I have been intrigued by the Democratic Party attack on the Bush Viet Nam record. Bush legitimately served as a fighter pilot in the National Guard. Just flying one of those things makes you a hero in my book. Yet the press went into a feeding frenzy over a twenty year accusation that he may have gotten an early out to work on a political campaign. They insisted that he release all of his records. Radicals like Terry McAlliffe (head of the Democratic National Committee) and Michael Moore (“Fahrenheit 911″) accused Bush of being AWOL. The press assured us that they were not taking sides, but that Bush had brought this upon himself by landing on that aircraft carrier with the sign, “mission accomplishedâ€. So they reported all the hype by McAlliffe and Moore.
While they maintain that Bush brought on the accusations about his Viet Nam records by landing on the air craft carrier, they refuse to see the parallel that Kerry brought on the very same criticism by running on his military record, rather than on his anti-war efforts or his 20 year Senate record. They refuse to report that Kerry’s tumultuous return came via three questionable Purple Hearts. A refusal in the face of Kerry’s light show at the Democratic Convention when he not only claimed to “defend America as a youthâ€, but also showed himself emerging from the jungles of South Viet Nam as a foot soldier armed with an M16. Since Kerry was a Speed Boat Commander, not an infantry man, in other times this would be considered ‘red meat’. The American main stream media has an agenda. The agenda is becoming more and more clear as the election nears … the agenda stated simply is to defeat George Bush at any cost. The press has no apparent appetite for anything negative about Kerry. Consider how the press has taken the heretofore Viet Nam ‘illegitimate war’, and morphed it into ‘a defense of our nation’. This statement made at the convention and repeated in Kerry’s adds, has gone unchallenged in the American press. Is Kerry saying that North Viet Nam represented a direct threat to the United States? Is he willing to disavow his post military record as Jane Fonda’s partner in his anti-Viet Nam grandiosity (including his admitted attendance and participation at a 1971 meeting of the ‘Viet Nam Veterans Against the War’ in 1971, where a plot to assassinate seven U.S. Senators was considered)? Is he willing to drop accusations that virtually all of his ‘band of brothers’ were ‘war criminals’… as he has admitted to being? Can you imagine the press’s reaction if this were Bush’s record? What would the media frenzy be if over 250 men who served with Bush made similar accusations?
When Kerry was caught in a absolute lie about being in Cambodia on Christmas Eve of 1968; rather than report the lie, the press accepted the explanation that Kerry ‘got the dates mixed up’. Let’s get this straight, we are to believe this excuse rather than the Congressional record? That record quotes Kerry as saying that date was not only ‘seared into his memory’, but also “the turning point of his lifeâ€. Furthermore, since there were virtual citadels and large munitions both on and off the waters separating Cambodia and South Viet Nam; why hasn’t the press asked just how he got that swift boat through those waters?
Over 250 men of valor who served with Kerry have stepped forward to tell us what they saw and heard in Kerry’s four month tenure in Viet Nam (“Unfit for Command†by John O’Neill and Jerome Corsi) and our press ignores them. Kerry’s own account of one of his controversial Purple Hearts (Douglas Brinkley’s “Tour of Duty,”) agrees with the fallacy of Kerry’s reporting of the incident. In his diary, given to Brinkley for the book, Kerry states he hadn’t yet been shot at on his 25th birthday, Dec. 11, 1968. The problem is that his first Purple Heart was awarded for a wound received on Dec. 2, 1968 … just as reported in “Unfit for Commandâ€.