I have faulted both Gore and Kerry for not fighting back against the dirty tricks of rove/bush with their own allegations of bushs' shortcomings. I still think both should have made more of the multitude of character flaws of junior's and the many skeletons in his closet. The problem with my reasoning is that to get the message to the public you need media coverage and the media was 95% on the side of bush in every instance. Why wasn't bush forced to address the stories about:
a) His cocaine use and whether he was ever in trouble with the law over it.
b) His illegal handling of his stock sales.
c) Abortions for his girlfriends.
d) Many questions about his national guard non-service.
These and many other subjects were brought up during the 2000 and 2004 campaigns. When asked about such things bush would usually respond that he had already answered those questions or that he was different when he was young and imply he's perfect now. The press would then go on to the next question and you wouldn't see anything (or very little, usually giving junior's side) about it on TV. When Kerry or Gore were put into the same situation the press would pound them for an answer and you would see it on the cable news shows day after day.
I still say Gore and Kerry should have fought a more dirty campaign but I may be wrong. If you'll remember whenever false or highly exaggerated negative stories were put out about Gore or Kerry the stories were never put out by bush himself. They weren't even put out by someone who could easily be tied to him. He had the press convinced he was the one running a clean campaign and the democrats were the ones being dirty. The press gave him a free pass on almost every issue which would have shown him in any sort of bad light. This has only just changed a little bit during the past year or so when now junior's failures have become so monumental they can no longer be swept under the rug.
I can thing of no person in history who is better to compare junior to than Adolph Hitler, Adolph was well know for having others do his dirty work and convincing the public he was above it all just as junior has been. Will the public ever face the truth?
_____________________________________
Why the Swift Boat Hoax Still Matters!
Sunday's New York Times revisited the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth attacks against Sen. John Kerry and highlighted how Kerry is still working hard to clear his name and knock down any questions that remain about his stellar service in Vietnam. Kerry's not the only one nursing wounds from the Swifty attacks. For lots of people the phrase 'Swift Boat' has become synonymous with 'Florida Recount'; a dreadful, hard-to-relive chapter in campaign history, in which Republicans played bare-knuckle hardball and the press pretty much let them get away with it.
I devote an entire chapter in my new book: "Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush" to the Swift Boat hoax, not only detailing the absurdity of the allegations, but to chronicle how the press walked away from its traditional role as campaign referee and simply threw up its hands, announcing it was impossible to tell which side--Kerry or the Swifties--was telling the truth. That, despite the fact the Swifties stepped forward 35-years after-the-fact and without a single military document to back up their wild claims. (Every U.S. Navy record backed up Kerry's version of events.)
Thanksfully, over months and years the Swifties' most serious charges of faked wounds and bogus medals have proven to be fictitious; a political dirty trick. Yet thanks in large part to the press' initial timidity during those dog days of summer 2004, the Swifties remain lurking today, waiting for the next opportunity to pounce. For instance, Swifty ring leader and chronic fabricator John O'Neill recently sent out a nationwide fund-raising letter on behalf of a Vermont Republican running for the U.S. Senate. Just this week the Associated Press, profiling James Webb and his effort to unseat Virginia Republican Sen. George Allen, noted the issue of military service could become a campaign issue. (Webb was a decorated Marine; Allen never served.) The AP reported, "A top Allen adviser, Christopher J. LaCivita, was the mastermind behind Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a group of Vietnam veterans who made unsubstantiated allegations challenging Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry's record of wartime heroism."
And we now know that right after the 2004 victory Bush's brother Jeb personally thanked the factually-challenged Swifties, gushing in a January 2005 letter, "I simply cannot express in words how much I value their willingness to stand up against John Kerry."
In other words, the GOP sees the Swift Boat hoax model as a huge success, which it was, and, having put one passed the Beltway press corps, is likely to employ the same tactics again and again. Democrats and progressives are kidding themselves if they think the Swift Boat charade pulled on Kerry was an aberration. Yes, the Kerry campaign mishandled the situation, as Kerry conceded in Sunday's Times. But real blame rests with the mainstream media, and the atrocious job they did covering the story in real time, too often tip-toeing around the plain fact the allegations were nothing more than a dirty trick. Here's a key passage from my new book, Lapdogs:
-------------------------
Incredibly, faced with an elaborate campaign hoax, most in the press didn't set their sights on the Swifties or the Bush campaign which refused to denounce the lies. Instead, the punditocracy, echoing Republican spin, collectively agreed that the smear campaign was really Kerry's fault. "In some ways you can certainly say that John Kerry brought this on himself," insisted Time magazine's Carney. "He should have known that this was coming because he has experienced it in previous campaigns. He knows that John O'Neill is out there."
ABC's Chris Bury made the same point during an appearance on CNN: "Because [[Kerry's military service] is the central tenet of John Kerry's campaign....once that issue is open, it's fair game."
In a sense they were right, it was fair game--just as questions about Bush's military service were fair game. But the Swifties never played fair-- they couldn't even keep their stories straight. As their dishonesty become obvious, journalists never adjusted their coverage. Instead, pundits and reporters diverted their eyes from the porous, poorly constructed smear campaign and focused the blame on the Kerry campaign. That saved reporters the trouble of labeling Vietnam veterans as liars (not to mention Bush's father, wife, and political advisor Karl Rove who all publicly signed off on the contents of the Swifty campaign), which in turn would have unleashed the fury of right-wing press critics. It also kept the Swift Boat storyline on familiar ground, one of tactics and process—were Kerry's consultants too slow in responding? Was their coordination between the Swifts and the Bush campaign, etc.? All of that should have been secondary to the central and pressing question—Were any of these allegations true?
Time concluded Kerry's slow footedness—his faulty political instinct—was "almost worse" that the Swift Boat charges themselves, which Times conceded were "reckless and unfair." [Emphasis added.] In the eyes of the D.C. media elite, not successfully knocking down libelous charges was "almost worse" than lobbing them. For reporters (like Republicans), the whole controversy was born at the Democratic convention when Kerry, they said, went overboard with his Vietnam references. "Fifty percent of the convention, or more, was about [Vietnam ], and his speech was about that," insisted New York Times reporter Adam Nagourney. With all that nostalgia, "There was not, I think it's fair to say, that much talk about what [Kerry] would do as president."
Fact: During his nearly 60-minutes convention address, Kerry made less than five references to his military service. By comparison, he devoted 19 paragraphs of his speech to buttressing national security, nine paragraphs to improving the economy, and six to addressing health insurance woes. But just one month later, journalists, echoing the talking points of Republicans, insisted the convention was all about Vietnam, which then somehow made it okay for partisan who had remained silent for 35 years to suddenly question Kerry's medal-winning service.
But so what if the Kerry campaign highlighted his distinguished combat service? He's hardly the first presidential candidate to do that. The notion that because Kerry talked about his war record he opened the door to false accusations was certainly a novel theory for the press to peddle. During the 1996 campaign Republican nominee Sen. Bob Dole was featured in television ads that showed him recovering from his World War II injury. Dole also talked about his service during his convention acceptance speech, ("The 10th Mountain Division, in which I served in Italy, and the Black troops of the 92nd Division who fought nearby were the proof for me once again of the truth I'm here trying to convey.") Does anybody really think that if a group of disgruntled fringe activists had bought TV time in 1996 to smear Dole's war record with bogus charges, that reporters that pundits would have tsk-tsked Dole's handlers for opening the door to such allegations by relying too much on his biography? The blame-the-victim standard in 2004 was created out of whole cloth by Republicans and warmly adopted by the journalists. It allowed them to pretend there was nothing unseemly about the whole charade.
----------------------
In Sunday's Times, the newspaper absolutely refused to acknowledge the role reporters and pundits played in helping sustain the Swift Boat hoax. Instead, the Times noted vaguely that despite the fact U.S. Navy records backed up Kerry's version of vents, for whatever reason "the charges stuck."
Next time conservative launch an updated Swift Boat hoax, progressives and online activists, not to mention Democratic campaign operatives, must make sure the press doesn't allow phony allegations to stick.
----guest blogged by Eric Boehlert
crooksandliars.com |
