SwiftVets.com

[Me#1You#10]

Beldar has filed suit in the court of public opinion...grab a seat in the courtroom (or the witness chair if you're of a mind)..."New" New Media v. "Established" New Media/MSM and may the TRUTH prevail...my money's on Beldar...

From BeldarBlog

[stealthy]

FTR~ Beldar is correct. No one has laid a glove on their credibility and the attacks on them by leftists like the NYTs only hurts the leftists because the case is based on common sense and anyone with any believes the SBVs.

Sullivan will claim that he was only charactering the coverage, which makes that blub accurate.

I don't read Sullivan anymore. He sees everything now through the prism of his homosexuality.
_________________
American Conservative

[Me#1You#10]

What "prism" Sullivan applies is, IMHO, irrelevant. What comes out the other end is.

I tried to watch the replay of Sullivan/Hitchens with Russert at 1 AM my time. I shouldn't have gone prone on a sofa to do that, as Mr. Sandman launched a sneak attack during a commercial break. But one thing Sullivan said hit home and, IMHO, has relegated him to the status of "once was" in terms of objective journalism.

I must paraphrase, but it went something like this. "Even IF what the SBVT is saying were true....". Let me repeat..."Even IF what the SBVT is saying were true..."

Case closed Andrew. This is NOT a qualification that one who is secure in his analysis of the facts of the case would offer. There would be no IF about it, IF you had investigated the charges and found them to be without substance. No Andrew, your dismissal is not based on fact, but on preference...and I know now that you are no longer to be trusted.

[sevry]

[Me#1You#10]

This looks like a case for District One of "Intercourts"

[wovenhearts]

THE SWIFTIES GET CALLED 'REFUTED', WHILE THE CBS MEMO IS MERELY 'DISPUTED' [09/27 09:14 AM]

From Kerry Spot: Read Beldar's commentary (below) about how the Swift Boat Vets for Truth are being called "discredited" or "refuted" without actually being proven wrong on anything.

Again, I'll emphasize that I think the Swifties let themselves get bogged down in a dispute over details that are hard to prove one way or another - like whether Kerry was shot at and missed while he was pulling Rassmann out of the water. But on other clear cases, like the Christmas in Cambodia, and the use of Kerry's testimony against POWs, they were completely right. And Kerry's lack of a detailed response, his refusal to take questions from a reporter about the book - all of it makes an independent observer suspect that the Swifties are more right than wrong about what happened during those months in Vietnam.


http://beldar.blogs.com/beldarblog/2004/09/a_challenge_to_.html

Saturday, September 25, 2004
A challenge to those who claim that the SwiftVets' allegations have been "debunked" or are "unsubstantiated"
My lawyer readers will immediately recognize this as an invitation to Kerry supporters to make a motion for partial summary judgment on the SwiftVets' claims.

This short paragraph from a New York Times article perfectly illustrates the liberal media's widespread characterization of the results to date of the SwiftVets' campaign (boldface added):

Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which drew national attention with advertisements making unsubstantiated attacks against Mr. Kerry's military service, has less money and uses several strategies to stretch its dollars, said one of its leaders, John O'Neill.

To find a similar example from the blogosphere, one need look no farther than Andrew Sullivan's passing dismissal of the SwiftVets' campaign (boldface added):

As word spread, anti-Kerry forces sent in more money to the Swift Boat Veterans for truth website, allowing them to ramp up their ad efforts. And within a few days, the old media was forced to cover the claims extensively — even if much of their coverage amounted to a debunking.

As someone who's followed the SwiftVets' campaign closely — someone who's read Brinkley's Tour of Duty, O'Neill's Unfit for Command, and Kranish et al.'s John F. Kerry: The Complete Biography cover to cover, plus all of the mainstream media reports I could find on the internet and a goodly portion of what's appeared from both political sides of the blogosphere — I'm simply stunned to read these sorts of statements.

I can think of one major SwiftVets allegation on which they've arguably failed to offer more than circumstantial evidence — that Kerry "gamed the system" to get his medals. Kerry's stonewall — his refusal to sign Standard Form 180 and thereby release the documentation that should, if it exists, reveal still-hidden details like how he came to get his first Purple Heart — has been effective in keeping the SwiftVets from nailing down that point with direct evidence. Yet the circumstantial case is powerful — Kerry's commanding officer at the time, Skip Hibbard, says he refused to approve that Purple Heart in December 1968, yet Kerry showed up with the medal anyway in March 1969 in some as-yet-unexplained fashion.

I can think of other SwiftVets allegations on which there is directly competing evidence that requires the public to draw conclusions. For example, does one credit Adm. Bill Schachte's account of his first-hand knowledge of how Kerry received the trivial wound that led to his first Purple Heart, or does one credit Zaldonis' and Runyan's claims that Schachte wasn't aboard the skimmer? Which of the eyewitnesses does one choose to find credible on the question of whether Kerry was or wasn't under enemy fire when he plucked Rassmann from the Bay Hap River? Other allegations require an exercise of subjective judgment. For example, was Kerry's pursuit and dispatching of a single VC soldier sufficiently valorous to merit his Silver Star?

But on none of these issues I've just listed have the SwiftVets' allegations been "debunked" or proven "unsubstantiated." Andrew Sullivan or the NYT repeating over and over that they have been simply don't make them so. To employ the legal jargon of summary judgment proceedings, a rational factfinder could conclude from the evidence that the SwiftVets have produced on each of these allegations that, indeed, they're true. A trial judge who dismissed these allegations outright, without letting the factfinder (typically a jury) consider them, would certainly be reversed on appeal and told to let the jury do its work. They haven't, in lay terms, been "debunked" — but rather, they're fiercely disputed by competent evidence (some of it eyewitness, some of it circumstantial, some of it documentary).

Hence my challenge for the weekend to my readers — you're probably a minority, as these things go, but I know from my comments pages that you're out there — who may agree with the NYT or Mr. Sullivan:

Can you identify even one specific and material SwiftVets allegation that you believe to have been fully "debunked" or fully proven to be "unsubstantiated"?

Some ground rules for this challenge that I think are not unreasonable:

By "specific," I mean to exclude sweeping conclusions like "John Kerry wasn't as big a hero as he's made out." By material, I mean to exclude trivia like "the VC soldier John Kerry shot was in a uniform instead of in a loincloth." And I ask that if you're to make an honest effort to meet my challenge, you provide quotes and links, both to the SwiftVets' allegations and to the evidence that you offer to show debunking or lack of substantiation.

If you rely on documents — for example, Larry Thurlow's Bronze Star citation as support for the proposition that he and Kerry were under enemy fire after PCF 3 was struck by a mine — then to reach "debunked" status, you ought to show that there are no contrary eyewitness accounts to those documents, nor other contrary documents. Otherwise, you've merely established that a dispute exists — what lawyers would call a "genuine issue of fact" that must be resolved by a judgment call as to which side has the greater weight of the credible evidence.

Saying your side has the greater weight of the evidence isn't "debunking" or showing that something is "unsubstantiated," it's saying that your side ought to ultimately prevail on the factual dispute, and that's a very different kettle of fish. To use a converse example by way of illustration: I would argue that the "Christmas in Cambodia" story repeatedly told by Sen. Kerry has indeed been thoroughly debunked and proved unsubstantiated — that is, there simply is no credible evidence from which any rational factfinder could conclude that Kerry's claim to have spent Christmas 1968 several miles inside Cambodia, under friendly fire and on a secret mission, was truthful.

I of course reserve the right to offer a rebuttal, as will, I'm sure, my like-minded readers. But I'm genuinely curious about this, and will try to summarize the results of this challenge fairly in a new post sometime early next week.

[/url]http://www.nationalreview.com/kerry/kerryspot.asp[/url]

[fortdixlover]

[dcrhere]

What the Swities ought to do is use the beldar post as a baseline and offer $100,000 out of the ad budget to anyone who can refute the Swifty claims.

In the case of O'Reilly and the MSM, offer it to the charity of their choice.

After all, the MSM still brings up Gary Trudeau's $10,000 bounty for anyone who can prove Bush was at the National Guard in Alabama.

Hold a press conference. Put the money in escrow and make it legitimate. Toss it in the face of O'Reilly, Sullivan, etc. to put their money where their mouth is. You'd get more ink that way than simply spending another $100,000 in media buys.