papaslap

One guy can fly a jet fighter while the other guy can beach a tollycraft.

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What jet fighter? Only fighting Bush did while Kerry served his Country (Vietnam), was fighting off the many hangovers from alcohol and drugs abuse.
The drug and alcohol abuse has cause permanent brain damage and is why he can't remember how to complete a whole sentence. Most people in America and the World see Bush as a HOMER SIMPSON like character with nuclear weapons and a wet brain. Doh! Some scary stuff.

Bush was AWOL and a alcoholic Drug addict, while Kerry was serving his Country honorably.

What's your point?

"Like I said, not one of these characters has challenged Kerry's record where it really mattered. With the US Navy. That speaks volumns about an agenda."

Same for GW's NAtnl Guard service then?


Two sides to every coin.

"Nuanced? Kerry's story just doesn't add up

By Mark Steyn

John Kerry is too strange to be president. I don't mean "strange" in the way of his predecessor. Al Gore, the first Android-American to run for president, was weird. But Kerry's strangeness is of an entirely different order. For purposes of comparison, go back a couple of months to that fevered few weeks when Michael Moore, bigshot Democrats and the media were hounding Bush over his allegedly spotty attendance in the Texas Air National Guard during the early Seventies.

The point is, even if it were true, it fits the Bush narrative: he was a lackadaisical son of privilege who goofed around, drank too much, found Jesus, sobered up and got his life together. If you've got 30-year-old pictures of him dancing naked on a bar in Mexico when he was supposed to be back at the air base, so what? It's compatible with the official version. That's Bush: the bad stuff still fits the picture.

But with Kerry, even before any gaffes or scandals, the official narrative makes no sense. He's publicly opposed to the Vietnam War. But he volunteers for it. Then he comes back disgusted with his experience in war, publicly hurls his medals away (or someone else's: that story keeps changing), denounces his fellow veterans as war criminals, torturers and rapists, and claims that he personally committed atrocities.

But then he decides to run for president and suddenly Jane Fonda morphs into John Wayne and all those war criminals are war heroes he wants at every rally and he's got his medals back and his disgust at his wartime experience has mysteriously turned into pride in his wartime experience to the exclusion of all else.

If Steven Spielberg, Barbra Streisand or any of his other Hollywood supporters got a script like that, they'd send it to rewrite. Either that or they'd figure they'd got an early, rejected draft of the new Manchurian Candidate.

That's what people mean when they talk about how "complex" and "nuanced" Kerry is. They don't mean his positions on the great questions of the day are complex and nuanced.

Quite the contrary: for the purposes of this campaign, his entire political career – 20 years as Senator, Lieutenant-Governor to Michael Dukakis – has been dropped from his CV. If Kerry had exhibited the slightest trace of any interestingly complex view of any policy matter, you can be sure we'd have heard about it. But he hasn't.

So the only "complex" aspect of the Kerry campaign is the man himself, who's complex in ways that don't seem entirely healthy. My chums across the page were rather dismissive yesterday about "Swift Boat Veterans For Truth", a group of fellow officers who think he's unfit to be president.

Let's take it as read that Swiftees who support or oppose Kerry are "politically motivated": the fact is, the Swiftees opposed to him significantly outnumber the four who support him, which is interesting in itself. But consider just one of the items from their new book about him.

For decades, John Kerry has told anyone who'd listen that at Christmas 1968 he was on an illegal mission inside Cambodia. On the floor of the Senate in 1986, while attacking President Reagan for turning Central America into another Vietnam quagmire (wrong as usual), Kerry said: "I remember Christmas of 1968 sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia. I remember what it was like to be shot at by the Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge and Cambodians, and have the President of the United States telling the American people that I was not there; the troops were not in Cambodia. I have that memory which is seared – seared – in me."

The illegal Yuletide foray was so seared into him that he brought it up at every opportunity.

As he told the Boston Herald in 1979, "I remember spending Christmas Eve of 1968 five miles across the Cambodian border being shot at by our South Vietnamese allies who were drunk and celebrating Christmas. The absurdity of almost being killed by our own allies in a country in which President Nixon claimed there were no American troops was very real."

LBJ was President on Christmas Eve 1968, but let that pass. Here's an Associated Press story from 1992: "Navy Lt John Kerry knew he had no business steering his Mekong River patrol boat across the border into Cambodia, but orders were orders… By Christmas 1968, part of Kerry's patrol extended across the border of South Vietnam into Cambodia."

Just one problem. It never happened. Every living officer up his chain of command says Kerry was never ordered to Cambodia. At least three of his five crewmen say their boat was never in Cambodia. And if you don't believe any of his fellow veterans, read the excerpt from Kerry's own journal published in Tour Of Duty, the recent hagiography by Douglas Brinkley.

On December 24 1968, Kerry was at Sa Dec – that's well inside Vietnam, 55 miles from the Cambodian border – and waxing wistful to his diary about a quiet Christmas far from home: "Visions of sugarplums really do dance through your head and you think of stockings and snow and roast chestnuts and fires with birch logs and all that is good and warm and real. It's Christmas Eve."

I'm Vietnammed out. But it's the centrepiece of Kerry's campaign: the other day, asked a straightforward question about 9/11, he stuck to the current millennium for a good 20 seconds and then veered off into "the war that I fought in was a war where we saw America lose its support for the war, where the soldiers came back having had to do what our soldiers are doing today, carry an M-16 in another country, try to tell the difference between friend and foe. I know what it's like to go out at night on patrol", etc, etc. So, since Vietnam seems to be the only subject on which he has anything to say, it would be reassuring to know that at least he's got that right.

For most of his adult life John Kerry has peddled as his central Vietnam anecdote – the one that drove him to turn on his nation's leaders – what appears to be a complete fantasy. Why would he do such a thing? If there's a good answer to that question, maybe someone in his doting press pack would like to ask it.

These Swift Boat guys keep changing their stories. On Nightline last evening, one of guys in the attack Ad was shown on video with a glowing recommendation of Kerry when he was running for Senator in 1996.

Let Bush and his supporters be revealed for what the represent, ugly partisons with nothing of value to share but contrived charachter attacks! The fact is that Kerry is a decorated Veteran and Bush is not and no books or political adds are going to change that!

Wow Jeff'ed you blast partisan attacks and then knock one off for yourself. Consistantly inconsistant is the left.

BTW it's a dodge to defend Kerry with attacks on Bush. If your kid was smoking dope and you where busting him for it would you allow him off the hook because he attacked the next door neighbor for his past DWI. Makes about as much snse as what you are saying.

Hello pot................meet the kettle.

Gawd! Do you listen to yourself??!! And you call Kerry a flip-flopper? Holy smokes!!

You are too much sometimes.

What is very clear is that Kerry can say anything he wants and his actions can be counter to what he says. He can lie,contradict himself all day long and his base voters don't care. Not because he is JF Kerry but because he is not GW Bush.

Post just one 'contradiction'.

TK,

I blast partisan attacks when they lack credibility. To use AM's term, when some of "the not so Swift Boat guys" one day support Kerry and the next sign on to this smear campaign, which is backed by big $$ Republican contributions, this should cause everyone to question their integrity, especially when the are going after a decorated Veteran.

I don't have a problem with Veterans who dislike what Kerry had to say after the war. That is their perogitive. The Nightline program, not only highlighted the inconsistencies of the partisan attack adds, but also that Veterans seem to be very split on Kerry, some admire that he spoke his mind and some think he went over the line.

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1.) "I actually did vote for the 87 billion dollars, before I voted against it."--- John "they call him Flipper-Flipper.... king of the Mekong" Kerry

Knowing the full context and depth of the issue, what is contradictory about that?

:rolleyes:

I try to follow what the current administration does to, or for, veterans. It ain't good.

They claim that Bouche has allocated more for vets than before, but the truth is that he's continually denied the amount VA has asked for. Consider, also, the number of wounded vets coming from Afghanistan and Iraq now. The number of people needing VA benefits is growing tremendously, and is going to be a major concern in the near future.

And he's still trying to close VA hospitals.