Guilty (17 page)

Would President Obama listen respectfully as Ahmadinejad says he plans to build nuclear weapons? Would he say he'll get back to Ahmadinejad on removing all U.S. troops from the region? Would he nod his head as Ahmadinejad demands the removal of the Jewish population from the Middle East? Perhaps in the spirit of compromise, would Obama agree to let Iran push only
half
of Israel into the sea? Obama: “As a result of my recent talks with President Ahmadinejad, some see the state of Israel as being half empty. I prefer to see it as half full.” Obama said he was prepared to have an open-ended chat with Ahmadinejad, so I guess everything would be on the table. Obama could return and tell Americans that he could no more repudiate Ahmadinejad than he could his own white grandmother.

I don't think Obama's wife Michelle made sneering remarks about “Whitey,” but I know for a fact that she said, “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country.” I believe he was born in this country, but I know his friends include racists, anti-Semites, and domestic terrorists, such as Jeremiah Wright, Louis Farrakhan, and Bill Ayers, respectively.

Still, the media wildly cheered Obama for fighting back against the Republican Attack Machine, the mendacity of which they illustrated by shouting the words: “Lee Atwater,” “Karl Rove,” “Willie Horton,” “the Swift Boat Veterans,” or any combination thereof. You never get details because the details don't help them. A front-page article in the
New York Times
in 2008 described the work of Floyd Brown, a conservative activist, as specializing in “malicious gossip”— without giving a single example.
⁵⁵

MSNBC's Chris Matthews somberly complimented Obama for doing “something John Kerry didn't do,” which was to “go after Swift Boats swiftly.”
⁵⁶
Praising Obama for his antismear website, Chrystia Freeland of the
Financial Times
said Obama had learned from “these Swift Boat episodes.” She observed that “recent political history is really helpful to Barack Obama. He and his campaign have seen what these sorts of stories, if not confronted right away, can do to a candidate.”
⁵⁷
On ABC's
Good Morning America,
the nonpartisan, totally objective George Stephanopoulos explained that Obama was “colored by the experience of the Michael Dukakis Democratic campaign in 1988, of John Kerry's campaign in 2004. In both of those cases, the Democratic candidates were attacked by unfair and untrue charges, but failed to respond and lost the election.”
⁵⁸

In mentioning the Dukakis campaign, Stephanopoulos was referring to the Willie Horton ad. “Willie Horton” becomes the leitmotif of the Democrats every presidential election year. The way they carry on, you would think Willie Horton belongs in a pantheon of American heroes along with Rosa Parks. It's getting to the point that liberals are going to start naming streets after Horton.

As I explained at length in my book
Godless,
the Willie Horton ads were fantastic. What happened was not, as National Public Radio said, that George H. W Bush “beat Michael Dukakis with the help of the racially charged Willie Horton ad that implied Governor Dukakis was soft on crime.”
⁵⁹
It was that Dukakis was so ridiculously soft on crime that as Massachusetts governor he was furloughing first-degree murderers, one of whom was Willie Horton. The media would have you believe that Horton's only crime was being black. In fact, he was in prison for carving up a teenager at a gas station and then stuffing his body into a garbage can. And that wasn't Horton's first offense. He had already been convicted—and released—for attempted murder in South Carolina. While on his Dukakis-granted furlough, Horton raped and tortured a Maryland couple in their home for twelve hours. The Maryland couple flew to Boston to sit down with Dukakis and ask why he thought it was a good idea to furlough murderers. Dukakis refused to meet with them. Instead, he issued a statement reaffirming his strong
support for furloughing murderers. So Dukakis did not lose the 1988 election because “he did not adequately respond to Republican attacks,” as NPR put it.
⁶⁰
He lost because of an idiotic furlough program he supported, protected, and staunchly defended.

I'll stop pointing out the facts about Willie Horton as soon as liberals stop lying about the ads. I'm only beginning to point out the facts about liberals' other evidence of Republican dirty tricks, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

Kerry did not lose the 2004 election because he “failed to respond” to “unfair and untrue charges” of the Swift Boat Veterans. Although “swift-boating” has become a synonym for a tactic used by lying scoundrels,
⁶¹
it actually referred to a group of highly decorated Vietnam veterans who came forward to question the qualifications of one of their own, John Kerry.

If the media insist on using the phrase “swift-boated,” they could at least use it properly. Rush Limbaugh cannot swift-boat Obama. Sean Hannity cannot swift-boat Obama. Karl Rove cannot swift-boat Obama. No matter what they do or say, they can never swift-boat him. They never met the man. But if a few hundred people, both Republicans and Democrats, who have been in some sort of community with Obama came forward and called him a liar, then and only then could he consider himself “swift-boated.” If, for example, hundreds of Obama's fellow congregants from the Trinity United Church came forward and said Obama was lying about events at his church, that would be swift-boating.

Ironically, even if it were true that the Swift Boat Veterans were lying—and it isn't—it undercut Kerry's main selling point anyway. Kerry's message was
I'm a veteran! Don't talk to me about war and peace!
An ad by two hundred Swift Boat Veterans who served with Kerry saying that he was unfit to be commander in chief completely destroyed Kerry's presumptive credibility as a veteran, whether you believed the two hundred Swift Boat Veterans or not. Either they were telling the truth, and Kerry wasn't fit to be dogcatcher, or they were not telling the truth, in which case military service isn't much of a trump card. Yes, Kerry had served in Vietnam. But so had they.

In May 2004, a group of Swift Boat Veterans held a press conference
in front of an old photo of a bunch of Swift Boat officers, including Kerry, that the Kerry campaign was using to tout his military experience. One by one, the officers stood up, seventeen in all, pointed to their own faces in the campaign photo, and announced that they believed Kerry unfit to be commander in chief. Only one officer in the photo being used by the Kerry campaign supported Kerry for president. The bestselling book by John O'Neill, aptly titled
Unfit for Command,
included five dozen eyewitness accounts of Kerry's service in Vietnam.

Fewer than 10 percent of all Swift Boat Veterans contacted refused to sign a letter saying Kerry was not fit to be president. At the beginning of the campaign, O'Neill had signed up 190 Swiftees to say Kerry was unfit for command. By Election Day, he had 294 in all. Only 14 Swift Boat Veterans sided with Kerry, while 294 sided with O'Neill. Let's see, would it be more difficult to get 14 people to tell the same lie or to get 294 people to tell the same lie? I defer to any registered Democrat on this question.

Also, contrary to the incessantly repeated claim that Kerry had “failed to respond”
⁶²
to the Swift Boat Veterans, Kerry was constantly responding. He responded by issuing retractions—about a retraction a day once the Swift Boat Veterans started talking. Kerry had to backpedal on the circumstances surrounding his first Purple Heart for action on December 2, 1968. On Kerry's website, he said it was his “first intense combat.” The Swift Boat Veterans said they came under no enemy fire at all that day and that Kerry's injury was a ricochet from a mortar round that Kerry had fired himself. (This rules out the Purple Heart, but did qualify him for another “Boy, is my face red” citation.)

Indeed, among the eyewitnesses who said Kerry came under no enemy fire on December 2, 1968, was John Kerry himself. According to Douglas Brinkley's book
Tour of Duty,
Kerry wrote in his diary nine days later, on December 11, 1968, “We hadn't been shot at yet.” His campaign tried to figure out how to claim that Kerry couldn't have known this because he wasn't even on his own boat at the time, but then settled on the Clintonian technique of denying the meaning of the word “we.” A Kerry campaign official explained that when Kerry said “we hadn't been shot at yet,” he meant that he had been shot at but
others on his boat hadn't been. “We”: another two-letter word successfully parsed by a Democrat! Eventually, Kerry campaign official John Hurley admitted that it was “possible” that Kerry's first Purple Heart came from a self-inflicted wound. It was because of that self-inflicted wound that Kerry ended up with three Purple Hearts allowing him to come home from Vietnam after a mere three and a half months.

Most bizarrely, Kerry was caught telling a big, dirty, stinky lie about being in Cambodia on Christmas Eve, 1968. Over the years, he talked about his alleged 1968 mission to Cambodia repeatedly— in a letter to the
Boston Globe,
in various media interviews, and in eight speeches on the Senate floor.
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It was a memory that was “seared— seared—in me,” as he said in the Senate in 1986. “I remember Christmas of 1968,” Kerry reminisced, “sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia. I remember what it was like to be shot at by Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge and Cambodians, and have the president of the United States telling the American people that I was not there; the troops were not in Cambodia.”

No one, not one person, backed him on that claim. So eventually Kerry was forced to retract this one, too.
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What kind of adult tells a lie like that? (Answer: The kind who carries a home-movie camera to war in order to reenact combat scenes and tape fake interviews with himself.)

Kerry had long maintained that he did not attend the 1971 meeting of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) in Kansas City, Missouri, where the assassination of U.S. senators was discussed. Kerry campaign spokesman David Wade said, “Kerry was not at the Kansas City meeting.” Later, FBI files showed that Kerry was at the meeting. So Kerry had to take back that claim, too. As the
Washington Post
reported on August 28, “Told about the FBI records earlier this year, Kerry said through a spokesman that he now accepted he must have been in Kansas City for the November meeting while continuing to insist that he had ‘no personal recollection' of the contentious debate. Many people associated with VVAW find this difficult to believe.”
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By contrast, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth weren't forced to retract any part of their story. There's a reason it was Kerry—and not the Swift Boat Veterans—who told the
Washington Post,
“I wish they had a delete button on LexisNexis.”
⁶⁶

With all the talk about the dastardly Swift Boat Veterans, one is left to wonder how precisely they were able to spread their wild calumnies against John Kerry. The Swift Boat Veterans were given no time with Tim Russert, no
Today
show appearances, no fawning
New York Times
editorials or
Vanity Fair
hagiographies. The only way they could have gotten less attention would have been to be interviewed on Air America Radio.

When the
New York Times
could no longer ignore the Swiftees, it had to manufacture a special typewriter key for the Swift Boat Veterans so that any story mentioning them would read: “the unsubstantiated charges of the Swift Boat Veterans.” As with many words liberals create new meanings for—“everyone,” “constitutional,” “is,” “we”—the
Times
was apparently using the word “unsubstantiated” to mean “tested repeatedly and proved true.” At least sixteen times, the newspaper described the Swiftees' charges as “unsubstantiated.” By contrast, not once did the
Times
describe the laughably unsubstantiated charge that Bush went AWOL from his National Guard service as “unsubstantiated” out of eighteen mentions of that allegation.

The
Times
got so desperate that it called on the Federal Election Commission to shut down the ads of the Swift Boat Veterans, bitterly remonstrating in an editorial that the Commission had “done nothing to rein in” the Swiftees' free speech.
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Similarly, the Democratic National Committee threatened to sue TV stations that ran the Swift Boat Veterans' paid ads. When Democrats are this terrified of a book, it's not because they have a good response. The problem wasn't Kerry's want of alacrity in responding, it was that he didn't have an answer.

Far from not responding, Kerry and the media wing of his campaign responded to the Swift Boat Veterans aggressively and repeatedly. Apart from Fox News and the
Navy Times,
stories about the Swift Boat Veterans generally had titles like these: