander, in an interview, said Bush never appeared for duty. In August 1972, Bush was suspended from flight status for failing to take his annual flight physical.
In May 1973, Bush’s two superior officers in Houston wrote that they could not perform his annual evaluation, because he had “not been observed at this unit” during the preceding 12 months. The two officers, one of them a friend of Bush and both now dead, wrote that they believed Bush had been fulfilling his commitment at the Alabama unit.
There’s more at the link, but this does put it quite starkly.
Just keep in mind that the swift boat smear is being done to obscure the fact that our great wartime leader couldn’t even fulfill his pathetic little obligation to guard the Alamo during the Vietnam war, which is emblematic of his terrible handling of the war in Iraq and the threat of Islamic fundamentalism. Character will out. That’s all it is. And that all of these so-called patriots are willing to smear a man who volunteered and actually served in order to cover for this sad little fellow who never spent a minute outside the cozy comfort of his daddy’s protection says a lot more about them than it does about Kerry.
There were many honorable ways to behave during the Vietnam era. There were those who believed in the war and volunteered to fight it. There were those who were drafted and went as a matter of duty. There were those who fought the war, came to believe it was wrong and came back to change the policy. And there were those who believed it was wrong and refused to participate. All of those people stood up for what they believed in and did their duty as they saw it.
There was one group,however, who supported the war but didn’t stand up for their beliefs — refusing to take the heat that being a citizen, particularly a young man, in those days required. They played the system. Many of them “had other priorities” using every possible excuse, all the while vociferously backing the war effort — as long as someone else fought it. And, the worst of this group were the privileged who supported the war but merely pretended to fight it by having their connections pull strings to get them into safe stateside duty that they could later claim amounted to “service.” They would have pictures of themselves looking handsome in their uniforms. And they could swagger around with their buddies and drop casual hints for the rest of their lives about their days in the military. But even those phonies at least actually completed the minimal requirements to claim such affiliation.
It is very rare to find someone who finagled their way into the guard ahead of people who’d been waiting longer, had the government spend huge sums of money training him to be a pilot, quit flying less than two years later of his own accord and then dropped out of sight many months before his duty was fulfilled. It’s even rarer to find someone like this declared a fine figure of a man who served his country well — particularly when there are so many who actually did.
It is a very sad thing to see military men stoop to the level of smearing a combat veteran in a desperate bid to get a fey little richboy legitimately elected. I never thought I’d see the day they would debase their own service and that of all their comrades in order to play cheap partisan politics on behalf of such a man. As one who grew up in a military family, it makes me sick to see it.
You know, I’ll be interested to read the swiftboat liars book because from what I read here the statements from all these guys don’t say much of anything about Kerry’s war record. When they say he’s “unfit” it’s because they are pissed about his anti-war activities.
This smear is slick. All these right wing vets get filmed saying “he’s unfit to be commander in chief” without providing any details. They don’t say specifically why, but you are left with the clear impression that 200+ Vietnam vets think Kerry’s lying about his record at best and that he’s a coward at worst. In reality, they just hate his politics. But, it won’t make any difference, because you have Rush and Sean and John O’Neill and Ted Sampley all the rest filling in the blanks and none of these guys are rushing to elaborate on what they are really talking about. (Lots of honor and integrity in this crowd.)
I think the way to frame this issue is that these men are smearing the United States Military by saying that all those glowing reports and medal recommendations were lies. Is Kerry the only one about whom they believe all these officers lied or were there others who recieved medals and commendations who didn’t deserve them? Do they think this kind of thing is this still going on today? It may force some of these men to come out and admit what they are really saying.
They obviously hate Kerry’s guts with a passion, and probably hate Democrats with a passion too. But, I’m not sure they’ll hold up if they’re accused of denigrating the military, which is what they actually are doing. I think, if pressed, they may want to explain that when they say he’s “unfit” they are talking about Kerry’s antiwar activity, not his combat experience.
And, that’s a very old argument that means absolutely nothing. Which is why they’ve decided to smear instead of taking Kerry on for what they really hate him for.
The redoubtable Hesiod, in the comments below, wonders why nobody has unearthed the story of George H. W. Bush Sr’s 1988 brush with controversy over his navy heroics in WWII. Apparently, there were some fellow aviators — not on his own plane mind you (ahem) — who claimed that he bailed prematurely on two of his comrades on the Barbara II and got them killed.
I only bring this up because it’s interesting that even though a man came forward to make these charges in an August 12, 1988 NY Post story by Allan Wolper and Al Ellenberg, called “The Day Bush Bailed Out,” the Democrats didn’t then use it as a line of attack to destroy Bush Sr’s reputation. In fact, the story died down quite quickly. Had they chosen to smear him, there was enough mud around to make it ugly. They didn’t.
And, it’s not as if Bush Sr. didn’t run on his war record. In fact, CNN is currently helping his son run on it too. In every campaign it was front and center. But, in all the years of running against George Bush our side never stooped to questioning his bravery or integrity in the Big One.
But somebody did. His name is Ted Sampley, Godfather of the Swift Boat Liars. If you’d like to read all about Bush Sr’s alleged cowardice in WWII, here it is, from the chief veteran smear artist himself. Seems he has problems with a lot of war heroes.
I have often said that Junior is a bad son. I can’t think of anything worse than standing with the scum who smeared your own father’s war record. Unless you hate your father, which it seems he does.
It’s going to take a Shakespeare to do justice to this sick little story.
One the one hand you have the fellow who sits and read childrens books when he’s told that the country is under attack and on the other you have the fellow who rushes in to save lives over and over again.
Former U.S. Sen. Chic Hecht of Nevada is a staunch Republican, but he thanks his lucky stars for Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts.
On July 12, 1988, Hecht was attending a weekly Republican luncheon when a piece of apple lodged firmly in his throat.
Hecht stumbled out of the room, thinking he might vomit but not wanting to do it in front of his colleagues. Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., thumped his back, but Hecht quickly passed out in the hallway.
Just then, Kerry stepped off an elevator, rushed to Hecht’s side and gave him the Heimlich maneuver — four times.
The lifesaving incident made international news, and Dr. Henry Heimlich, who invented the maneuver in 1974, called Hecht to say that had Kerry intervened just 30 seconds later Hecht might have been in a vegetative state for life.
“This man gave me my life,” the 75-year-old Hecht said Thursday.
Hecht said he was amazed that Kerry acted so quickly — some people were assuming that he was having a heart attack.
“He knew exactly what to do,” he said. “But a lot of people know what to do. They just don’t size up the situation immediately.”
I hadn’t heard about this one and I don’t think most other people have either.
Let’s just say some people are a little bit more quick and decisive under pressure than others.
Ask yourself which person you’d rather have running the country in dangerous times.
I don’t mean for this to become McCain week here on Hullabaloo, but I can’t let this pass. It’s just that it’s always a sad day to find that people on my own side can be just as fucked up and full of shit as the Republicans. Here we have a lefty who is calling McCain a coward in Vietnam:
Well…Unfortunately, McCain is just one more bad example in the pantheon of power-hungry white guys who are leading the country right now. Follow with me.
[…]
Let’s start with his tenure as a prisoner of war. McCain was a naval fighter pilot during the Vietnam conflict, at the same time that his father was in charge of all American forces in Europe. When JM was shot down in 1967, he was captured, enduring some fairly bad injuries at the time of capture. However, almost immediately following his imprisonment, McCain started talking to his captors in exchange for medical treatment. BY HIS OWN ADMISSION (link) in an article he wrote for US News and World Report, McCain talked not only to North Vietnamese interrogators, but also to European and Asian reporters about bombings of civilian targets, combat air operations, and his own status within the military.
There’s no doubt that the Vietnamese who held JM knew of his high-value status, and used him as a public-relations tool, but that doesn’t relieve JM from his obligations as a soldier. The military Code of Conduct bars prisoners of war from using either their status or military knowledge to benefit from privileges or for reduced discomfort. In fact, the CoC makes it perfectly clear that you should never allow yourself to become a POW, and if it happens anyway, you are never allowed to cooperate with the enemy. Now, understanding that all human beings do have a breaking point at which they will no longer be able to control themselves, it would be understandable to see someone breaking down and babbling nonsense in order to get one’s captors to stop a torture session. But McCain admitted that it took only FOUR DAYS for him to trade information for medical care. As the Virgin Mary said, ‘Come again?’
The link he refers to above is to one of Ted Sampley’s propaganda pieces. In fact, McCain’s own words are here and they’re not quite what old Ted said they were.
They beat McCain senseless on the floor of a cell for those four days, denying him care for his crushed and infected leg and arm. When he realized he was going to die without medical care he said he’d talk. They said never mind, thinking he was a goner. It was only when they found out that he was an admiral’s son that they got him some medical care.
As for whether anyone is “allowed” to cooperate with the enemy, I’ll just let the POW’s speak for themselves on this:
BAUGH: You’re always sitting either on the floor or on a stool or concrete block or something low. The interrogator is always behind a table that’s covered with cloth of some kind, white or blue or something. And he sits above you and he’s always looking down at you asking you questions and they want to know what the targets are for tomorrow, next week, next month. You don’t know. You really don’t know. But he doesn’t — he’s going to have to have an answer of some kind. Now the back of the room comes the — the torture. And he’s a — he’s a big guy that knows what he’s doing. And he starts locking your elbows up with ropes and tying your wrists together and bending you.
FER: They tied me in knots uh, with this nylon strap cutting off the circulation to my arms and my wrists and the pain is getting very great. And so uh, I gave out a great big holler and I said okay, okay, okay. I’ll tell you what you want to know. I says you know, you’ve been trained, you’ve been raised to be a — a real — a tough resister. This is embarrassing. You have given in John Fer, you have given in in a very short period of time. Now it wasn’t that bad uh, and so when he said what’s your unit again, I said uh, I can’t tell you that. Well he got very upset and he said something very sternly to this guy and he really tied me up this time and really cinched it down tight uh, when the pain got so great this time, they didn’t come back right away.
BAUGH: There’s a point where you’ve completely had it. Where you lose control of your bowels, you throw up, uh, you’ll sell your mother down the river uh, in a heart beat. And there’s a point everybody reaches that you decide I’ve had it. I’ve got to do something to get out of this program. And like me like most everybody we started telling them stories. We made up targets. I had em bombing footbridges in China over creeks which I knew weren’t real targets.
MCMANUS: The beatings were going to occur for a specified period of time almost regardless of what happened. Again, it was to establish uh, the rules of the game. They were in control. That they were the masters. Uh, uh, and — and you were subservient to them and you’d better be careful.
BURROUGHS: They wanted propaganda. They wanted us to denounce our leaders. They wanted us to denounce capitalism. They wanted us to praise Ho Chi Minh. They wanted us to praise the communist initiative. They would put the standard communist glowing terms on every little thing that happened.
MCMANUS: They did a lot of beatings but beatings are easy. Uh, the — the body responds to a beating very well you know, for that point where your body can’t take it anymore, it just shuts down and you go unconscious. So I mean there’s very little a person truthfully can do to you by beating you. Uh, but the — the ropes were — they were scary because they you know, you’d been put in a position whereby if you did something, you’d choke yourself.
MCGRATH: I was in terrible, terrible pain. They were using the rope trick. The Vietnamese — we called it the Vietnamese rope trick and that was to take the arms behind your back, tie your hands together, tie them up real tight and then rotate your arms behind and over your shoulder until your shoulders dislocate. Well this one is already broken and dislocated so that was easy. And I remember this one starting over the top and I can remember the cracking and breaking and my elbow also dislocated. I was in terrible pain. Trying to scream. Wishing I could die. I finally said I can’t live. I can’t live another day. And no — no food, no water, no sleep uh, twenty four hours a day of this and I started talking. And I broke what we call breaking, I broke past name, rank, serial number.
RISNER: Some guys had been hurt, they’d been tortured. They were scared. Now think of this for a moment. Although we had pretty much the cream of the crop as pilots, they had to be highly educated and highly motivated to get there. Now how do you train? Well still you’ve got — you got uh, a variation in humanity. One guy told me, he said I can’t even stand unpleasantness let alone being tortured. He said in the court, when the interrogator pounds the desk he said it just shrivels me up inside. What if you have a man that’s claustrophobic and they put him in a black cell. He’s going to lose it. He’s going to go crazy probably.
DENTON: I put out the word Roll back, bounce back. That was the first time that was initiated. It was very important to last us the rest of the time. You could be tortured to give something, but then you don’t just lie back and continue to give them things as they just gradually exploit you. You stop and don’t give them anything, you make them torture you again and again and give them as little as you can the next time. In other words, they never advance their indoctrination of you to the object they wanted was you become a slave without torture to do anything they want to help their cause.
STUTZ: I really thought before I was shot down and when I was first shot down that I was the toughest fighter pilot in the world. That I was John Wayne uh, Superman all of them rolled up into one and by God, they couldn’t break me. I was one tough son of a gun. Uh, I found out real fast how weak I was. Uh, pain may cleanse but by God, it also hurts. And uh, and I’m telling you, when your shoulders rotate in the sockets and you’re hanging there and — and you cry and you — you bleed and you pray and you scream and when you scream, all they do is pick up a dirty rag and stick it in your mouth so they don’t have to listen to you, and the thing that affects you, at least me, affected me the most was, God, I don’t want to die here and nobody even know it.
The Vietnamese knew that John McCain’s father was an admiral and they were willing to let him go early as a PR stunt. He declined and ended up spending more than five years in that hellhole. Today he cannot raise his arms above his head because his shoulders were dislocated so many times. And unless you consider “material comfort” to mean that the torture stopped for a little while then McCain never got any material comfort and neither did anyone else. Read this transcript if you want to know what hell really is.
Goddamn this makes me mad. You can hate John McCain all you want for being a right wing asshole, but it is insulting to humankind to denigrate the physical and psychological courage those guys showed under pressure we can’t even imagine. Our condemnation of the torture at Abu Ghraib or Gitmo is righteous and true because we can see ourselves in that horrible situation and have empathy for it. Yes, even terrorists and Republicans feel pain.
NAJAF, Iraq, Aug. 10 — Bats flapped out of crypts, startling soldiers creeping through the cemetery with guns up. Graves opened beneath their combat boots. And an old enemy displayed a new professionalism, darting in clearly practiced moves between tombstone and mausoleum to stalk the Americans from above ground and below.
In the battle to control one of the world’s largest graveyards, U.S. Marines and soldiers say they are coping with a lot, including lingering regret. The vast cemetery in Najaf is sacred to Shiite Muslims, perhaps 2 million of whom lie buried in miles of desert adjoining the shrine of Imam Ali, son-in-law of the prophet Muhammad.
Soldiers involved in the fighting described how many of the most recent graves are marked by photos, which crumble when U.S. forces shell the cemetery walls to reach the militiamen hiding within.
‘Wives, daughters, husbands,’ said Sgt. Hector Guzman, 28, of the 1st Cavalry Division’s 5th Regiment. ‘You just know you’re destroying that tomb.’
The Houston native shook his head. ‘It doesn’t feel right sometimes.”
“We feel bad that we’re destroying, that we’re desecrating graves and such,” added Staff Sgt. Thomas Gentry, 29, of Altoona, Pa. “That’s not what we want to do.”
What the reinforced U.S. force in southern Iraq wants to do, commanders say, is destroy the Mahdi Army, the militia loyal to Moqtada Sadr, the militant Shiite cleric. The militia has bedeviled the U.S.-led occupation force in Iraq since October, when its largely impoverished, disaffected young gunmen first ambushed a U.S. patrol in a Baghdad slum. A far larger, sustained uprising in April and May undid much of the occupation’s effort to establish security in Shiite-populated central and southern Iraq.
The current engagement, which began Thursday with another ambush, is billed by all sides as the final showdown.
Sadr this week brushed aside overtures from Iraq’s interim government and vowed to fight to his last drop of blood. Iraqi officials, who consult closely with the U.S. commanders of the 160,000 foreign troops in Iraq, said the door was closed on negotiations.
[…]
Avoiding damage to the shrine — and the outcry that surely would follow from the world’s Muslims — is a U.S. objective so well known that the gold-domed mosque has become a refuge and staging ground for the guerrillas, U.S. officers said.
“There’s nothing good that can come of it,” said an Army operations officer, laying out the possible outcome of any strike on the mosque. “We win, we lose. We lose, we lose.”
The cemetery was deemed less sacrosanct, however. Marines first followed militia fighters into it on Thursday morning after being ambushed while moving to reinforce the main Iraqi police station in Najaf, which had come under siege by several hundred militiamen.
The battle for the graveyard went on for 36 hours. In the end, the Marines counted four of their own dead and more than 300 militiamen. But veterans of the battle said the lopsided casualty count — disputed by Sadr’s officials — did no justice to the weirdness of fighting on a sweeping landscape that venerates death.
NAJAF, Aug. 10 — Solemn-faced U.S. Marines and soldiers prepared for what was expected to be a decisive battle for the holiest city in Iraq, but as darkness fell Wednesday an armored column preparing to venture deep into Najaf turned away from the main gate as the U.S. commander announced a delay.
“Preparations to do the offensive are taking longer than originally anticipated,” said Maj. David Holahan, executive officer of the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit in Najaf. “We never said when we would do it.”
Commanders were awaiting final approval from Iraq’s political leaders — notably the interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi — for a combat operation aimed at clearing militia fighters from the city of 600,000.
As discussions continued, the supreme leader of neighboring Iran warned that American combat operations in Najaf constitute “one of the darkest crimes of humanity.”
“The United States is slaughtering the people of one of the holiest Islamic cities and the Muslim world and the Iraqi nation will not stand by,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in an address broadcast on Iranian state television, according to the official government news agency.
Najaf is home to the shrine of Imam Ali, which the militias have turned into a firing base off limits to U.S. forces. The site holds the remains of the most revered figure to Shiite Muslims, who constitute a majority in both Iraq and Iran, a theocracy where Khamenei holds ultimate power.
“These crimes are a dark blemish which will never be wiped from the face of America. They commit these crimes and shamelessly talk of democracy,” the ayatollah said. “Shame has no place in their vocabulary.”
The Iranian leader spoke as U.S. Marines and soldiers busied themselves cleaning weapons, refitting equipment and loading ammunition, food and — most important in the extreme desert heat — water and ice into the armored vehicles that could soon carry them to a decisive final battle with the militia holding Iraq’s holiest city.
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. This has got to rank up there with the most absurd of absurd wars that have ever been fought. More and more this looks like another War of Jenkins Ear.
Can someone explain to me why this story continues to get very little play? I don’t get it. The administration blew the cover of an al Qaeda mole for political purposes and it just goes nowhere.
Aside from the usual “mediawhore, mediawhore” explanation, does anyone have any serious ideas as to why this is? This strikes me as curious even for our benighted press corp. It’s a hell of a story and one which I would think even the infotainment crew would be unable to resist. Is there something more to this that isn’t readily apparent?
Lord Saletan runs a regular series condemning Kerry for his “caveats and curliques” and then turns around and blasts him for not explaining stem cell research in scientific detail when he’s on the stump. You see, Kerry is much too verbose when he isn’t and much too simplistic when he is and it’s all just so very unseemly.
Apparently his lordship just remembered the culture war and is appalled that the Democrats are fighting back with an issue on which most of the country agrees. Republicans can use terms like “the culture of life” and “partial birth” abortion as a club but if Kerry uses the stem cell issue as a proxy for the efficacy of science in ordinary people’s lives he’s a demagogue.
The fact is that this issue captures one of the main differences between the two parties and it’s one that has some real salience with the people. If there’s one thing that Americans have always believed in, it’s scientific progress. And there is an undercurrent of discontent out there that the right wing is imposing a religious agenda that is impeding that progress — specifically medical progress which is something in which we all have a personal stake.
I’m sorry that his lordship disapproves of using this issue to illustrate the medieval view toward science the fundamentalist right are forcing on the country, but that’s just tough. He’s the one who has made a fetish about Kerry’s overly complex rhetoric and now he complains when he hits a real emotional chord. His lordship is very difficult to please.
I just want to make a small point about John McCain. While I too find his support for Bush somewhat vomitous, I don’t see any reason to throw the baby out with the bath water.
John McCain is useful to us. He may be campaigning for Bush but he is much more of a pain in his ass than an asset. He represents a certain independent constituency that is just as likely to break our way as Bush’s, even with McCain’s tepid endorsement of Junior — particularly if the Bush people refuse to condemn things like that Farah article yesterday. I think we should wrap our arms around John McCain for the duration of this election even as he throws his arms around Bush. Sowing mistrust between the two camps is good politics and it accrues to our favor.
I’ve never been a big fan of McCain. He’s much too conservative for me and I’d never vote for him even though he has a certain fearless quality that is unique in the Republican party these days. But, he’s not the Republican Zell Miller. His supporting Bush doesn’t surprise me in the least. I’m sure he considers it his duty to his party. But, he’s enough of a thorn in Bush’s side — like calling for him to condemn the Scumbags ad — that he actually helps Kerry more than Bush. Hate him if you will, he’s a conservative Republican, after all — but he’s our conservative Republican.
Via Suburban Guerrilla I see that Lil’ Rodney Turncoat just doesn’t understand why so many Democrats are upset by what he did. Imagine that:
BATON ROUGE, La. – A party-switching Louisiana congressman said Tuesday he’s surprised and “hurt” by Democrats’ reactions to his defection to the Republicans — and vowed to return nearly $90,000 given to him by members of his old party.
“I’m somewhat puzzled as to how much hoopla this has created,” Rep. Rodney Alexander said in a conference call with reporters Tuesday.
[…]
Party leaders and officials have called him a “traitor,” “confused” and a “coward,” with the last charge stinging, Alexander said Tuesday.
“It hurt like the dickens,” the first-term congressman said. “I wasn’t a coward. That took a lot of courage to do that.”
His explanation of the switch has shifted somewhat.
On Friday, he declared: “I’m ashamed of some of the things the Democratic Party stands for.”
On Tuesday, he suggested a political calculation was at the root of his decision. He said he had become worried about “erosion” in his base of support, after another Democrat, a politically unknown black woman, qualified to run against him.
Alexander insisted no deals had been made with GOP leaders for making the change.
“I did not have contact with any of the leadership prior to making that decision on Friday,” he said. “I didn’t even tell my own children.”
I’m sure he hurts like the dickens allright. It takes a lot of courage to be Tom DeLay’s bitch.
One of his old colleagues didn’t seem terribly impressed with Lil Rod’s behavior:
House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer (MD) released the following statement today regarding Rodney Alexander’s last- minute party switch: “Rodney Alexander’s action of filing for re-election on Wednesday, August 4th as a Democrat and some 48 hours later, just before the deadline for filing was to close, filing for re-election as a Republican, was an act of perfidy.
“Perfidy is defined as ‘a deliberate breach of faith; a calculated violation of trust; treachery.’
“It was an act of a person without honor or integrity. In my 24 years in Congress, I cannot recall a more deceitful, more calculated, more treacherous violation of trust, which Congressman Alexander sought and which he received, than what he has done over the past few days and months.
[…]
“A man of honor, as many before him have done, would have changed his party affiliation well before the filing deadline. He would have had the courage to face a challenger and defend the failed policies promoted by his new party. He would have had the courage to explain why he has joined a party whose policies have left behind so many of the children and families he now represents and seeks to continue to represent.
“Congressman Alexander chose instead, through stealth and misrepresentation, to avoid the honorable course of action. He has let his constituents down. He has let his party down. He has let his colleagues down. But in the final analysis he has let his reputation and his conscience down even more.
Alexander probably would have won the seat anyway no matter what party he belonged to. He didn’t really need to cheat but I have little doubt that DeLay demanded it of him as a show of loyalty. In order to be one of the boys you have to prove how deep in the mud you’re willing to grovel. It’s more of that bullyboy hazing that Republicans love so much. It’s what they do instead of going to war.