SwiftVets.com

[fortdixlover]

So, on the memory "seared - seared" into his brain, John Kerry's spokesman J. Johnson says "John Kerry has said on the record that he had a mistaken recollection earlier. He talked about a combat situation on Christmas Eve 1968 which at one point he said occurred in Cambodia. He has since corrected the record to say it was some place on a river near Cambodia and he is certain that at some point subsequent to that he was in Cambodia. My understanding is that he is not certain about that date ... I believe he has corrected the record to say it was some place near Cambodia he is not certain whether it was in Cambodia but he is certain there was some point subsequent to that that he was in Cambodia.

Unfortunately, this is not horseshoes. Close doesn't count. "Some place near Cambodia" makes the entire Kerry's 1968 Christmas Carol worthless. Hw wasn't in Cambodia in 1968. He wasn't shot at by Cambodians in 1968. He wasn't ordered into Cambodia.

Per PowerLine, "the whole point of Kerry's now retracted claim that he was in Cambodia (and the reason why his memory of being there might have been "searing") was to show that President Nixon was lying when he said that American combat forces were in Cambodia. Nixon wouldn't have been lying if Kerry had merely been near Cambodia. For purposes of the point Kerry was making on the Senate floor, if he wasn't actually in Cambodia he might just as well have been in Aspen."

The man can't get his basic facts straight and wants to be U.S. President.

THE BIGGEST PROBLEM HERE, HOWEVER, IS THE SILENCE OF THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA. OUR MAINSTREAM MEDIA APPEARS TO BE WORTHESS AND UNTRUSTWORTHY AS WELL.

FDL


http://dislogue.dansch.net/archives/000090.html

Kerry's Disappearing Art

"I wish they had a delete button on LexisNexis."
--John Kerry.

That statement in a Washington Post article is especially interesting in light of recent modifications to the Kerry campaign website and other published documents on the web surrounding the historical record of Mssr. Kerry's career. He is quoted saying,


"I'll say thank you to every journalist who wrote [expletive] articles about me," he joked. Then he added, "I plead guilty to being a little brash when I first got into politics. I wish they had a delete button on LexisNexis."

Analyzing this is illuminative of character.

First he focuses anger on the articles and indirectly on the jouralists. Just because he is joking does not mean there isn't real anger driving the joking. We often use this sort of joking as a way to tone down and still express our anger, letting others know we're angry without exposing them to its real lash. That he used an expletive which the paper chose not to print, and that he's a politician conscious of how this sort of expletive comes across, shows it's more than casual joking. It's joking with a purpose. He was communicating a desire that reporters be careful what they write about him because it might hurt his election chances.

Next he pleads "guilty to being a little brash." This can be taken by those who choose to as an apology for things he's said and done in the past. But it is not that. It is an admission that what he did in the past can or is adversely affecting his efforts to accomplish his goals now.

Finally we get the statement the reminds me of a book a friend loaned me recently, The Commisar Vanishes, by David King. The book shows graphically how Stalin sought to force a rewriting (or re-viewing) of history by modifying pictures, paintings, and textual works to remove that and those which he preferred forgotten. Kerry appears to share that impulse.

The activities of his campaign team and his supporters provide some evidence of this statement. One of the earliest incidents involved the Daily Kos furor surrounding the statements made regarding the contractors killed in Fallujah. At the time, Daily Kos was a significant fundraiser online for Kerry and was linked from Kerry's campaign site. When mushroom clouds began erupting over blogs regarding the callousness of Daily Kos, Kos purged the original statement from that blog and issued a lame apology. The Kerry site diappeared the link to Kos. At roughly the same time, the Kerry site disappeared a link to **, another source of controversial (to be clinical) voices singing harmony to the songs Kerry sang back in this days as icon for Vietnam Veterans Against the Wars.

Purging links may not on the surface appear to be the same as airbrushing people out of photographs. But each is an attempt to hide the fact that there were links between people, links that matter historically. The campaign did issue a statement about Kos, but admitted no error in associating with entities so extreme.

Then there was the yellowcake episode culminating in Joe Wilson's accusations that the Bush administration lied when it pronounced the infamous sixteen words in the State of the Union address. As part of his efforts to discredit the adminstration, Wilson lauched a site RestoreHonesty.com. The Kerry campaign hosted it. Sometime around the release of the 9/11 Commission's report that put the lie to Wilson's accusations, the Wilson site was disappeared. There is not reference to it on the Kerry site, and, at least at the moment, I can't find any sign of the Wilson pages anywhere. But the url, www.restorehonesty.com still points to the Kerry campaign site, the last shadow left in the picture after the airbrushing was done.

There are other, less direct, examples. When Michael Kranish of the Boston Globe misquoted one of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in an article, "Veteran retracts criticism of Kerry", it was quickly countered by an affidavit from Capt. Elliot. Supporters of the Swift Boat Vets pointed out there were direct links from that reporter to the Kerry campaign, questioning his objectivity and presenting potential motivation for spinning (in this case "spin" would be understatement) the statements of the Vets to the worst possible light for them and the best possible for Kerry. One of those links was apparent on the cover of the official Kerry-Edwards campaign biography. The key word is "was," shortly after the controvery ignited, Kranish's name and association with the book disappeared. Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit posted on this topic on August 7, 2004. You'll note successive updates showing Kranish's slow evaporation, first from the Amazon site's cover shot and text, then Barnes & Noble's also.

The explanations given by the Kerry campaign or associates may contrain truth. But in light of Kerry's quoted statement, and the developing pattern, one wonders.

We're grown so accustomed to Kerry "flip-flopping" on issues that it's almost become an old joke (which is the earnest hope of the Kerry campaign). While it might be easy to confuse his flip-flopping with this revisionary impulse, the two are not the same. People, even politicians, are allowed to change their minds and their positions. That's human, and in many cases it's even a positive thing if it shows they are observing new facts and modifying their opinions and positions to better fit reality. The corollary of this latter good "flip-flopping" is the tacit admission of earlier error.

When someone tries to hide evidence of error instead admitting the error, we are justified to censure it. It's human, everyone does it on occasion, but when it becomes a pattern it is a character flaw, and one that can cause tremendous harm if it's present in a President. It was Richard Nixon's fatal flaw. We need to ask ourselves if there is a pattern of trying to coverup errors in Mssr. Kerry's history indicating he too suffers from this flaw.

[Grampa]

[Uisguex Jack]

I absolutely love this line: