The Self-Destruction of the Kerry Campaign is a Rollicking Tale of Teddy White Proportions
One of the funniest things about the sad Kerry campaign is the way things keep disappearing from his website. Can’t say I’ve been there myself, but I keep reading how links to Wilson, meta-tags referencing Cambodia, items about the dox in your sox Bergler, etc., keep vanishing. Well, so have the medical records of Rev. David Alston, one of the Band of Brothers. As you will see from Ed Morrissey and and associate of Tom “River Rat” Mortenson, they removed the records because they prove that the guy was never on Kerry’s boat, despite the clever narrative they concocted to imply he was:
For years now we have been lead to believe that both Sen. Kerry and the Rev. David Alston had served together on the PCF-94 in Vietnam, and therefore, making David Alston an eyewitness to Kerry’s actions and heroism. The fact that Sen. Kerry has used a now famous photo of himself together with David Alston and other crewmates while serving on swift boats in Vietnam, left little reason to believe otherwise. As with most anything having to do with Sen. Kerry — nothing is ever as it first appears to be.
There can be little doubt that Sen. Kerry and David Alston wanted people to believe the two served together on the PCF-94 swift boat by some of their recent comments:“We were in a lot of firefights,” Alston said. “You learn a lot about people. After a firefight, John would come up to me and he would put his hand on me and he’d say, ‘David, are you all right?’” And Kerry added: “I didn’t know then that I had a man of God on my boat. That’s probably why I’m here today.” (Orlando Sentinel, 1/31/04)
“I stand here before you only because almighty God saw our boat safely through those rivers of death and destruction, by giving us a brave, wise, and decisive leader named John Kerry.” (David Alston in a speech before the Democratic Convention)
“I can still see him now, standing in the doorway of the pilothouse, firing his M-16, shouting orders through the smoke and chaos_. Even wounded, or confronting sights no man should ever have to see, he never lost his cool.” (David Alston in a speech before the Democratic Convention)
Rev. David Alston says, “When the bullets started to hit the side of the ship, we found out that John Kerry [could] lead. (Kerry for President Campaign Ad that aired early February ’04)
Only problem with the above statements is that they are most [certainly] false because David Alston was never a crew member under Sen. Kerry nor could he had ever participated in combat operations with Sen. Kerry because they were assigned to two different boats. From December 14 to January 29, 1969 Sen. Kerry commanded the PCF-44 while David Alston was the Gunner onboard the PCF-94 under Lt.(jg) Peck. On January 29, 1969 both Peck and Alston were wounded and hospitalized. We know Alston was wounded on that date because his casualty report was made available briefly by the Kerry Campaign before they had removed it.
It was necessary to remove the medical report because it named the wrong boat and gave the lie to a picture in which both Alston and Kerry both appear.
We salute the audacious ineptitude of the Kerry campaign. What will disappear next, in addition to, perhaps, Doug Brinkley’s integrity? Here’s what he’s saying today in the Telegraph:
“On Christmas Eve he was near Cambodia; he was around 50 miles from the Cambodian border. There’s no indictment of Kerry to be made, but he was mistaken about Christmas in Cambodia,” said Douglas Brinkley, who has unique access to the candidate’s wartime journals.
But Mr Brinkley rejected accusations that the senator had never been to Cambodia, insisting he was telling the truth about running undisclosed “black” missions there at the height of the war.
He said: “Kerry went into Cambodian waters three or four times in January and February 1969 on clandestine missions. He had a run dropping off US Navy Seals, Green Berets and CIA guys.” The missions were not armed attacks on Cambodia, said Mr Brinkley, who did not include the clandestine missions in his wartime biography of Mr Kerry, Tour of Duty.
“He was a ferry master, a drop-off guy, but it was dangerous as hell. Kerry carries a hat he was given by one CIA operative. In a part of his journals which I didn’t use he writes about discussions with CIA guys he was dropping off.”
You have to hand it to David Rennie at the Telegraph. He can smell a story and his editors are letting him pursue it and are giving him space. Rennie is one of the few mainstream print journalists reporting a story that is, in its own way, as big as Watergate. This is live coverage of a campaign that is melting down from its own lies — in real time and right before our eyes. And the NYT and WaPo won’t go near it. Ha, ha!
Memo to Doug Brinkley: reconsider what you are going to say about Fete-du-Roi (Morrissey) in Cambodia in January 1969, because you will be walking into a trap. Here’s what Andrew Antippas, the Cambodia Man in the US Embassy in Saigon in 1968-69, reports via the Washington Times:
As U.S. forces in 1966 and 1967 progressively pushed the Vietnamese Communists farther and farther away from Vietnamese population centers, U.S. commanders sought permission for “hot pursuit” operations against Communist forces attacking from Cambodian territory. This always was denied, much to the military’s frustration.
The Cambodians patrolled the crossing border points on the Bassac and Mekong Rivers and had fortifications above the frontier. In mid-1968, just before Adm. Zumwalt took over, a U.S. Army LCM landing craft sailing north on the Mekong River — loaded with lubricants, gas, rations, beer and a forklift, as well as a number of U.S. soldiers — missed the turn from the Mekong River to the Bassac River (the two main north-south rivers that flow through the Mekong Delta) in order to reach its destination on the southern portion of the Bassac. Apparently the troops were somewhat bemused from the heat and the beer consumed and sailed right up into Cambodia, where they were halted by a Cambodian patrol craft and taken to the frontier base and then up to Phnom Penh. Gen. Creighton Abrams, newly in command, was furious, and Adm. Zumwalt’s predecessor was nonplussed, blurting out that it wasn’t one of his boats.
Gen. Abrams snarled, “Yeah, it was one of mine and why did they do it?” We got the crew and LCM back eventually, but that was the only river incident involving the Cambodian border or Navy actions inside Cambodia to my recollection. There were continuing firefights along the Vinh the Canal, which is a kilometer inside the Vietnamese border and stretches straight as a shot from the Gulf of Siam to the Bassac River. The canal fronted the southern Communist base areas inside Cambodia and the Navy patrol craft frequently interdicted Communist infiltrators.
There were plenty of incidents on land in 1968 involving U.S. ground forces and aircraft along the 800-mile-plus length of the Cambodian border with Vietnam. A favorite VC/NVA tactic was to pull up next to a Cambodian military post, shoot at the Americans and then leave and let the Cambodians receive American counter-battery fire or aircraft strikes.
Finally, concerning the assertion that Mr. Kerry was shot at by the Khmer Rouge during his Christmas 1968 visit to Cambodia, it should be noted that the Khmer Rouge didn’t take the field until the Easter Offensive of 1972, when the Vietnamese forces that had attacked the Cambodians initially in March 1970 pulled out of Cambodia to attack the U.S. and Vietnamese forces in Vietnam. Only Vietnamese Communist soldiers were found on the battlefields of Cambodia in 1970-72.
The bottom line of all this is that in the 15 years of active American military involvement in Vietnam and Cambodia, between 1961 and 1975, there was ongoing attention and scrutiny paid to the border because of the political sensitivities over the neutrality of the Cambodians. While things may have happened that no one ever found out about in Saigon, the Cambodians yelled bloody murder to the world press and the ICC whenever they found Americans trespassing.
The really fun part of the Kerry Campaign is that they won’t stop lying and spinning, and they will dig themselves an ever deeper hole. And it’s still August! We’ve got over two months of this to go, go, go! I hope Brinkley lets us know about “secret” and “illegal” missions into the Cambodian Heart of Darkness, transporting Captain Willard, Dracula and the Tooth Fairy. I can’t wait.
Back to seriousness. There is a price to be paid for arrogance. The Kerry campaign is in the process of paying the ultimate political price for building its appeal on the Potemkin Village of Kerry’s war record. More than that, the campaign’s self-destruction is due even more to the campaign’s contempt for regular American people. They thought that no one will notice, and if they notice, no one will listen.
That’s the second price of arrogance, and it is being paid by the New York Times and the Washington Post. Rennie, SBVT, the bloggers, they are reporting a huge and dramatic story, a Teddy White-sized story. It is incredible that the greatest of jouralistic institutions are failing to practice journalism in a story of these proportions.