Here's another fine example of the Dems trashing the Military Vets:
[BTW, IF you don't remember who Lawrence O'Donnell is: ]
Lawrence O'Donnell (born 1955) is a MSNBC political analyst who has appeared on The McLaughlin Group and The Al Franken Show.
Born in Boston, he was also an Emmy Award-winning producer and writer for the NBC series The West Wing and creator and executive producer of the late NBC series, Mister Sterling.
Although he is widely known as a relatively outspoken TV journalist, O’Donnell was the Democratic Chief of Staff of the United States Senate Committee on Finance from 1993 through 1995. In 1992, he was Chief of Staff of the United States Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_O'Donnell
polipundit.com
Friday, October 22nd, 2004
Lawrence O’Donnell Lost It
I am watching Scarborough Country right now and Lawrence O’Donnell has just lost it. He has been yelling at John O’Neill for about 12 minutes and called him a liar at least a couple dozen times during that same time period. He has continued to shout John O’Neill down after returning from commercial and now just called him a creepy liar. He has not let O’Neill get a word in edgewise and has not answered any charges beyond calling them lies. I can’t wait to get the trascript of this one. The Left is in total meltdown. I have never seen them this hysterical. Smells like raving desperation to me. If anyone else saw this I would love your comments.
UPDATE: I had heard about O’Donnell’s appearance on Scarborough Country last Friday night, but had not seen it. He has truly been working up to tonight’s breakdown. The transcript from last week is here. Read it to see how many times O’Donnell can say “lesbian sex” in one cable show segment. He goes on later in the show to say some incredibly strange things about God:
O‘DONNELL: George Bush‘s God is a very strange God. This is a God who wants everyone to be free. That‘s a very, very peculiarly frustrated God. That is a God that has been apparently frustrated for centuries in George Bush‘s imagination.
UPDATE: Michelle Malkin has a great post up on this complete with a picture of the meltdown and a link to the audio.
UPDATE: The Daily Recycler has the VIDEO! (Hat tip to Michelle Malkin)
-- Lorie Byrd
888888888888888
msnbc.msn.com
'Scarborough Country' for Oct. 22
Read the transcript to the 10 p.m. ET show
PAT BUCHANAN, GUEST HOST: The swift boat vets target the battleground states with a $5 million ad buy, but will the strategy work? We‘ll ask “Unfit For Command” author John O‘Neill.
Then, she‘s a cheeky billionaire who says exactly what she thinks.
But is America ready for Teresa Heinz Kerry? And are her gaffes hurting her husband‘s campaign?
Plus, John Kerry goes on a wild goose chase to macho up his image.
Did it backfire? We‘ll talk to one of his hunting buddies.
ANNOUNCER: From the press room, to the courtroom, to the halls of Congress, Joe Scarborough has seen it all. Welcome to SCARBOROUGH COUNTRY.
BUCHANAN: Hi. I‘m Pat Buchanan, sitting in for Joe.
The Swift Boat Veterans For Truth, a 527 organization representing more than 250 swift boat veterans who served in Vietnam with John Kerry, aired their first ad on August 5. Arguably, these ads became the single most effective attack weapon in this year‘s election. The swift vets have just purchased $5 million of additional airtime in Florida and Ohio and will run two anti-Kerry ads.
Here‘s a look at one of them.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, SWIFT BOAT VETERANS FOR TRUTH AD)
NARRATOR: They served their country with courage and distinction. They‘re the men who served with John Kerry in Vietnam. They‘re his entire chain of command, most of the officers in Kerry‘s unit, even the gunner from his own boat, and they‘re the men who spent years in North Vietnamese prison camps, tortured for refusing to confess what John Kerry accused them of, being war criminals.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BUCHANAN: Joining me now, the author of the best-selling book “Unfit For Command” and a member of Swift Boat Veterans For Truth, John O‘Neill.
Welcome, John.
This is a very large buy, $5 million, Florida and Ohio. If you add it all up, how much money has your organization raised and does it intend to spend before Election Day November 2?
JOHN O‘NEILL, SWIFT BOAT VETERANS FOR TRUTH: We have gotten, Pat, 110,000 individual contributions. It‘s one of the largest number, we believe, of individual contributions ever received, particularly for a small Web site like ours. The total amount of money we‘ve raised is approaching $22 million. We‘ll spend every single penny before Election Day. We‘ll spend them on ads. Not one of our guys has gotten a dime. Every single penny will go into these ads as well, as a mailing that we have made to 1.2 million veterans in these and other states and telephone calls that our guys are making both personally and through phone banks right now.
We hope to make two million calls to the veterans in those states.
BUCHANAN: All right, which do you think—this is a brand new ad.
Lawrence O‘Donnell, incidentally, is here with me.
This is a brand new ad, and I have not seen it. Which of the past ads that you ran from the first day appear to have been the most effective in changing minds?
O‘NEILL: I think that probably the first and second ads, Pat. The first and second ads were downloaded, although we had very little money and could buy very little time with either of them.
On the first ad, Kerry threatened to sue us, and that produced widespread free media, but the first and second ads were individually downloaded at our Web site, SwiftVets.com, each—one more than three million times, the other one more than two million times. That means people downloaded it and circulated them throughout the Internet.
BUCHANAN: All right, look, a poll that‘s been conducted by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania testifies to the impact, John, of the swift boat ads.
The center asked veterans the question, is Bush a stronger leader than Kerry? Before the Democratic Convention, some 57 percent of veterans said Bush was a stronger leader than Kerry. Immediately after the Democratic Convention, however, Bush‘s number dropped to 43 percent. But after nearly a month of swift boat ads in August, Bush was back up to 56 percent.
Now, clearly, Kerry made gains with veterans at his convention, but it all vanished after the swift boat ads of August. Now, John, what I want to ask you is this. I‘m surprised that we have not seen Max Cleland. We did back I think in August or September. Why has his band of brothers, all but one of whom I believe served on the boat with him, or right beside him, why have they not come forward to attack your ads or to contradict them or to challenge them?
O‘NEILL: The real reason, Pat, is there‘s no way they can contradict in any substantial form the book “Unfit For Command,” and so they‘ve chosen to convert Kerry from a purported brave veteran, a deal that they can‘t sustain, into now being a goose hunter, or sometimes he‘s an altar boy.
The truth is that there are 23 million veterans, and they are a band of brothers. And they understand integrity and loyalty. And they resent very deeply Kerry‘s actions in calling us war criminals. That‘s why the veteran vote is going out to sea on Kerry.
BUCHANAN: All right, let me ask you, Lawrence O‘Donnell, clearly, Kerry has expressed anger about these ads. And he said later, I should have answered them earlier in August, and we didn‘t do it, and it clearly hurt.
But Max Cleland was very public. He went down to Crawford, Texas, to the ranch. Why has Kerry not only ignored the ads, but almost dropped all references? You know, at the convention was the controversy, John Kerry reporting for duty. Why has he dropped all of that now? Are they just trying to sweep that aside or what?
LAWRENCE O‘DONNELL, MSNBC SR. POLITICAL ANALYST: Well, let‘s get back to the truth.
The fact of the matter is that John O‘Neill on MSNBC had to face—debate an argument with Kerry‘s bands of brothers people who served with him in Vietnam and knew him well, and plenty of the people who served on that boat with him have come on MSNBC and other networks and refuted much of what‘s in that book.
And then John O‘Neill‘s own sources, like Larry Thurlow, turned out to be nuts. He turned out to claim in John O‘Neill‘s book—and Pat Buchanan and I have both written nonfiction books, and we write them to a very high standard, not this O‘Neill standard, where he never tells you in his book that Thurlow got a Bronze Star for the same thing that Kerry got a Bronze Star for, the same encounter with the enemy. And that citation says that there was enemy fire.
And the guy, and this Thurlow, who received this Bronze Star, wants us to believe that 35 years had passed and he had never read the words on his own citation. It‘s one of the many lies that the book advances. To me, the most interesting lie, John O‘Neill, that I would submit to you that you should is, you make a lying claim that John Kerry‘s anti-war activity prolonged the amount of time that prisoners of war were held in Vietnam.
You know the truth is what got them out of Vietnam was ending the war. You know the truth is that John Kerry helped end that war sooner through the protests. And I‘d like to ask you, John O‘Neill, when you got back from Vietnam, what did you do to save a single life that you left behind in Vietnam? What did you do to get the American soldiers out of Vietnam?
(CROSSTALK)
BUCHANAN: Hold it. OK.
Go ahead, John O‘Neill.
O‘NEILL: I would like to respond.
First of all, Larry, I don‘t think there‘s a thing you said that wasn‘t a lie in everything you just said. To start off with, with respect to John Kerry, John Kerry‘s anti-war activities didn‘t get any POWs home. The Treaty of Paris got the POWs home.
(CROSSTALK)
O‘DONNELL: Ending the war, which you didn‘t do a thing to do. You didn‘t have the courage to lift a finger against it.
(CROSSTALK)
BUCHANAN: Look, he has got a right to respond. I was in the White House at the time. Nixon had brought half the troops home by the time Kerry made his protest.
Go ahead, John O‘Neill.
O‘NEILL: What actually happened, Kerry wanted to abandon ship and leave the POWs there. We negotiated a treaty that brought them home. That‘s why they‘re all here. If Kerry had helped them out, they wouldn‘t be in that photograph with us. Kerry‘s a guy they‘ll never forget. He wanted to leave them behind.
(CROSSTALK)
O‘DONNELL: That‘s a lie, John O‘Neill. Keep lying. It‘s all you do.
(CROSSTALK)
BUCHANAN: Hold it, John O‘Neill.
How do you justify the—how do you justify the statement you just made that Kerry wanted to leave the POWs behind?
O‘DONNELL: Lies. He doesn‘t justify anything.
BUCHANAN: Where did he do that?
O‘NEILL: On the Dick Cavett show and elsewhere, John Kerry‘s position was that we should accept the Madame Binh seven-point proposal, which called for unilateral withdrawal, setting a date after which at some future time, we‘d negotiate the return of the POWs.
So we would set a date. We would withdraw and then we would begin to discuss how to bring them home. That would have never worked. Our position was, you had to have a deal where the POWs came home. The POWs know that. This is like trying to claim—that‘s why they‘re all with us, because he would have let them rot in jails.
(CROSSTALK)
O‘NEILL: With respect to the rest of what you said, Larry...
(CROSSTALK)
O‘DONNELL: What did you do to end the war? What did you do to get them out? What did you do to end the war? You didn‘t lift a finger.
O‘NEILL: Oh, you‘re wrong. You‘re exactly wrong, Larry. First of all, I spent 12 months there. I wasn‘t a fake who spent three months, like John Kerry.
O‘DONNELL: What did you do to end the war, not what you did to fight it?
(CROSSTALK)
BUCHANAN: Lawrence, you‘ve asked that. You‘ve asked it six times.
Go ahead.
(CROSSTALK)
O‘NEILL: Then I debated John Kerry, Larry. I debated him on television. I proved he was lying. And John Kerry went home in 1971.
(CROSSTALK)
O‘DONNELL: One sentence about what you did to end it.
(CROSSTALK)
O‘DONNELL: What did you do to end the illegal American war in Vietnam? One sentence.
(CROSSTALK)
BUCHANAN: All right, let me give you something, my friend.
The illegal war in Vietnam, we were taken into it by John F. Kennedy and by Lyndon Baines Johnson. When Nixon came into office, we had 535,000 people there, and John Kerry was sent there by Lyndon Johnson. If it was illegal, it was your party that did it.
(CROSSTALK)
O‘DONNELL: Nixon continued the illegal war for no reason. He won nothing. The peace plan he got he could have gotten on the first day of his presidency.
(CROSSTALK)
BUCHANAN: Let me get a specific point here.
And, John O‘Neill, the Thurlow question, now, I‘m familiar with this. This was the incident in the river. Now, Thurlow did get a Bronze Star, and the Bronze Star did say...
(CROSSTALK)
O‘DONNELL: Which is not in John O‘Neill‘s book, because it‘s a lie.
BUCHANAN: Hold it. It‘s all there.
Look, but he got a Bronze Star, and it did say he took fire. My understanding is, he got the Bronze Star a couple of months later, that it came to him, and it did say he took fire. Thurlow does now say that after the explosion in the river, they fired into the bank for 45 seconds or something, and when they got no return fire, no fire at all, they stopped, and they rescued that other boat.
Now, how does Thurlow answer the question Larry raises about what‘s on his Bronze Star citation?
O‘NEILL: Well, here‘s what Thurlow says.
Thurlow says that, as everyone has said and as Kerry has admitted, he left the scene. He didn‘t stick around. He left the scene and came back. The question is, when he finally came back, was there fire? There are 11 different people, including all four officers, not just Thurlow, and seven enlisted men who say there was no fire.
But, understand, when Kerry came back and picked up Rassmann, he had stayed in exactly the same place. They all did for an hour and a half. There‘s not a bullet hole in any of the boats. Nobody was wounded. This is a 75-yard-wide canal.
BUCHANAN: Tell me, John, about—did not the citation Thurlow got say that they were taking fire?
O‘NEILL: It said under fire. That‘s true. It was based upon Kerry‘s own after-action report.
O‘DONNELL: That‘s a lie. It‘s another lie. That‘s a lie.
O‘NEILL: Which said there had been 5,000 meters of fire.
O‘DONNELL: Absolutely lie.
(CROSSTALK)
O‘DONNELL: You lie in that book endlessly claiming that reports belonged to Kerry that don‘t have his name on it, John O‘Neill.
You lie about documents endlessly. His name is not on the reports.
You‘re just lying about it.
(CROSSTALK)
O‘DONNELL: And you lied about Thurlow‘s Bronze Star. You lied about it as long as you could until “The New York Times” found the wording of what was on the citation that you, as a lying writer, refused to put in your pack-of-lies book.
(CROSSTALK)
O‘DONNELL: Disgusting, lying book.
BUCHANAN: John, let me ask you this.
O‘NEILL: And you, Larry, are a professional liar.
(CROSSTALK)
O‘DONNELL: You have no standards, John O‘Neill, as an author. And you know it. It‘s a pack of lies. You are unfit to publish.
(CROSSTALK)
O‘NEILL: There are 254 of us, Larry. It‘s a little hard to call us all liars.
BUCHANAN: All right, John O‘Neill, let me ask you a quick question. How do you know for certain that John Kerry wrote the after-action report that said the boats were under fire?
O‘NEILL: It has been tracked down specifically in...
O‘DONNELL: Lies.
(CROSSTALK)
BUCHANAN: Oh, let him talk.
(CROSSTALK)
O‘DONNELL: He just lies. He just spews out lies.
(CROSSTALK)
O‘DONNELL: Point to his name on the report, you liar. Point to his name, you liar. These are military records. Point to a name.
(CROSSTALK)
O‘NEILL: I will, if you‘ll shut up, Larry. You can‘t just scream everybody down.
(CROSSTALK)
O‘DONNELL: There‘s no name. You just spew lies.
(CROSSTALK)
O‘NEILL: ... let everybody talk, isn‘t...
(CROSSTALK)
BUCHANAN: Look, Lawrence, take it easy. You‘ve made your point.
We‘re going to take a break. We‘re going to give John O‘Neill a chance to answer that when we come back. We‘ll continue this discussion after the break.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BUCHANAN: If you‘re near Rockefeller Center this month, swing by Democracy Plaza, NBC‘s new election headquarters. You can get your picture taken in the Oval Office, send the future president an e-mail, and see a rare copy of the Declaration of Independence. If you‘re not in New York, check it out on the Web at Democracy.MSNBC.com.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BUCHANAN: Welcome back.
We‘re talking with the author of “Unfit For Command,” John O‘Neill, and Lawrence O‘Donnell is with me here in the studio Washington.
BUCHANAN: We have an e-mail, Lawrence, that says: “Why is Mr. O‘Donnell so angry? In fact, why are Democrats so angry? If they don‘t calm themselves down, they‘re going to have a heart attack.”
O‘DONNELL: I just hate the lies of John O‘Neill.
(CROSSTALK)
O‘DONNELL: I hate lies.
BUCHANAN: I know. Now, you‘ve argued that these are lies, but let me suggest...
O‘DONNELL: It‘s not an argument. They‘re proven lies. Every single journalistic look at this book has ripped it apart, left it in shreds. O‘Neill is a liar. He‘s been a liar for 35 years about this. And he found other liars to...
(CROSSTALK)
BUCHANAN: Why cannot John Kerry‘s band of brothers and Max Cleland come on and take this...
O‘DONNELL: They have come on. They have told you. Every single person who served with John Kerry...
(CROSSTALK)
BUCHANAN: I‘ve gone through every single incident.
O‘DONNELL: O‘Neill never served with them, never met them until Vietnam. Everybody who was on that boat with Kerry says all of this stuff is a lie.
(CROSSTALK)
BUCHANAN: Why have none of them signed the sworn affidavits that admirals and others have signed?
(CROSSTALK)
O‘DONNELL: Those affidavits have no legal meaning. They are fraudulent.
(CROSSTALK)
BUCHANAN: They‘re fraudulent? Twenty people got up and lied and signed their name to it?
O‘DONNELL: Yes.
(CROSSTALK)
O‘DONNELL: Because some of those people have signed their names to reports that say John Kerry‘s conduct in Vietnam was exemplary, reports written at the time. You can‘t sign both documents. They are lying somewhere.
(CROSSTALK)
O‘NEILL: Can I say one thing?
BUCHANAN: John O‘Neill, go ahead, John.
O‘NEILL: Pat, Mr. O‘Donnell has certainly shown he has a good pair of lungs.
But to try and return a little bit to just basic information, you asked the question, how do we know the report was written by Kerry? The first way we know that is that the other four officers that day, all four of them, say Kerry wrote it.
The second way we know it is the journalist Tom Lipscomb tracked the report to a Coast Guard cutter and proved that the only one on the cutter to write the report was John Kerry. Third, the report is compatible with John Kerry‘s account, which as late as the Democratic Convention.
O‘DONNELL: What are the initials on the report?
(CROSSTALK)
BUCHANAN: Let him finish.
(CROSSTALK)
O‘NEILL: Mr. O‘Donnell, this is what you all did to the POWs.
(CROSSTALK)
O‘DONNELL: Just tell me the initials, you liar.
O‘NEILL: You‘re afraid of the American people getting the truth.
That‘s why you scream and you yell.
O‘DONNELL: Creepy liar.
(CROSSTALK)
AND THERE IS MUCH MORE FROM THIS TRANSCRIPT AT THE LINK.....SEE the Representative of the Democrats totally go nuttier by the minute, and show America what it would be like under their thumb again.....http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6327790/ |
