John Kerry's real 'band of brothers'
MARK STEYN, THE JERUSALEM POST Aug. 25, 2004
A few months back, I bought a DVD set of an old TV variety show, black and white but digitally remastered. A bit too digitally remastered, as it turned out. It would be ungallant to name the lady artiste in question, but in several alarming close-ups it's all too clear she's come back from lunch a little the worse for wear, and in one scene she looks as if she's just been woken up after sleeping in the park for a week.
Not her fault. The make-up guy was making her look good enough for 1960 monochrome UHF lines. He couldn't have foreseen that 40 years on they'd have big-screen satellite TVs and DVD players and technology that would make that little facial pimple look like Mount Krakatoa about to blow through your screen.
That's what happened to John Kerry. For 25 years, he told The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, the United States Senate, and all manner of other well-known saps about his covert Yuletide operations inside Cambodia gun-running to anti-communists with his lucky CIA hat. To verify any of this would have required a trip to specialist reference libraries, looking up stuff on eye-straining microfiche, etc. So it was easier to let the old blowhard yak away and just nod occasionally.
Senator Kerry couldn't have foreseen that Al Gore would invent the Internet, and there'd be this Google thingy, and all you'd have to do is tap in a few words and a nanosecond later it would all be at your fingertips – veterans memoirs, Cambodian history, declassified Johnson administration documents, previous Kerry "stretchers" (as Mark Twain called them).
The Kerry campaign has now conceded that, by his own contemporaneous account, the young lieutenant was nowhere near Cambodia in Christmas 1968 and, if he was ever on a covert gun-running operation across the border during his four months in Vietnam, he seems to be the only rookie Swift boat lieutenant to land in the territory and get entrusted with such a mission, and it was evidently so top secret that neither his commanding officers nor the men on his own boat knew a thing about it.
Yet the grandees of the US media refuse to show any curiosity about any of this, and they think anyone who does is a nut or part of the Republican "smear machine." When it comes to this newfangled Internet business, they take the line of Walter Cronkite, the long-retired avuncular anchorman from the pre-cable era. Last week, Walter huffed that "he finds that some stories published on the Web – scandals especially – play too fast and loose with the facts." As opposed to Walter, who doesn't play fast and loose mainly because he doesn't produce any facts – not a single specific example – to back up his assertion.
And playing fast and loose with the facts may be better than playing as slow and tight with them as Walter and his chums do. Right now, some three or four of his fellow Swift boat veterans back John Kerry, whereas some hundreds of them oppose him. This in itself is surely rather remarkable. But Ron Brownstein of The Los Angeles Times deplores the "partisan venom" of the election and compares the Swift boat veterans' anti-Kerry commercial to a "snuff film." Get a grip, man. Have you ever seen a snuff film? Those Islamist nutcakes were releasing one a week a couple of months back. Sadly, the news that some 80% of his fellow Swiftees do not accord Senator Kerry the same deference the media do is all too ickily "partisan" for Ron. Maybe he'd find it all less beastly if he were to take up a position as social secretary to a dowager duchess. As Lord Charteris, the Queen's courtier, remarked of Fergie: "Vulgar, vulgar, vulgar." That's Brownstein on the Swiftees.
So for two weeks, as the Swiftees exposed Kerry's Cambodian fantasies, the networks and the "newspapers of record" were like Sherlock Holmes's dog that didn't bark – or, in this case, the sheep that didn't baa. Now the silence of the lambs has been broken. The editorialists at The New York Times have deigned to sully, belatedly, their hallowed pages with an acknowledgment of the existence of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, if not the substance of their charges. And this is what the sniffy editorialists – or at least their headline writer – have to say:
"Politics as usual."
Well, I should hope so. This is an election campaign, not a coronation – though you may be confused on that point if you get your news from the Times and the networks. Let us stipulate that the snoots at the Times are right – that the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth are a "Republican-financed group of partisans." Just as the handful of Swift boat veterans prepared to support John Kerry are a Democrat-financed group of partisans. After all, it seems unlikely that they're picking up their own hotel bills and air fares as they travel around the country as his loyal, if small, "band of brothers."
So both groups are "politically motivated." Good for them. That's what multi-party democracy is all about. The New York Times and CBS News are also "politically motivated." So is this column. It's a political column, and it's "politically motivated." One day I'll start a ballet column, and that will be balletically motivated.
So now that we've got all the preening patrician media snobbery out of the way, would it be too much to expect so-called political journalists to investigate Kerry's Cambodian stories? You know, the way they did when the comparatively minor question arose of whether Bush was AWOL from his National Guard base three decades ago. Boy, The New York Times loved that one:
February 4: "Military Service Becomes Issue in Bush-Kerry Race"
February 11: "The President's Guard Service"
February 13: "Seeking Memories of Bush at an Alabama Air Base"
February 15: "Still the Question: What Did You Do in the War?"
As the Times put it, "Mr. Bush himself also made the issue of military service fair game by posturing as a swashbuckling pilot when welcoming a carrier home from Iraq."
Well, the other feller made his military service fair game by posturing as a swashbuckling Swift Boat lieutenant to the exclusion of the other 59 years and eight months of his life. The story now is not John Kerry's weird secret-agent fantasies but the media's willingness to act as elite guardians of them. They're his real "band of brothers," happy to fish him out of their water, even if their credibility sinks in the process.
The writer is senior contributing editor for Hollinger Inc.
This article can also be read at jpost.com |
