Kerry can't resist inserting a Nam story.

Isn't it a shame that Bush can't insert his war experiences into the campaign. Maybe he can recount how he managed to escape punishment for going AWOL. Or possibly even better he can tell us about his battles with demon rum.

Maybe he can illuminate us a bit on his reported cocaine use as well as his twenty year love affair with the bottle.

Well, it's more than Bush can say, bro ;-)

...and the opposition can resist addressing the "Nam issue." Yeah, right.

It could be very illuminating and helpful to millions of people if he would reveal the details of how he quit without AA -- after all, not everyone believes that is entirely successful. Perhaps the dent in his skull from Laura's frying pan? Is his higher power hovering above the Methodist church he attends or is it hovering over him in the White House?

His alcoholism is a very relevant and serious issue. He has never been properly treated for his condition and this leaves questions as to whether or not he has really ever recovered or is simply now a dry drunk.

in vino veritas? perhaps George just needs another drink. I know I do.

It is getting a little irksome and tiresome hearing about his nam stories all the time. Didn't he ever have any pets when not in the service? Like when he was young or something that he could used?

It also irksome to continually hear about "freedom lovers" and those "who don't love freedom."

Of the two, the last does more harm.

This is sooooo transparent, VIRTUALLY NO ONE would have heard this story if X hadn't posted it here.

When grasping for straws one can often bring down the entire haystack upon themselves. Help! Air!

This may an obscure example, but trust me, you don't have to dig far to find a lot more of the same...

He has 'open mouth put in Nam' disease like Bush has ' open mouth put in foot' disease.

Bush has "open mouth, insert just around the corner foot-in-mouth disease." Much more contemporarily serious than some nitpicking about Kerry's service in Vietnam. Dubya would never bring up his military service. Hey, if there was the back-door drafting of National Guardsmen in the Vietnam era, Bush may have found himself in harms way over a Vietnamese jungle. Be serious, we all know that could never have happened under any circumstances.

hmmm.

when clinton ran, being a vet of vietnam was a big deal. when bush ran against gore, who happened to serve in nam, suddenly it wasn't. how does that work.

imho, bush opened the door for kerry to use his military background as a valid campaign issue when he started parading his ass around calling himself a "war president" and suiting up to drop onto the deck of the uss lincoln (at tax payer expense. the helicopter couldn't make the 30 mile trip??) and proclaim "mission accomplished".

LOL, did kerrys mut get a purple heart as well? Kerry should have gotten the dog three of em and brought the thing home with him, as a witness to the war attrocieties Kerry testified about that never happened!

funny, i just saw an interview with tommy franks. he was asked if he thought that it was possible that war crimes were committed. he answered that " he knows they did".

look, in war the stuff's gonna happen. some guys just loose it. kerry isn't the only one to have talked about it and vietnam isn't the only war where it is said to have occured.

that doesn't mean that every soldier is guilty of doing these things. and i've never read or heard kerry say that.

i have heard ann coulter say that all liberals are traitors, though.

Kerry testified about attrocities that were a lie. While attrocities happen in every war, that doesn't mean Kerry told the truth.

attrocities that were a lie? mmm, mai lai. what would you call that?

i guess franks was lying when he verified that he had knowledge of those types of acts occuring, right?

http://ice.he.net/~freepnet/kerry/index.php?topic=Keys


o In his April 1971 speech to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, John Kerry claimed that war crimes committed by the American military against Vietnamese civilians were "not isolated incidents, but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis..." War crimes in Vietnam were actually quite rare.

o Kerry claimed that war crimes were being committed "with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command." In fact, military personnel were warned that "if you disobey the rules of engagement, you can be tried and punished." War crimes were never a matter of policy, and were prosecuted when discovered.

o Kerry charged that the war in Vietnam was a racist war, that "blacks provided the highest percentage of casualties." Research published in B.G. Burkett's book "Stolen Valor" and other sources shows that casualty rates for black and white soldiers during Vietnam closely matched the proportion of America's overall population represented by each race.

o Kerry claimed that Vietnam was "ravaged equally by American bombs and search-and-destroy missions as well as by Viet Cong terrorism..." Later in his remarks, Kerry responded to a question about what might happen to the South Vietnamese after our withdrawal with "So what I am saying is that yes, there will be some recrimination but far, far less than the 200,000 a year who are murdered by the United States of America..." Yet according to historian Guenter Lewy in "America in Vietnam," "...the number of civilians killed deliberately by the VC is appallingly high. No counterpart to this death toll caused by communist terror tactics exists on the allied side."

o Asked for a recommendation about possible courses of action for Congress to pursue, Kerry stated that he had talked with representatives from Hanoi and from the PRG (Viet Cong) at the Paris peace talks, and mentioned his support for "Madam Binh's points." Madam Nguyen Thi Binh was at that time the Foreign Minister for the PRG. These meetings took place in the spring of 1970, before Kerry ever joined the VVAW.

o Kerry was a leader, fund-raiser, and spokesman for Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), an organization that staged mock mass murders of civilians to dramatize American atrocities, and handed out flyers that read "if you had been Vietnamese" American infantrymen might have "burned your house" or "raped your wife and daughter" and "American soldiers do these things every day to the Vietnamese simply because they are 'Gooks.'"

o Kerry's used "testimony" from the VVAW's "Winter Soldier Investigation" as the basis for his war crimes charges, although none of the witnesses there were willing to sign depositions affirming their claims. Later investigators were unable to confirm any of the reported atrocities, and in fact discovered that a number of the witnesses had never been in Vietnam, had never been in combat, or were imposters who had assumed the identity of real veterans.

o The deception extended to the VVAW leadership. Executive secretary Al Hubbard claimed to have been an Air Force captain wounded piloting a transport over Da Nang in 1966. Hubbard was actually a staff sergeant who was never assigned to Vietnam.

o The Winter Soldier Investigation was financed by pro-Hanoi radicals such as Jane Fonda and Mark Lane, who hoped to undermine American support for the war by framing American soldiers as mass murderers. At the same time, the North Vietnamese military was torturing American prisoners of war to make them confess to identical crimes. At least one former POW has stated that Kerry's testimony was used by North Vietnam to demoralize American prisoners during interrogations.

o John Kerry has denied any association with Jane Fonda, but he attended the 1970 VVAW leadership meeting that chose Fonda and Executive Secretary Al Hubbard to do a national speaking tour to raise money for the VVAW and launch new chapters. Fonda was also the primary source of funds for the Winter Soldier Investigation, where Kerry was a moderator.

o The VVAW signed the People's Peace Treaty during Kerry's tenure -- the VVAW even sent a delegation to Hanoi. The document was a laundry list of North Vietnamese bargaining points, including the key concession that the United States must agree to withdraw all troops before any negotiations could take place for the return of American prisoners.

o The VVAW was at the heart of the propaganda effort that so effectively smeared American servicemen in Vietnam as murderous, drug-addled psychotics that returning veterans were cursed and spat upon in the streets. In fact, as shown in B.G. Burkett's book "Stolen Valor," Vietnam veterans are more psychologically stable and successful than their civilian counterparts.

o The VVAW was a radical and potentially violent organization that formally considered assassinating prominent supporters of the war. As reported in the New York Sun by Thomas Lipscomb, during a November 1971 meeting in Kansas City the VVAW leadership and chapter coordinators voted down a plan to murder several U.S. Senators, including John Tower, John Stennis, and Strom Thurmond. Two VVAW members who were present, Randy Barnes and Terry Du-Bose, place John Kerry at that meeting, as do the meeting minutes and FBI records. Kerry claims to have resigned from the VVAW at the meeting or shortly thereafter, but there is no evidence that he ever informed authorities about the conspiracy. Kerry continued to publicly represent the VVAW until at least April of 1972.

Where were you in 1972, Karzak? If you think the country is polarized now, you should have been there then. The Weathermen, The SLA and lots of other wildly radical groups were calling for armed revolution in the US and if I had a nickle for every time someone in a group I was in suggested or hinted or made outright calls 'to go under the gun' I'd be about six dollars richer. It was bad. Kent State in 1970 showed to a lot of young Americans that their country would kill them as easily as it killed Viet Namese.
The VietNam War was, at that point, sixteen years old. 50,000 had died wearing America's colors and as far as anyone could tell it was going to go another sixteen years despite Nixon's claim of a secret plan to end the war. (Yeah, he was first with that line.)

You know what happened? Cooler heads prevailed. The anti-war movement looked around and saw, for the first time since 1968, that the public was actually with them and that the need for violence had dissipated. One of those cooler heads was John Kerry who left the V V a W as it got, in the lingo of the day, heavier. He went on to find other ways to serve his country, a country that I'll bet on some days, he thought was lost to him. I know I had those days back then.

Lots of things got said back then, by phonies and by heros, just like now.
It's important now that we speak the truth to each other, to say what we know to be the facts, to be cool in this most heated decision, to be, in a word, American.

Joe Nation