Its Sunday morning and I couldn’t wait to open the Boston Globe to see the reaction to Senator Kerry’s current travails regarding the Swiftvets ads. As I expected there was a Kerry defense piece prominently located under the fold written by the chief Kerry defender at the Globe, Michael Kranish. The main focus of the story is the seemingly very credible accompanying piece written by William Rood who was a skipper of one of the swift boats on the day Kerry got the Silver Star. Rood, in detail backs up Kerry’s assertions of what occurred on that day.
The rest of the story focuses on the ads and Kerry and McCain’s calls for the ads to be taken down. I find this somewhat disingenuous when you consider the amount of soft money spent by the Swiftvets (less than a million) versus the amount spent on the ACT and MoveOn.org ads that total near 62 million. I did not hear Kerry or anyone else call for these ads to be dropped particularly when Bush was being compared to Hitler.
The article quotes extensively from the Globe biography of Kerry which leads me to ask one question which is related to one of the main assertions of the Swiftvets, that Senator Kerry has refused to release his military records. This becomes of even greater interest to me when I read the Article by Michael Dobbs of the Washington Post on Saturday, here is the relevant section
“Although Kerry campaign officials insist that they have published Kerry's full military records on their Web site (with the exception of medical records shown briefly to reporters earlier this year), they have not permitted independent access to his original Navy records. A Freedom of Information Act request by The Post for Kerry's records produced six pages of information. A spokesman for the Navy Personnel Command, Mike McClellan, said he was not authorized to release the full file, which consists of at least a hundred pages.”
My question is how on earth could the Globe be covering this guy for 30 years and without having gotten hold of 100 pages of this information? Apparently, much like Brinkley, the Globe has used Kerry’s memories as the primary source of their information.
I was pleasantly surprised to later, find a piece by Patrick Healey which tried to focus a bit more on the actual issues of the campaign and point out some of the inconsistencies in Kerry’s agenda and how eventually they will need to be dealt with.
Any further attempts at objectivity were cast aside when you get to the editorial and op ed pages. The editorial entitled “Big Lies for Bush”, one of the more laughable assertions is that during the 1996 election, regarding why Clinton did not attack Bob Doles service record, “any such attack on behalf of Clinton, an admitted draft dodger, would have been preposterous”. First it is revealing that for the first time ever, the Globe actually called Clinton a draft dodger and secondly if Carville, Davis and Podesta could have gotten 254 of Dole’s comrades to sign on to a book questioning his fitness for command you can bet your life it would have been in print. The editorial ends asking for Bush to call off his “dogs”, an interesting label to apply to over 250 veterans.
The best is left for last, presented by the predictable Thomas Oliphant, in the piece called “Smear by veterans may hurt Bush.” He begins in the first line by himself smearing John O’Neill as an attack dog trained by Nixon to go after Kerry. There is a complete dismissal of O’Neill as potentially a person of conscience who actually was outraged at Kerry’s slander of the people who were serving in the military at the time of his service. His take on this is that O’Neill is strictly a “right wing looney” and all the allegations made by these guys have no merit nor are they worth discussing further.
He refers to O’Neill’s rejection of a prominent role in the Nixon election effort and 35 years of private life as “retreating home to Texas”. I find that interesting since apparently O’Neill has not once tried to capitalize on his 15 minutes of fame since then by running for anything nor during many opportunities in Kerry’s career did he speak out or work against him in any way despite efforts to recruit him.
Tom goes on to explain that the reputable press (of which he is one) wouldn’t bother with the Swiftvet issue and that it is only the lowered standards of cable TV that are to blame. He concludes by saying that “the best counter to him today is the serious press attention that his group fears most”.
Well Tom, get ready for some serious voter and press attention because the real core of the Swiftvets effort is coming soon in the form of the ads that attack Kerry’s post Viet Nam congressional testimony. There is no difference of opinion or conflicting eyewitness accounts. This will be the unvarnished John Kerry and it will be interesting to see the reaction.
