SwiftVets.com

[fortdixlover]

A fascinating piece by David Horowitz - a must read

The Kerry dossier. Not a pretty sight.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/blog/BlogEntry.asp?ID=329

My blog “The blood on Kerry’s hands" has inflamed some passions. I won’t bother you with the run-of-the-mill hysterical reactions from the left, but I did receive one email that saddened me a bit. It was from very bright young man, named Alex Schulman, whom I met at Brown University where he was a journalist on the Brown Daily Herald and a principled voice in the battle over my reparations ad. Alex is not a conservative, and so impressed me by his courage and independence of mind. Unfortunately he has been swept up by the passions unleashed over the past year, initiated from the left, which have caused this electoral season to be particularly ugly and irrational.




Comment submitted by Alex Schulman:



David, this is truly despicable. You may disagree with John Kerry's prospective platform but to endorse this bottom-feeding cadre of hired mercenaries in their attempt to slander a US senator's war record is beyond contempt. So too to call Kerry a scoundrel who has the blood of Asians on his hands (you do seem to weep for the one NVA teenagre he "shot in the back"). Where exactly were you during the Vietnam War? Is your atonement for helping out the communists (publishing an increasingly scurrilous blog) somehow more moral than giving your country decades of public service? I'm starting to think you have no more decent a political judgment now than you did at Ramparts when you backed the NLF. This nonsense from your quarters is only increasing my opinion that Bolsheviks stay Bolsheviks, even if they go over to the other side. Did George W Bush even grapple with any of the issues surrounding the Vietnam War, back when he dodged the draft via the National Guard and then didn’t even show up for duty? Shame on you. Truly disgusting stuff.







Horowitz Reply:


Hi Alex. How about a hello first. Passions are very high in this campaign, so be careful when talking to friends about politics and making issues that neither you nor anyone else has any certainty about so personal. It's okay to raise the issues but don't be so eager to leap to the personal, you may have second thoughts later on that cause you to regret what you said. The political battle in this campaign, don't forget, is about a Republican President defending himself against Democrat charges that he lied to the American people and killed American boys and girls for no reason. If you hit that hard -- and Mr. Kerry certainly has -- you've got to expect the ball to come back at you with some velocity.

I don't actually have many disagreements with "Kerry's platform" because I don't know what he believes. Does anyone? I think he is a man of extremely bad charcter, based on his entire career and not the three months on the river he chose to feature at the convention for entirely devious reasons as even you must admit. (Just for the record, no one challenged his patriotism. It's the Dems who have called Bush a "false patriot" and a "fraud" and (in Al Gore's case) a "traitor." When you are running away from a war you
supported (as Kerry is) trotting out the flag and the military background is good cover.




I have never hid where I was during the Vietnam War. On public occasions too numerous to list, in print and otherwise, I have always said that the blood of the Vietnamese is on my head along with Kerry, Dean, Kennedy and the others. The difference between us is that I noticed the two and half million who died because of us and they not only haven't but persist in refusing to admit it. I am practically the only member of my generation of anti-war activists who has owned up to what he did. I did not mention my role in this paragraph but then everyone knows of it because I have been so vocal about it. Surely one omission in twenty years of public statements on the subject can hardly be used as an indictment.




What makes Kerry a scoundrel is not that he was wrong 30 years ago but now that history has shown him wrong he hasn't got the integrity or moral decency to own up to it. I picked the one passage from the Cavett Show where he forcefully denied that there would be a bloodbath. This was pretty important because the argument in 1971-4 was whether or not to abandon South Vietnam and Cambodia and this was the main Nixon argument against abandoning them. Kerry was a leader of the abandon them crowd. It happens that by 1973-4 when these issues were decided, I was pulling back from these positions. Nonetheless I have for twenty years (you can read my first public statement in "My Vietnam Lessons" in Left Illusions, which was a speech I gave in 1985) owned up to what we did and the fact that we were wrong and Nixon was right. Kerry has not.

"Bottom feeding cadre" when you use it of course is not to be taken as slandering the service to their country of vastly more members of the swift boat command than John Kerry has testifying for him (I believe the ratio is something like 280 to 13). Don't you see your own double standard here? Do you really think the hundreds of swift boat veterans who have challenged Kerry's medals (which of course he himself threw away in contempt but then did not) are simply lying? John O'Neill is a Clinton Democrat. What do you think his motivation would be for making this all up? What you forget is that Kerry began the slander campaign against men who served their country by calling his fellow soldiers "war criminals." Why do you think virtually every swift boat commander is part of the anti-Kerry group and seventy-five percent who served in the same command? I was always anxious about leftists who accused American soldiers and America of war crimes in a blanket fashion. I did not like what Fonda did in Vietnam and I had nothing to do with the Winter Soldier Investigation because as a leftist I knew they were promoting Communist propaganda and lying (mainly) about the atrocities while limiting them to one side. (I had experience with this with the Bertrand Russell War Crimes Tribunal, which I have written about in Radical Son.)



You have every right to back Kerry and probably do so for reasons that I would find worthy and reasonable, while disagreeing, because I know you are an honest person. Too bad you can't muster the generosity and self-discipline to afford me the same benefit of the doubt.



David

Comment submitted by Scott Liebertz:



Mr. Horowitz,



Just finished reading Politics of Bad Faith and enjoyed it very much - especially the review of the horrors of Communist Russia. In regards to this article, we agree that Kerry is a scoundrel of sorts, but I don't quite understand why you think he and his ilk are to blame for the millions of deaths in South East Asia after we left. Kerry didn't pull our troops out - Nixon did. Doesn't he share at least some of the responsibility? And by the way, weren't you one of those "despicable comrades" of John Kerry - at least by intellectual affinity. It puzzles me that a man such as yourself who has gone through such a dramatic intellectual conversion seems to have very little humility about the limits of human knowledge and understanding. You ask how seemingly intelligent people could even consider voting for Kerry? Shouldn't you understand that better than anyone?




Sincerely,



Scott Liebertz







Horowitz Reply:



I have of course acknowledged, even proclaimed my culpability in the postwar debacle in Indochina.



It's true that Nixon pulled the troops but this was not his desire; it was the political necessity forced on him by the left. Moreover, even after the pullout the left pressed for cutting off the aid, which was the coup de grace for the 2 million who were then slaughtered. I've written about the specific circumstances in Radical Son.



Finally, I certaintly do not fault Kerry for having been mistaken once. It's his refusal to admit error since, and indeed his insistence on wearing his betrayal of the Indochinese as a badge of honor that I object to.



Comment submitted by Tran:



As a Vietnamese who was lucky enough to escape from the communists, thank you for this editorial.



Comment submitted by Tim Feaver:



I couldn't have said it better, David. I flew helicopters in Vietnam 1970-71, been there, done that. We deserted a desperate people, millions were killed because of that action, and Vietnam is still today one of the most despotic and persecuted countries in the world. This is the legacy we left the Vietnamese, because we didn't, as a nation, have the guts to stay the course until we accomplished the right thing. John Kerry, Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda, are all traitors to the country in which they live, and to the Vietnamese people. Kerry was a traitor while still a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, yet the government turned a blind eye to his treason.



It is absolutely amazing that supposedly intelligent people in this country are actually considering electing the man their President and Commander-In-Chief. If they get him, they deserve him. May GOD Have Mercy on us all, and keep that from happening.



Thanks for your article.







From my friend Wally Nunn, a helicopter gunner in Vietnam:.






David,



There are two questions to ask Kerry:






1) Are you a war criminal or a liar given your own words you saw and paticipitated in war crimes, even if you only saw it you had a duty to report and stop any incidents.


2. Why will you not release your medical records that pertain to your purple hearts. Many of us received minor wounds in combat that technically qualified us for the purple heart, but most of us felt it unseemly to be receive an award that many of our friends were killed or maimed received, often the only recognition they received for their sacrifice.

[GenrXr]