The Pool of Slime

Okay, let me be one of the 1,320 bloggers that will post on this article today.

When the lowest and dirtiest attack ad of the year is finally exposed for the flimsy, error-prone, cooked up piece of bullshit that it is, if you are President Bush you probably do not want the NY Times to say this in the fourth through eighth paragraph:

Mr. Kerry called them "a front for the Bush campaign" - a charge the campaign denied.

A series of interviews and a review of documents show a web of connections to the Bush family, high-profile Texas political figures and President Bush's chief political aide, Karl Rove.

Records show that the group received the bulk of its initial financing from two men with ties to the president and his family - one a longtime political associate of Mr. Rove's, the other a trustee of the foundation for Mr. Bush's father's presidential library. A Texas publicist who once helped prepare Mr. Bush's father for his debate when he was running for vice president provided them with strategic advice. And the group's television commercial was produced by the same team that made the devastating ad mocking Michael S. Dukakis in an oversized tank helmet when he and Mr. Bush's father faced off in the 1988 presidential election.

The strategy the veterans devised would ultimately paint John Kerry the war hero as John Kerry the "baby killer" and the fabricator of the events that resulted in his war medals. But on close examination, the accounts of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth' prove to be riddled with inconsistencies. In many cases, material offered as proof by these veterans is undercut by official Navy records and the men's own statements.

Several of those now declaring Mr. Kerry "unfit" had lavished praise on him, some as recently as last year.

Gee, Karl, looks likes your slimy, craven, M.O. may have been exposed at last.

Yesterday, saw the exposure of Larry Fine Thurlow as being a discredited doofus.

In the past we've seen George Elliott, another of them, exposed as a true lying flip-flopper. But let's relive the experience for a minute:

George Elliott, one of the Vietnam veterans in the group, flew from his home in Delaware to Boston in 1996 to stand up for Mr. Kerry during a tough re-election fight, declaring at a news conference that the action that won Mr. Kerry a Silver Star was "an act of courage." ...

...In an evaluation of Mr. Kerry in 1969, Mr. Elliott, who was one of his commanders, ranked him as "not exceeded" in 11 categories, including moral courage, judgment and decisiveness, and "one of the top few" - the second-highest distinction - in the remaining five. In written comments, he called Mr. Kerry "unsurpassed," "beyond reproach" and "the acknowledged leader in his peer group."

Adrian Lonsdale, another Swiftiliar:

[Had previously] supported him with a statement about the "bravado and courage of the young officers that ran the Swift boats."

"Senator Kerry was no exception," Mr. Lonsdale told the reporters and cameras assembled at the Charlestown Navy Yard. "He was among the finest of those Swift boat drivers."

But Lonsdale, and Roy Hoffman, a retired Admiral who were the leaders of the Swift Boat crews had a reason to get back at Kerry above and beyond his later peace protesting:

Both Mr. Hoffmann and Mr. Lonsdale had publicly lauded Mr. Kerry in the past. But the book, Mr. Brinkley's "Tour of Duty," while it burnished Mr. Kerry's reputation, portrayed the two men as reckless leaders whose military approach had led to the deaths of countless sailors and innocent civilians. Several Swift boat veterans compared Mr. Hoffmann to the bloodthirsty colonel in the film "Apocalypse Now" - the one who loves the smell of Napalm in the morning.

The two men were determined to set the record, as they saw it, straight.

Hoffman, as he had when he was "in the shit" used his stars to round up people and get his revenge...and of course, he wasn't the ONLY one who wanted revenge on Kerry.

Mr. Hoffmann's phone calls led them to Texas and to John E. O'Neill, who at one point commanded the same Swift boat in Vietnam, and whose mission against him dated to 1971, when he had been recruited by the Nixon administration to debate Mr. Kerry on "The Dick Cavett Show."

And we know about O'Neill already...and the Times has more...but you can read it there, as are the connections to all sorts of wealthy Republicans including Bob Perry and Murray Spaeth, his wife, and, most importantly, Karl Rove.

And then they concocted a way to make their little conspiracy seem bigger:

The group decided to hire a private investigator to investigate Mr. Brinkley's account of the war - to find "some neutral way of actually questioning people involved in these incidents,'' Mr. O'Neill said.

But the investigator's questions did not seem neutral to some.

Patrick Runyon, who served on a mission with Mr. Kerry, said he initially thought the caller was from a pro-Kerry group, and happily gave a statement about the night Mr. Kerry won his first Purple Heart. The investigator said he would send it to him by e-mail for his signature. Mr. Runyon said the edited version was stripped of all references to enemy combat, making it look like just another night in the Mekong Delta.

"It made it sound like I didn't believe we got any returned fire," he said. "He made it sound like it was a normal operation. It was the scariest night of my life." ...

Each veteran's statement was written down as an affidavit and sent to him to sign and have notarized. But the validity of those affidavits soon came into question.

Mr. Elliott, who recommended Mr. Kerry for the Silver Star, had signed one affidavit saying Mr. Kerry "was not forthright" in the statements that had led to the award. Two weeks ago, The Boston Globe quoted him as saying that he felt he should not have signed the affidavit. He then signed a second affidavit that reaffirmed his first, which the Swift Boat Veterans gave to reporters. Mr. Elliott has refused to speak publicly since then.

"Dr. MangletheTruth", Louis Letson comes in for a special smackdown, having no evidence he actually treated Kerry, Letson says essentially, "um, you'll have to take my word for it", and there's more holes in his story and that of another not-so-swift vet" tied to it:

The group also offers the account of William L. Schachte Jr., a retired rear admiral who says in the book that he had been on the small skimmer on which Mr. Kerry was injured that night in December 1968. He contends that Mr. Kerry wounded himself while firing a grenade.

But the two other men who acknowledged that they had been with Mr. Kerry, Bill Zaladonis and Mr. Runyon, say they cannot recall a third crew member. "Me and Bill aren't the smartest, but we can count to three," Mr. Runyon said in an interview. And even Dr. Letson said he had not recalled Mr. Schachte until he had a conversation with another veteran earlier this year and received a subsequent phone call from Mr. Schachte himself.

Mr. Schachte did not return a telephone call, and a spokesman for the group said he would not comment.

There there is more on Thurlow's, now laughable, story of there being no enemy fire when Kerry (and he) won Bronze Stars for valor and Kerry had rescued Jim Rassman, a Green Beret who had been escorted up river by Kerry's boat for a period of time:

A damage report to Mr. Thurlow's boat shows that it received three bullet holes, suggesting enemy fire, and later intelligence reports indicate that one Vietcong was killed in action and five others wounded, reaffirming the presence of an enemy. Mr. Thurlow said the boat was hit the day before. He also received a Bronze Star for the day, a fact left out of "Unfit for Command."

Asked about the award, Mr. Thurlow said that he did not recall what the citation said but that he believed it had commended him for saving the lives of sailors on a boat hit by a mine. If it did mention enemy fire, he said, that was based on Mr. Kerry's false reports. The actual citation, Mr. Thurlow said, was with an ex-wife with whom he no longer has contact, and he declined to authorize the Navy to release a copy. But a copy obtained by The New York Times indicates "enemy small arms," "automatic weapons fire" and "enemy bullets flying about him." The citation was first reported by The Washington Post on Thursday.

Okay, by now the Freepers -- well to the extent they can make it to the latter portions of a 3,500 word article, have given up until the insection of Jonah's Rubber Pants Street & K-Lo's unrequited Desire Avenue can tell them what to think. So they are back to masturbating to pictures of Michelle Malkin...

"Type with one hand, type with one hand..."

Now back to our regular posting:

Here is one little insignificant bone that alleged Professor Reynolds (the brown-dwarf star of the University of Tennessee Law School) can dampen his trousers about:

As serious questions about its claims have arisen, the group has remained steadfast and adaptable.

This week, as its leaders spoke with reporters, they have focused primarily on the one allegation in the book that Mr. Kerry's campaign has not been able to put to rest: that he was not in Cambodia at Christmas in 1968, as he declared in a statement to the Senate in 1986. Even Mr. Brinkley, who has emerged as a defender of Mr. Kerry, said in an interview that it was unlikely that Mr. Kerry's Swift boat ventured into Cambodia at Christmas, though he said he believed that Mr. Kerry was probably there shortly afterward.

Oh, hooray, Instacracker (link to it? I don't think so....) has a little pyhrric that he can flog for a few more days. "But, but, Cambodia...Cambodia...Cambodia... Um, here is my 18th link to a story about Cambodia?").

And finally, like most things associated with the modern Republican Party, comes the thing that they specialize in, to dig up the deepest of dirt and capitalize on the politics of resentment (Eisenhower and now Reagan are rolling in their graves so much you wonder if the RNC put up the money to put their caskets on a rotisserie):

What drives the veterans, they acknowledge, is less what Mr. Kerry did during his time in Vietnam than what he said after. Their affidavits and their television commercial focus mostly on those antiwar statements. Most members of the group object to his using the word "atrocities" to describe what happened in Vietnam when he returned and became an antiwar activist. And they are offended, they say, by the gall of his running for president as a hero of that war.

Now you would think that the length of this post means I've copied the whole damn thing. But I haven't. It is well-worth reading. It almost makes up for our regularly having to put up with Adam Nagourney and Jodi Wilgoren...well, not really, but it is an improvement.

But the importance of the Times writing this, along with Kerry's questioning of Bush's hiding from denouncing it...when Rove's operatives are connected to it (did I mention you can find a handy-dandy graph and flowchart in the article?) is bad news for Bush, even if the fact its being talked about at all is bad for Kerry.

The question is will the press continue to put up with this bullshit. Hopefully this is a sign that at least they won't as much as they have before.

....Maybe.