You republican spinmeisters are very good at taking a person's strength and framing it as a weakness. Look at what you did to Kerry.
Yes, let's look at it. Kerry ran as a war hero. "I'm John Kerry, and I'm reporting for duty!" he said at the convention. His strength as a war hero was illusory, which made it very easy to frame it as weakness. It was weakness.
This was the same John Kerry who collected purple hearts for scratches, bugged out of a 12 mo tour after only 4 months, testified before the Senate that his fellow soldiers behaved like the army of Genghis Khan and committed or condoned war crimes on a daily basis. Just for the icing on this 'war hero' cake, Kerry routinely told whoppers about his service, like "Christmas in Cambodia" running guns for the mysterious CIA guy, who gave him what came to be known as 'the magic hat'.
This John Kerry was therefore cordially loathed by most of his fellow veterans, who blamed him for the fact that they were spat on as baby killers when they returned from Vietnam. That's why the Swifboat Veterans for Truth included 3/4 of the officers in Kerry's own division.
You simply cannot credibly run as a war hero if the vast majority of your fellow veterans hate you. One would think this would be obvious.
Yet to this day, the Dems cannot absorb the simple lesson here. Instead they wrap themselves in a kind of aggrieved paranoia, how Kerry was so a real gosh-darn war hero, he was just done in by the Republican smear machine. He was "Swiftboated" by operatives working for Karl Rove. Yeah, that's what happened. They have been enabled in this delusion by the NYT and all the main MSM media portals, who are reliable water-carriers for the Dem Party.
The vast majority of veterans admire John McCain, btw. |
