Me#1You#10
Site Admin
Joined: 06 May 2004
Posts: 6503
|
 Posted: Wed Jan 30, 2008 7:28 pm Post subject: FrontPage Mag: Scott Swett Interview |
 |
|
Just up at FrontPage Mag, managing editor Janie Glasov's interview with Scott Swett...a good read...
| Quote: | To Set The Record Straight
By Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com | 1/30/2008
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Scott Swett, the co-author (along with Bob Hahn) of WinterSoldier.com, SwiftVets.com and HillCAP.org. He worked closely with the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and other anti-Kerry veterans' groups during the 2004 presidential campaign. He is the co-author (with Tim Ziegler) of To Set The Record Straight: How Swift Boat Veterans, POWs and the New Media Defeated John Kerry.
FP: Scott Swett, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
Swett: Thanks very much. I appreciate the excellent work you do.
FP: Why was this book necessary?
Swett: First of all, because it's an important story. The successful effort of veterans and their supporters to prevent John Kerry from becoming America's Commander-in-Chief was an unprecedented event in American politics, and it was arguably the only non-party political effort to tip the balance of a presidential election in anyone's memory.
Secondly, it is necessary because of the continuing battle over how these events will be remembered. Nearly every day another high-profile Democrat trots out the term “swift boating" as a shorthand reference for unfair or false criticism of a candidate's record. The most relentless slogan-slinger is Kerry himself, who seems determined to devote his remaining career to making the very name of the boats he served on into a political curse, like "McCarthyism." This is a tactic familiar to students of the Left, who will recall the sensational but farfetched charges made by Anita Hill against Clarence Thomas on the eve of his elevation to the Supreme Court. A solid majority of the public believed Thomas rather than Hill, which led to his confirmation by a Democrat-controlled Senate. Nevertheless, leftists in the media and elsewhere simply continued to write about Hill's charges as though they had been shown to be true. Polls taken a few years later showed that public opinion had reversed – a majority now believed Hill's accusations.
The same thing is happening today. By relentlessly repeating the term "swift boating" as an epithet, leftists hope to obscure the fact that the Swift Vets were successful precisely because the public found them credible. They were widely believed because they backed up their charges with eyewitnesses, affidavits and documentation. Polls showed that they were particularly effective in swaying the opinions of independent voters and veterans. As we show in the book, the Swift Vets forced Kerry to backtrack on a number of topics, including his longstanding claim to have been illegally ordered to fight in Cambodia on Christmas Day of 1968 – an event Kerry once told the Senate was "seared, seared into my memory." The Kerry campaign also claimed that Kerry alone had turned his boat back into an ambush to rescue a Special Forces soldier who had fallen into the river. This heroic “No Man Left Behind” story formed the basis for millions of dollars worth of TV advertising and was highlighted at the Democratic National Convention. However, after the Swift Vets came forward to tell the real story, even the Washington Post was eventually forced to admit that Kerry's boat was actually the only one to leave the scene of the initial mine explosion. For the book, we were able to locate and interview some key participants in the engagement who weren’t heard from in 2004, including the commander of the Special Forces team and a FAC pilot who watched from overhead.
FP: What is some information in this book that will surprise most readers?
Swett: I don't think many people are aware of the extent to which Kerry's Vietnam Veterans Against the War worked with the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War. We document in a number of ways how the VVAW cooperated with and frequently deferred to America’s enemies. And despite the excellent investigative reporting on the topic done by the journalist Tom Lipscomb, I’m not sure that many people are aware that the VVAW actually voted on a proposal to murder several pro-war U.S. Senators, and that John Kerry attended those meetings.
Readers may also be surprised to learn just how dishonest media coverage of the anti-Kerry veterans really was. After initially ignoring the Swift Vets failed to suppress their story, most old media networks and newspapers consistently misrepresented their charges against Kerry, pretended that they had been adequately addressed, and in general did everything they could think of to try to ensure that Kerry was elected.
Finally, I don’t believe most people understand, even today, how it came to be that the American troops who fought in Vietnam came to be viewed with contempt, pity and revulsion by a large segment of the public. That was not an accident; it was the result of an astonishingly vicious anti-military propaganda campaign that centered on the false claim that U.S. war crimes in Vietnam were widespread and were committed, in Kerry’s words to the Senate, “with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.”
FP: Tell us about efforts by the old media to first ignore and later attack the Swift Vets.
Swett: The first and simplest tactic they used was to simply pretend that the Swift Vets’ explosive charges against Kerry didn’t qualify as “news.” For example, the Associated Press sent a reporter to the group’s initial press conference in May 2004, but then the AP failed to publish any story whatsoever. Pressed for an explanation, an AP spokesperson claimed the event “didn’t advance the anti-Kerry veteran story.” This after Kerry’s entire chain of command from Vietnam had just publicly questioned his fitness to serve as America’s Commander-in-Chief – an unprecedented event in American political history.
Kerry’s advisors told him it would be best to ignore the Swift Vets because the media could be trusted to conceal their charges from the public. And in fact, most of the old media remained silent well into August, despite the fact that the veterans were now the hottest topic in the country. The Kerry camp was right about the media’s intentions, but wrong about their ability to suppress the story. Then, when Kerry changed course and denounced the Swift Vets, the old media instantly followed suit. The New York Times ran a long article tracing dubious “connections” between the Swift Vets’ media representatives and leading Republicans, with the obvious intent of supporting the Kerry campaign’s false accusation that the Swift Vets were a Republican Party operation.
Ironically, the attacks by Kerry and his media supporters had the unintended consequence of introducing the Swift Vets and their testimony to a new segment of the public. SwiftVets.com, the website that I ran for the group, had its most successful day ever when Kerry spoke out against them – more than $500,000 in donations rolled in. This tremendous response by the public helped make it possible to heavily target key states such as Ohio and Florida with devastating TV ads during the last weeks of the campaign.
FP: What was the role of the new media in the 2004 presidential campaign, and how did 2004 differ from all previous presidential elections?
Swett: By 2004, the new media – by which I mean primarily the Internet and talk radio – had reached a point where it was no longer possible for the traditional TV networks and leading liberal papers to control the country’s political discussions, as they had been accustomed to doing for several decades. In addition to delivering information that the old media wouldn’t report for fear of harming the Democratic candidate, the new media also provided real-time fact-checking on news stories promoted by mainstream outlets.
The most striking example of this was the debunking of the “60 Minutes” segment that charged President Bush with shirking his duties, failing to follow orders, and pulling strings to avoid being sent into combat during his time in the Texas Air National Guard. When it aired in early September 2004, every major news organization in the country touted it as a huge story with damning implications for the President. But somehow, all those thousands of journalists, editors and fact-checkers overlooked what a few ordinary citizens saw at a glance – the “National Guard memos” on which the story was based were actually crude forgeries created on a modern word processor instead of a typewriter.
This resulting scandal destroyed the old media’s bid to distract attention away from Kerry’s record, and it completely undercut a multi-million dollar TV ad campaign targeting Bush’s National Guard service that the DNC just happened to launch the following day. Several well-deserved firings at CBS News followed, and the scandal also effectively ended Dan Rather’s long career as a Democratic Party spokesman. It’s an amazing story. Anyone interested in how it all happened is welcome to visit our web site and download our free chapter, Rather’s Ruin and the Rise of the Pajamahadeen.
If such a story had aired just a few years earlier, there’s little question that it would have been accepted as true and would have had a significant impact. That raises an interesting question: how many times has the media lied to us in the past without anyone noticing?
FP: Your thoughts on the coordination between the Left and America's enemies, both during the Vietnam War and today?
Swett: The common thread linking the leftists who helped enable the communist genocide in Southeast Asia a generation ago and those who control today’s “peace” movement is their identification of America as their primary enemy. This makes them willing to coordinate their activities with any external enemy of the US regardless of ideology. On the surface, it would seem improbable that American “liberals” would have much in common with fanatics who, for example, regard women as essentially property, but that clearly matters less than their desire to see our country thwarted and defeated.
Much more could be said, but I think I’ll just direct readers to David Horowitz’s excellent book, Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left, and leave it at that.
FP: Illuminate for us the ongoing efforts by the Left to smear U.S. troops and veterans.
Swett: A major push is underway right now to once again portray our troops as criminals. The New York Times kicked off the effort the other day with a long article detailing crimes committed by veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan after they came back home. Of course, the Times carefully avoided mentioning that civilians in the same age range commit the same sort of crimes at a significantly higher rate than veterans. The blogger Iowahawk responded with a great parody article that listed crimes committed by journalists and suggested that “without programs for intensive mental health care, the nation faces a potential bloodbath at the hands of psychopathic media vets.”
New York Times owner Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., said during the Vietnam War that if an American soldier encountered a North Vietnamese soldier in the field, he would want to see the American get shot. There is no reason to think he has changed his views.
The radical group Iraq Veterans Against the War is working in tandem with several of the old VVAW propagandists, as well as other far left stalwarts such as Vets for Peace and the American Lawyers’ Guild. The IVAW has scheduled a new “Winter Soldier” war crimes tribunal for mid-March in Washington DC, where they will no doubt reprise the VVAW’s ugly tactic of giving unsubstantiated “testimony” about U.S. atrocities.
Allegations of war crimes by people who are unwilling to provide detailed information under oath to military investigators are meaningless. That’s exactly how the VVAW’s propaganda effort operated in 1971 – they told dozens of horrible stories that were impossible either to prove or disprove because, in nearly all cases, the “witnesses” refused to cooperate with investigators or failed to provide any substantive evidence.
These people are not on our side. Their goal is to undermine public support for the U.S. military, the means by which America is able to project force around the world.
The Romanian general Ion Pacepa was the highest-ranking Soviet bloc officer ever to defect to the West. In 2004, he described the war crimes propaganda campaign he helped to administer during the Vietnam War as just one aspect of “the larger Soviet objective of destroying the U.S. from within through the use of lies.” The Soviets are no more, but the tactic is still used by their spiritual descendants. The antidote is to expose the lies on a case-by-case basis, by documenting and publicizing the truth. Those who are interested in a practical example may want to pick up a copy of our new book, To Set The Record Straight: How Swift Boat Veterans, POWs and the New Media Defeated John Kerry.
FP: Scott Swett, thank you for joining us.
Swett: It was my pleasure.
------------------------------------------------------------
Jamie Glazov is Frontpage Magazine's managing editor. He holds a Ph.D. in History with a specialty in U.S. and Canadian foreign policy. He edited and wrote the introduction to David Horowitz’s Left Illusions. He is also the co-editor (with David Horowitz) of The Hate America Left and the author of Canadian Policy Toward Khrushchev’s Soviet Union (McGill-Queens University Press, 2002) and 15 Tips on How to be a Good Leftist. To see his previous symposiums, interviews and articles Click Here. Email him at jglazov@rogers.com.
FrontPage Magazine
|
|
|
FAQ
Search
Memberlist
Usergroups
Register
Profile
Log in to check your private messages
Log in
