John Kerry would, I believe, have been a disaster for American national security
if he had won the 2004 U.S. election.
I am so happy that we never got to find out.
Swift Boat Veterans For Truth ad against John Kerry, 2004.
From here.
Kerry's bizarre attempt to use his Vietnam service in his campaign:
Viet record ripples
by Mark Steyn
- on the appalling
anti-Vietnam War protester
and career-long opponent of the military
John Kerry's
cynical attempt to use his Vietnam service
in his run for President.
The Democrats don't understandthe current war,
and they don't understand people who admire Bush as a war leader.
It is all totally alien to them.
Hence this pantomime about Kerry and what he
supposedly did 30 years ago
- as if that makes it all right.
"But that's not how the Democratic Party muscle saw John Kerry.
Since the notion of a credible war president wasn't important to them,
they looked at the war on terror merely as a Bush wedge issue to be neutralized. And they figured their best shot at neutralizing it was Lt. Kerry on a Swift boat."
"But every normal person that night saw only a strange man with nothing to say about anything that has happened since the early 1970s."
"Vietnam veterans mostly loathe Mr. Kerry for riding the war-what-is-it-good-for-absolutely-nothing movement to celebrity status and,
just as they thought they couldn't despise him any more,
here comes the old opportunist riding the I-was-proud-to-do-my-patriotic-duty shtick to the presidency."
Another War He Didn't Like:
John Kerry's anti-Cold War '84 campaign
by Duncan Currie
- on Kerry's opposition to the campaigns against the communists in
Nicaragua and Grenada.
- "Among Democrats, it is fashionable to remember the Cold War as a bipartisan effort.
...
We're all Cold Warriors now
- now that the Cold War is over."
Do We Want to Go Back?
- Victor Davis Hanson on the appalling John Kerry.
- "Just as a presidency of earlier ossified liberals like Michael Dukakis or Walter Mondale probably would have led to
support of a utopian nuclear freeze and subsequent Russian intimidation of Europe, unilateral cuts in military
preparedness, and acquiescence to the Soviet Union, so too the election of John Kerry may well undo much of what has
been achieved these last three years"
Kerry's bizarre combination of "war hero" and anti-war activist.
From defeatjohnjohn.com.
The Swift Boat ads are not just about John Kerry
and the U.S. election.
They are bigger than that.
They are about reclaiming the image of the ordinary, noble, brave
and honourable Vietnam veteran - men no different from
their fathers that fought tyranny in World War Two.
It is their reply - after all these years
- to John Kerry, Oliver Stone,
and a whole generation of useless hippies that vilified
and slandered them.
"It is a fact that in the entire
Vietnam War we did not lose one major battle.
We lost the war at home,
and at home John Kerry was the field general."
- Bob Elder,
Swift Boat Veterans For Truth.
Interviews with Vietnam veterans in general
(not just those who served on Swift Boats)
Bud Day
Kevin McManus
Thomas S. Pyle
Thomas J. Sterling
Robinson Risner
James H. Warner
Leo K. Thorsness:
2nd interview:
The most stunning interview is that with Ralph E. Gaither.
Listen to him as a POW explain to his
communist North Vietnamese
guard
how he is free and the guard is not.
"What sort of idiot would make the centrepiece of his presidential campaign four months of proud service in a war he's best known for opposing?
...
How cocooned from reality do you have to be to think you can transform one of the most divisive periods
in American history
- in which you were largely responsible for much of the divisiveness
- into a sappy, happy-clappy, soft-focus patriotic blur without anybody objecting?"
"John Kerry went to Vietnam. Voluntarily.
... his service should make Kerry the election-year choice of those who serve, or once served, in our country's uniform.
Instead, military men and women are overwhelmingly suspicious of Kerry. Many despise him so intensely that their emotions verge on hatred."
"You can't trash those who served in front of Congress and the American people, spend your senatorial career voting against our nation's security interests, then expect vets to love you when you abruptly change your tune."
John E. O'Neill Question and Answer session.
He says the Swift Boat Veterans will not stop
even if Bush asks them to:
"George Bush was not a part of our unit nor is he a part of our story.
This is a matter deeply between Kerry and ourselves. It goes beyond politics
and deeply involved the honor of our unit,
the damage done by his false charges and his wild exaggeration of his service with our unit."
We're Not GOP Shills:
President Bush can't stop us from telling the truth about John Kerry,
by John E. O'Neill
- "We formed Swift Boat Veterans For Truth for one purpose: to present to the American public our conclusion that John Kerry is not fit to be commander in chief.
...
Had another person been the presidential candidate of the Democrats, our group never would have formed. Had Mr. Kerry been the Republican candidate, each of us would still be here.
We do not take direction from the White House or the president's re-election committee, and our efforts would continue even if President Bush were to ask us directly to stop."
Kerry's quagmire
by Mark Steyn,
on Kerry's appalling bullying and whining response to the Swift Boat Veterans ads
- especially when contrasted with Bush's dignity
and sheer coolness
in the face of a 3 year long, world-wide tidal wave
of abuse:
"The minute you start running ads demanding that voters
"tell George W Bush to stop telling lies about what a weally weally big war hero I am",
you sound ridiculous. Especially when your opponent is a guy who's never complained about anything
- not the "Bush is Hitler" stuff, not the
"Bush knew about 9/11 in advance" stuff, not even the comparatively mild Michael Moore
slur that he's a moron so paralysed without his minders that he continued reading
My Pet Goat to Florida grade-schoolers for a full seven minutes on September 11.
Kerry himself made sneering cracks about the pet goat business,
and Bush didn't whine about it."
Media Moans
by John Podhoretz
- "The last two years in particular have seen the explosion of a new medium
- the personal Internet newspaper, or blog -
that has already and will forever change
the way people get their information.
...
The success of the Swift-boat vets' ads is the tale of the triumph of the nation's
alternative media. The mainstreamers didn't want to touch the story with a 10-foot pole,
and they didn't. But the alternative media did.
...
And the story just wouldn't go away, because millions of people were interested in it."
TAE: "At the Swift Boat veterans' May 4 press conference you had an open letter
calling Kerry unfit to be Commander in Chief. It was signed by virtually
all of John Kerry's commanders in Vietnam. Yet the story fell flat. The media ignored it.
How did your group react to the media blackout?"
O'NEILL: "We were shocked. We couldn't believe it."
TAE: "Did your group consider giving up?"
O'NEILL: "We couldn't give up because in the end our objective was to get our facts out.
We had to be able to look at ourselves the day after the election and know we had done everything
we could. If we were simply shouting in the desert, we would still have to shout.
Our analysis after the press conference was that the three major networks, the New York Times,
and the Washington Post would under no circumstances carry a story like ours,
no matter how well documented."
TAE: "Before the first ad came out, who picked up the story?"
O'NEILL: "The only people willing to publicizing the story very early were Sean Hannity, the Wall Street Journal,
Investor's Business Daily, several Web sources, and finally C-SPAN"
Again, I started covering this story in May 2004.
His account of mainstream media's desperate attempts to bury the story is hilarious now,
since we know Kerry lost, but wasn't so funny back then.
NoEffect.org
(also here
and here)
- Mark Steyn on how MoveOn.org has achieved nothing:
"Hardly a day goes by without some featurette or other on
"how the Internet is changing the way we do politics" or some such,
with seemingly obligatory references to the spectacular success of
MoveOn.org.
But, in all the stories about the spectacular success,
nobody ever seems to point to any examples of what they're spectacularly successful at.
...
By comparison, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth
raised very little money and spent even less.
...
Who would you say got a bigger bang for their buck?"
In contrast,
"The Swifties rarely get cited as an example of a new energizing force,
only as the umpteenth coachload of "Republican-funded smear merchants."
But they changed the dynamic of the presidential race. They paralyzed the
Kerry campaign, deprived it of its only theme and left it floundering in
search of another."
"MoveOn.org, on the other hand, has
generated a thousand articles on the buzz, the cool, the chic of
MoveOn.org. Rather than a transformative force, they're remarkably like
those two other props of the Democratic party, the music business and
Hollywood, in both of which blowing millions to little effect is a way of
life.
...
The Swift Vets will go away when John Kerry does. But I doubt
MoveOn.org will. Rich but barren, they're not a new force but as perfect
a manifestation of the modern Democratic party's ideological nullity as
could be devised."
Glenn Reynolds
sums up
the Internet blog revolution in news, politics and analysis:
"The Internet, on the other hand, is a low-trust environment.
Ironically, that probably makes it more trustworthy.
That's because, while arguments from authority are hard on the Internet,
substantiating arguments is easy, thanks to the miracle of hyperlinks.
And, where things aren't linkable, you can post actual images.
You can spell out your thinking, and you can back it up with lots of facts,
which people then (thanks to Google, et al.) find it easy to check.
And the links mean that you can do that without cluttering up your narrative too much,
usually, something that's impossible on TV and nearly so in a newspaper."
Richard Fernandez:
"If Kurtz's theory is correct, then outlets like CBS are in the process of offering liberalism a cup of poison.
The function of news is to provide its readership with reliable information about their own society
and the events that effect it. It gives readers a way of determining effects so they can alter causes.
But any information system which throws data quality checks overboard ..
is creating a catastrophe for its consumers. It is axiomatic in database applications that it is better
to have no data than the wrong data.
...
As a "mouthpiece" or "propaganda organ" the Internet is
.. still largely inferior to the Mainstream Media.
But as an organ of accurately understanding the world, it is vastly superior.
This has allowed conservatives to outmaneuver liberals time and again, to understand, for example,
that neither Afghanistan nor Iraq were Vietnam; to see that the United Nations was a sham,
among other things. In many ways the Mainstream Media is a liability to the liberal cause,
a profoundly effective way of deceiving themselves."
I would go further.
I would say
it is hard to take seriously the opinions of people
who get all their news
just from their locally-available
newspapers, magazines, TV and radio.
The Internet exists, folks.
Why not use it to travel the world?
If you live in Ireland, say,
why listen to an Irish journalist's summary of what's happening in Israel?
Why not read the Israeli press?
Including their letters pages,
and their blogs.
Why listen to a "war correspondent" tell you about Iraq?
Why not read U.S. military blogs?
Why not read Iraqi blogs?
This is the Internet, people.
It's a new world.
The military and veterans reject Kerry (who saw combat) and go for Bush (who didn't):
"If John Kerry loses, it will be the parade we never had."
-
Anonymous Vietnam veteran,
expressing the contempt that
most veterans
have for Kerry.
If history judges that it was indeed the Swift Boat Veterans
that brought him down,
then this will be the veterans' greatest victory,
and their sweetest revenge against Kerry and the other
anti-Vietnam war protesters
who enabled the communist victory.
Serving military support Bush, not Kerry.
Opinion poll shows they would give Bush an even larger landslide.
According to this poll, Kerry - the supposed "war hero"
- will get even less military votes than
Gore in 2000.
Also here.
A 55-point chasm in military support for Kerry and Bush
by Ross Mackenzie
- "The left detests the military, and the military knows it - and reciprocates
...
And despite Kerry's conflicting attempts to reinforce his leftist base while simultaneously
seducing the military, the latter obviously isn't interested. It spurns him. Those in the military resent
the prospect of risking their lives with him as their commander in chief
in a war he terms "wrong" and "a grand diversion" - with allies he terms "coerced and bribed.""
They all hate America, and want to see it weak and defeated.
And, strangely, they all want Kerry to win.
Why is that?
If you want to make America's many enemies happy
and demoralise its friends all over the world,
then vote for Kerry.
High Stakes:
Quite simply, Kerry must be stopped; and Bush must win
(and here),
by Paul Johnson.
- "All the elements of anarchy and unrest in the Middle East and Muslim Asia and Africa
are clamoring and praying for a Kerry victory. The mullahs and the imams, the gunmen and their arms suppliers
and paymasters, all those who stand to profit
- politically, financially, and emotionally
- from the total breakdown of order, the eclipse of democracy, and the defeat of the rule of law,
want to see Bush replaced. His defeat on November 2 will be greeted, in Arab capitals,
by shouts of triumph from fundamentalist mobs of exactly the kind that greeted the news that the Twin Towers
had collapsed and their occupants been exterminated.
I cannot recall any election when the enemies of America all over the world have been so unanimous
in hoping for the victory of one candidate. That is the overwhelming reason that John Kerry must be defeated,
heavily and comprehensively."
"President Bush now represents a symbol of defiance against the terrorists and it is a fact,
that all the enemies of America, with the terrorists foremost,
are hoping for him to be deposed in the upcoming elections.
...
The outcome here on the ground in Iraq seems to be almost obvious. In case President Bush
loses the election there would be a massive upsurge of violence"
"if President Bush is reelected, this will prove to them that the American people
are not intimidated despite all their brutality, and that their cause is quite futile."
"If you lose this war, you are no more, and you will have to withdraw within your boundaries
cringing and waiting for terror to strike you in your homeland
...
you will have to watch from far with bitterness the forces of darkness and evil
taking over in many parts of this earth
...
You think I am exaggerating, you think I am being paranoid? I just pray that destiny would not prove all these things;
I pray that these horrors will not come to pass. And all this for what? For failing to confront
a few thousand ex-baathists and demented religious fanatics and some common criminals,
concentrated in some rural areas of a country of the size of just one of your states;
and that for a nation that has defeated Nazism, Imperial Japan and the Soviet Empire!"
"Well if Senator Kerry is such a good man, and he may well be, then it would be prudent
to wait just another four years to elect him, after the job is done."
Just read the whole thing.
Iran wanted Kerry.
Interview with Iranian ambassador to Iraq, Irish Times, May 24, 2008.
He admits that they wanted a different winner in 2004.
And as for 2008, it is clear Iran wants the weak appeaser Obama:
"It is the right of the American nation to elect who they want.
But we hope they won't make a mistake, like the last time."
This is not just a slogan.
This is actually true.
A U.S. intelligence official claims that
al Qaeda -
encouraged by their victory in
Madrid -
plans attacks during the U.S. election.
The official says:
"The view of al Qaeda is 'anybody but Bush.'"
It is proved that
al Qaeda wanted Zapatero to win in Spain
- and he did.
Al Qaeda slaughtered hundreds of innocent Spanish civilians
- and then the Spanish did what al Qaeda wanted.
It is also clear that in the U.S. election
al Qaeda wants Kerry to win
(also here).
Now I believe that
Americans are different to Europeans.
That if they are attacked, they will not do their attacker's bidding,
but rather the opposite.
That a serious attack would instead
be followed by a Bush landslide,
and a green light for regime change in
Iran and Syria.
But al Qaeda may imagine differently,
and so they may attack.
"Imagine if, in the presidential election of 1944, the candidate opposing FDR
had insisted that we were losing the Second World War and that, if elected, he would begin
to withdraw American troops from Europe and the Pacific.
We would have called it treason. And we would have been right.
In WWII, broadcasts from Tokyo Rose in Japan and from Axis Sally in Germany warned our troops
that their lives were being squandered in vain, that they were dying for big business and "the Jew" Roosevelt.
Today, we have a presidential candidate, the conscienceless Sen. John Kerry, doing the work of the enemy propagandists
of yesteryear.
Is there nothing Kerry won't say to win the election? Is there no position he won't change?
Doesn't he care anything for the sacrifices of our troops in Iraq?
And if he does care about our soldiers and Marines, why is he broadcasting remarks that insist
- against all hard evidence - that the terrorists are winning?"
"But Kerry doesn't want to see those things. He's reverting to form.
Just as he lied about our troops three decades ago, encouraging our enemies of the day
and worsening the suffering of our POWs in North Vietnam, today he's pandering to a new enemy.
Imagine the encouragement the terrorists, insurgents and global extremists
draw from Kerry's declarations of defeat, from his insistence that our efforts in Iraq
and in the War on Terror have failed."
"In an election year, our engagement in Iraq is a legitimate topic for sober debate. But Kerry isn't serious.
All he does is to declare defeat. He certainly doesn't
want to be al Qaeda's candidate, but he's made himself into their man through his irresponsibility.
...
The terrorists and their allies already intended to increase the level of violence in Iraq before November.
But Kerry's pandering has encouraged them to pull out all the stops. I wish it were otherwise,
that our election process had more integrity, but the truth is that every roadside blast and car bomb in Iraq
is meant to support John Kerry."
Of course the terrorists want the president to lose,
Charles Krauthammer,
October 11, 2004
- "It is perfectly true, as Bush critics constantly point out, that many millions around the world
- from Jacques Chirac to the Arab street -
dislike Bush and want to see him defeated. It is ridiculous to pretend that Osama, Zarqawi
and the other barbarians are not among them."
The religious fascist
and
butcher of civilians,
Osama Bin Laden, video, Oct 2004.
The mass killer of innocent Americans,
Osama Bin Laden,
apparently
returned from the grave
in a video to try to influence the U.S. election
of Nov 2004.
Bin Laden is trying to influence the election.
Otherwise why release it now?
Bin Laden therefore wants one candidate to win.
The whole video is an attack on Bush, blaming him for everything.
This isn't a double-bluff.
Bin Laden wants Kerry.
Bin Laden wanted Kerry,
is what Bush himself thinks about it 2 years later.
I think he's right.
Bin Laden did want Kerry.
Bush says in 2006:
"I thought it was going to help
[the Bush side].
I thought it would help remind people that
if bin Laden doesn't want Bush to be the president,
something must be right with Bush."
Raymond Ibrahim
on the public liar and butcher Osama Bin Laden
blaming the Bush administration for war and terror:
"any "intelligent person" ..
will realize that whenever double-talking Osama, the self-proclaimed enemy of the U.S.,
who issued a fatwa in 1998 obligating Muslims to kill and plunder every American they come across
- whenever this same man attacks and defames the Bush administration,
he is unwittingly demonstrating that they are doing
something right to defeat terrorism.
Otherwise, why constantly bother trying to turn U.S. public opinion against them?"
Some notes on the video:
A video. No attack.
This alone shows his incredible weakness.
This alone shows how successful Bush has been at protecting America.
He says he will only attack
U.S. states
that vote for Bush.
States that vote for Kerry will be "safe".
If you trust the word of a crazed religious fundamentalist
mass murderer, that is.
The very idea of offering a "truce" shows his weakness.
No talk here of the jihadis "destroying" America.
He is on the run.
The correct response is to finish him off.
So, should we actually be interested
in what an uneducated mass murderer has to say?
We could negotiate, and agree to put the past behind us.
Or, as
Richard Fernandez
says:
"The other course is to reject Osama's terms utterly;
to recognize the pleading in his outwardly belligerent manner and reply that his fugitive existence;
the loss of his sanctuaries; the annihilation of his men are but the merest foretaste
of what is yet to come: to say that to enemies such as he,
the initials "US" will always mean Unconditional Surrender."
Bush's excellent response to Bin Laden's attempts to stop democracy in Iraq,
December 29, 2004:
"Now, Osama bin Laden issued a statement, as you know, which made the stakes of this pretty clear to me.
His vision of the world is where people don't participate in democracy.
...
His vision of the world is one in which there is no freedom of expression,
freedom of religion, and/or freedom of conscience."
Postmodern War
by Victor Davis Hanson
- "Victory always sways the heart even of the most ardent pacifist,
just as defeat and humiliation erode the will of the most zealous hawk
- although it is hard to confess that most humans still think with the most primitive part of their brains.
...
But bin Ladin's October infomercial mentioned truces and respites, not out of tender concern for the West,
but because bin Ladin is beginning to feel, like al-Sadr, that he is going to lose.
...
Perhaps for all the debate over how to fight irregular wars in an age of global terrorism,
we would do best to recall the realistic, if inelegant, words of the owner of the Oakland Raiders
.. "Just win, baby.""
"A coalition of the coerced and the bribed"
-
John Kerry on
America's loyal allies,
who have bravely stood with America since 9/11,
and have stood up to
treacherous countries like France.
And Kerry only has
contempt
for them for supporting America.
This man must not become President.
A vote for Kerry
is a vote to lose the war.
It is a vote for American humiliation and defeat.
"there is no reason, Bob, that young American soldiers need to be going into the homes of Iraqis in the dead of night, terrorizing kids and children, you know, women, breaking sort of the customs of the
- of - the historical customs, religious customs."
- John Kerry's
view of what the U.S. troops are doing in Iraq, 2005.
"You know, education, if you make the most of it, if you study hard and you do your homework,
and you make an effort to be smart, uh, you, you can do well.
If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq."
- John Kerry
on America's heroically brave soldiers, 2006.
"There is a great difference between politicians and dissidents.
Politicians are focused on polls and the press. They are constantly making compromises.
But dissidents focus on ideas. They have a message burning inside of them. They would stand up for their convictions
no matter what the consequences.
In spite of all the polls warning you that talking about spreading democracy in the Middle East
might be a losing issue
- despite all the critics and the resistance you faced
- you kept talking about the importance of free societies and free elections.
You kept explaining that democracy is for everybody. You kept saying that only democracy will truly pave
the way to peace and security. You, Mr. President,
are a dissident
among the leaders of the free world."
-
The Soviet dissident
Natan Sharansky
to George W. Bush after his re-election,
on the difference between Bush and Kerry.
From one of the most famous dissidents of
the whole Cold War era,
from a man who spent 9 years in Soviet prisons,
this is some compliment.
He'll help lose the
Islamist War
too:
