It has been said that John Kerry is going to run for President again. As part of that effort, he has to confront the SwiftBoatVets once more. Kerry’s record is full of swiss cheese and worse, so he can’t count on the truth to set us all free; therefore, it appears that smears, slurs and intimidation will be part of a re-invigorated anti-SwiftBoatVets campaign. Bob Tyrell:

Well, I for one shall delight in reviewing the Swifties’ corpus delicti once again. There are his Purple Hearts that his officers deny authorizing. There are the missing medical records needed to substantiate his decorations. There are the questions the Swifties raised about his honorable discharge, a mysterious discharge not issued until several years after he was out of the Navy and then only issued by President Jimmy Carter in the midst of his amnesty program for draft dodgers. And there is all the controversy about young Mr. Kerry’s dealings with the North Vietnamese in Paris while the war was going on and he was still in the service. Doubtless there are more indelicacies to be examined. Frankly I doubt the American electorate will gain any higher opinion of a presidential candidate who in 1971 appeared before Congress to claim that American soldiers “raped, cut off ears, cut off heads” and otherwise mistreated the Vietnamese.

Mr. Kerry’s statement is long and lurid, and the Swifties gladly reproduced a tape of it during the 2004 election. Now these veterans are being harassed by the senator’s supporters with crank calls in the night and venomous postings on the liberal Web site HuffingtonPost.com. On that celebrity-ridden site the names and personal information of more than a dozen Swift Boat veterans were posted by such “trusted” Huffington Post celebrities as “SatanLivesinUSA.” Could this be Barbra Streisand’s username? At any rate, this eminence wrote on June 24: “SwiftBoatVets who need some Black Ops done on them. I have some very good ideas I gleaned from ‘CIA Book of Dirty Tricks.’ Don’t get mad, get even.”…

“Aside from one or two complaints, fellow commenters did not object to the posting of the information or the threats.” Within hours the veterans were receiving threatening calls. In the early hours of June 25 one Swiftie, Van Odell, got three in four minutes, the last from a man who inquired, “I want to know why you lied about John Kerry. . . . Traitors must die. We will get you.”

We don’t claim to understand John Kerry in depth, but we know this: he has built his adult life on a series of grandiose lies. These lies are sad and sick. They feature Kerry in implausible situations of great moment, and feature him as a star.

For example, he couldn’t limit his 1971 description of the atrocities committed by US soldiers to the typical problems of fighting a war against an enemy who hides among civilians. Instead he had to make up extravagant atrocities and invoke the name of Genghis Khan, whom US schoolchildren knew as the most bloodthirsty warrior in history. Even that reference was not grand enough for Kerry. He had to pronounce the name of Genghis Khan in a fancy-pants Yale way, to let us know that John Kerry is a superior man to us, learned in history and the ways of warfare.

Christmas in Cambodia is even more grandiose. Kerry gave the famous speech that undermined his Presidential run (seared–seared) on March 27, 1986. Of course Kerry was not in Cambodia on Chistmas in 1968, and his serial cover-ups and backtracking on this lie did as much as anything else to undermine his candidacy in the last election. But it is the nature of the lie that interests us. Among other things, Christmas in Cambodia was about being a movie star in the biggest anti-war movie to date of the Vietnam era. We refer to Kerry’s October 14, 1979 review of Apocalypse Now in the Boston Herald, in which John Kerry compared himself to Martin Sheen. As he said then:

On more than one occasion, I, like Martin Sheen in “Apocalypse Now,” took my patrol boat into Cambodia

In fact, I remember spending Christmas Day of 1968 five miles across the Cambodian border being shot at by our South Vietnamese Allies who were drunk and celebrating Christmas. The absurdity of almost being killed by our own allies in a country in which President Nixon claimed there were no American troops was very real. But nowhere in “Apocalypse Now” did I sense that kind of absurdity.

We see John Kerry as a man who has been trying to play roles all his adult life, with one eye towards the mirror to see how he is coming across. (Remember the JFK cufflinks?) He has been successful because he has always looked the part — a key test he passed with flying colors in Debate #1 with Gorge Bush, by the way, in which he appeared utterly presidential. But we see the inner Kerry as an insecure and troubled man who has used his grandiose tales to create a certain dignified and dashing image, always a couple of steps ahead of the real man.

As matters stand now, with Kerry v. SwiftBoatVets II coming to a campaign near you, there are several unfortunate consequences to John Kerry’s actions. It is sad that a man in his sixties still chooses to live this way, and worse still that he leads others to defend him in his ridiculous, serial fantasies. But most of all, it is inexcusable that the hundreds of men of the SwiftBoatVets will once again be subjected to all sorts of undeserved abuse, all because one man has so much invested in an imagined life of glory.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 1st, 2006 at 8:58 am and is filed under Democrats, General, War, art, culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.