He said they said who cares?

The Campaign Finance reform was supposed to clean things up--but, IMO, it has made things worse. These 527s are all very shady, with their hazy connections.

But, if MoveOn is anti-GOP--we shouldn't pretend that doesn't translate to: pro-Democrat.

I imagine the RNC's private smile over the Swiftvets is no toothier than the DNC's toward MoveOn...

The core constituency of the Republican Party is white and male, with a leaning toward the military.

With his background, Kerry was going in and taking a core Republican constituency, white veterans.

If Kerry can take them away from Bush, it is obviously bad news for the GOP.

If Republicans cannot project an image of tough, hard, no-nonsense white male decision making, what the hell do they have left? Women lean against them, minorities detest them, (Cubans only make up 5% of the Hispanic vote)-if Kerry takes the white grizzled vet with the tatoo vote, the GOP might as well close up shop.

That's what it's about.

THE MILITARY RECORD

Officer From Another Swift Boat Breaks Silence and Defends Kerry

By JIM RUTENBERG

Published: August 22, 2004

Vietnam veteran who served with Senator John Kerry on a Swift boat mission broke a 35-year silence this weekend to support Mr. Kerry's version of events from one of their operations together and to chastise veterans critical of the senator as having "splashed doubt on all of us."

The veteran, William B. Rood, is now an editor at The Chicago Tribune, which ran on its Web site yesterday and in Sunday's paper a 1,750-word first-person article in which Mr. Rood recounted the mission. His account added to a growing debate over the most serious claims from the group, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. And it ensured that questions swirling around the veracity of the group's claims, and the Kerry campaign's accusations that the group was connected to the Bush campaign, would dominate the contest for yet another day.

Mr. Rood stepped forward after Mr. Kerry called him and another veteran on Mr. Rood's boat as members of the Swift boat group blanketed cable television and radio talk shows to repeat their claim, also made in a book and a television advertisement, that Mr. Kerry had fabricated his military accomplishments to win medals.

Mr. Kerry's phone calls were part of his campaign's first concerted push to address the group's claims, which surfaced weeks ago. That push also included the release of a new Internet advertisement on Saturday highlighting accusations made about Senator John McCain by military supporters of Mr. Bush in 2000 and a public call by Mr. Kerry's running mate, Senator John Edwards, for Mr. Bush to tell the group to cease running advertisements against Mr. Kerry.

The Swift boat group, which garnered much of its initial financing from men who have supported Mr. Bush's and his father's political endeavors, has been ready to defend itself and quickly provided a statement Saturday saying Mr. Rood's article was politically motivated. The group continues to raise money and on Friday introduced an advertisement with former prisoners of war recounting the pain Mr. Kerry's 1971 antiwar comments caused them when they were being held by the Vietcong.

Mr. Bush's campaign confirmed on Saturday an accusation by the Kerry campaign that one of the veterans in the that advertisement was a member the Bush campaign's veterans' advisory committee. The Bush campaign said in a statement that it did not know that the man, retired Col. Kenneth Cordier, was going to appear in the advertisement and because of that he was no longer a volunteer.

The Bush campaign denies involvement with the Swift boat group and on Saturday released a statement to the Federal Election Commission saying that the Kerry campaign's accusations of coordination were untrue. The Bush camp has declined to tell the group to stop running advertisements, but aides said Mr. Kerry should join Mr. Bush in calling for all outside groups to stop advertising.

In his article Mr. Rood disputed a claim the Swift boat group made in its book, "Unfit for Command," that Mr. Kerry had received his Silver Star for chasing down a lone Vietcong teenager "in a loincloth" who may or may not have been armed on Feb. 28, 1969.

Mr. Rood was the skipper of one of three boats involved in the mission with Mr. Kerry, conducting a sweep for the enemy through a tributary of the Bay Hap River. "I have no idea how old the gunner Kerry chased that day was," Mr. Rood wrote, but "he was a grown man, dressed in the kind of garb the VC usually wore." He also wrote that Mr. Kerry had devised a plan to face into enemy fire, a breach of typical procedure.

He added, referring to John O'Neill, a co-author of "Unfit for Command" and a leader of the Swift boat group: "The man Kerry chased was not the 'lone' attacker at that site, as O'Neill suggests. There were others who fled. There was also firing from the tree line well behind the spider holes and at one point, from the opposite riverbank as well."

Mr. Rood also noted that Roy F. Hoffmann, a retired rear admiral who was the Swift boat group's commander, lauded the operation at the time in glowing terms. Mr. Hoffmann is, with Mr. O'Neill, one of the main engineers of the anti-Kerry group's effort.

The Swift boat group released a statement yesterday from Mr. O'Neill saying he stood by its account. He said the account was consistent with those of two biographies of Mr. Kerry, "Tour of Duty" and "John F. Kerry: The Complete Biography By The Boston Globe Reporters Who Know Him Best," and that of Larry Lee, a crewman on Mr. Rood's boat. Mr. O'Neill said he had tried to contact Mr. Rood for his book and that Mr. Rood's decision to come forward now was "an obvious political move."


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I agree with you sofia, move on is a pro democrat thing designed to get around the campaign finance reform. I think the campaign finance reform sounded good but when it was actual time to start compaigning, it was just as problematical for us as for the republicans. so groups like move on started to find ways to get around it. Personally I am glad.

The difference is that swift boat thing have smeared a guy's reputation with no sources to back up their statements other than that they were there. In this day and age, we need more than that because you never know a person's motivation.

The Swift Boat Vets For Truth increasingly look like a bunch of old drunks who have been sitting at the bar in their local VFW and waiting for a way to get even with Kerry ever since he turned against the war thirty years ago.

Elliot and the others who used to support Kerry look like victims of an "intervention"-they got surrounded by their old buddies from back then, and got brought over to the other side.

Kerry: Slo-Mo on Swifties

By MAUREEN DOWD

Published: August 22, 2004

WASHINGTON — It's easy for the Bushes to stay gallant. They delegate the gutter.

There are always third-party political assassins, ostensibly independent, to do the dynasty wet work.

W.'s old pal and running partner, Lee Atwater, set up the Bush modus operandi: Lay in the weeds while craftily planting plausibly deniable surrogates to slice up your rival.

The New Yorker editor David Remnick, writing in Esquire in 1986, limned the 1980 Congressional race in South Carolina's Second District "between Atwater's man, Republican Floyd Spence, and a Faulknerian figure named Tom Turnipseed At one press briefing, Atwater planted a reporter who rose and said, 'We understand Turnipseed has had psychotic treatment.' Atwater played it cool and refused to comment, but later told the reporters off the record, 'In college I understand he got hooked up to jumper cables.' "

Karl Rove is Atwater's protégé on jumper cable politics.

The weird thing is, given how transparently the Bushes play the game of staying above the fray even as their creepy-crawly surrogates do dishonorable and undignified things, their rivals always seem caught off guard when the third parties show up to rip their throats out.

The phlegmatic Michael Dukakis never knew what hit him with Mr. Atwater's Frankenstein monster Willie Horton coming at him in a third party scare ad and G.O.P. smear leaflets and letters.

John McCain should have known what was coming in South Carolina, but he acted stunned and hurt when he was hit with the Atwater/Rove mud treatment by shadowy Bush supporters.

Just as the Bush campaign dragged out fringe veteran surrogates in South Carolina to slime the former P.O.W. for being antiveteran, now the stomach-turning Swift boat attackers are sliming a war hero as a war criminal.

They started their vengeful and brazen campaign in May, after plotting since winter. But John Kerry is only now forcefully responding - though he should have had a response ready, since the Nixon tool John O'Neill has dogged him since '71.

Charging on Thursday that Mr. Bush wants the Swift boat sleazoids "to do his dirty work," Mr. Kerry reached for yet another Vietnam reference and water metaphor: "When you're under attack, the best thing to do is turn your boat into the attack."

The Skipper would do well to get a swifter boat. How pathetic is it that he's playing defense on Vietnam when W. didn't even serve?

Bill Clinton implied two weeks ago that Mr. Kerry was acting sluggish. "Whenever they hit me, I hit 'em back," he told Jon Stewart. "And whenever they came up with a charge I didn't believe was true, I answered back."

Reports in The New York Times and The Washington Post last week made it clear that the vile Swift boaters have told wildly varying accounts, sometimes supportive of Mr. Kerry.

The Times revealed that Swift Boat Veterans for Truth - is that like the administration's Clear Skies Act for spewing pollution? - has a trellis of ties to Karl Rove, the Bush family and Bush supporters. "A Texas publicist who once helped prepare Mr. Bush's father for his debate when he was running for vice president provided them with strategic advice," Kate Zernike and Jim Rutenberg wrote. Indeed, it was the same woman who worked for a third party group that slimed Mr. McCain on the environment in the 2000 primaries.

And the group's ad was produced by the Dukakis tank ad wizards.

The Kerry camp knows the Swift boat snipers are hurting the Democrat and fears the Bush oppo campaign will soon move from tarnishing Mr. Kerry's war record to dwell on his days as a shaggy-haired antiwar spokesman. The White House must tear down his heroism before it can tear down his patriotism.

Meanwhile, the Bush crew is shamelessly doing to Mr. Kerry what it once did to Mr. McCain: suggesting that the decorated Vietnam vet has snakes in his head and a temperament problem. "Senator Kerry appears to have lost his cool," Scott McClellan told reporters in Crawford on Friday. And the Bush campaign chairman, Marc Racicot, said on CNN that Mr. Kerry looked "wild-eyed" responding to Swift boat muck.

It makes sense for W. to use surrogates to do his fighting, just as he did when he slid out of Vietnam and just as he did when he sent our troops to fight his administration's misbegotten vanity war in Iraq.

Bush should leave the swiftvets to do what they will, as long as Micheal Moore, Bruce Springsteen, Whoopie Goldberg, MoveOn... do Kerry's heavy lifting.

Sofia, sweetie, "heavy lifting" in the way of saying nasty things about the person is one thing. Indeed, you might feel that some things said in Fahrenheit 911 were even untrue. But the biggest claims that are challenged in Fahrenheit 911 are about Saudis.

What these Swift Boat people are doing is taking the times that Kerry performed well in battle-the highest pressure you can put anyone under-and claiming he did not. That is disgusting.

You cannot ask a man to do more than to put his very life at risk in a battle. This, Kerry did. To try to take credit away from him for it goes far beyond campaign tactics, or even sneaky campaign tactics. The fact that Kerry, along with the rest of the country, later came to realize the war itself was wrong is immaterial-he did what those in authority asked him to do-risk his life. In fact, he volunteered for an especially dangerous detail.

That is what makes the Swift Boat vets' behavior so hard to take. The Bush campaign, denials aside, has really gone past any acceptable point here.

If you don't understand that, you are truly hopeless.

Where was Dowd's outrage when MoveOn.org was lambasting Bush's Guard service?

MgC wrote


A far better question is where was Bush when he was supposed to be serving?

Flying a Jet in the Guard, or is that some sort of trick question?

MgC
He was high but not in a jet.

And round and round we go...

What does any of this have to do with the fact that Dowd and other liberal columnists are coming down against the swift boat ads against Kerry, but remained mum while MoveOn besmirched the name of the sitting President of the United States?

Nothing. There's plenty of hypocrisy to spread around. Certain A2Kers have pointed out that 527 has given rise to a new campaign tactic. Murder by proxy.

I have said it a million times and every time it breaks my heart.....bush will win reelection and it will be because the American people, or a large enough majority of them to get the job done, are influenced by fear and purposeful ignorance.

It's a sad day and our brave ancestors must be turning over in their graves at the view.

Both parties found a way to skirt the campaign finance laws. No surprise there. They were well aware that the law had no teeth when they passed it. That is why it why it passed through congress. My disgust and mistrust of congress goes up a notch with every passing year.

McGentrix:

Bush was jumped to the head of the line for flight training for a certain jet. Nobody doubts that. There appears to be no other cause other than his father is a Congressman.

The jet for which Bush was moved up over better qualified candidates was scheduled to be replaced in VietNam by another jet. Bush's father, the Congressman, was in a position to know that.

Flight training takes two years, as Bush and his father were both well aware.

So by the time Bush graduated flight school, surprise!!-he didn't have to go to VietNam since there was no call for pilots for those planes there.

Since Bush has sent over 175,000 men into battle, these are fair items for examination.

By comparison, the Republican campaign ahs grabbed a bunch of drunken, bitter old Swift boat vets off the bar stool at the local VFW and paid them to go on a cross country, all-expenses-paid vacation telling preposterous stories that contradict official reports, their own medal citations, and in at least one case, a simple look at a map.

That's quite a difference.

Bush was a graduate from Yale, How many other candidates for flight school were? You speculate and pretend it's fact. It isn't, it's speculation. There is ZERO evidence, even anecdotal evidence that demonstrates Bush Sr. was responsible for getting Bush Jr. in the guard. You wish there was, so there is.



Evidence? No. Speculation? Yes.



*yawn*



Kerry wants to be president, his past is ripe for the picking. Oh, BTW, your dismissal of the Swift Boat Veterans completely destroys any credibility you could have had.

just one opinion kelt...I wouldn't lose any sleep over it.....