Excerpts from the KC Star and the Cybercast News Service appear below as a supplement to the preceding post, "The Next Big Thing?". Emphasis on the question mark, please.
And we find Captain Ed is on this like salt on a sailor, with a round-up of big-media coverage.
Kerry hedges on '71 KC meeting
By SCOTT CANON The Kansas City Star
Posted on Sat, Mar. 20, 2004
Confronted with 32-year-old FBI records, Sen. John Kerry's campaign all but conceded he attended a 1971 Kansas City meeting where a fellow anti-war veteran called for political assassinations.
Those active in Vietnam Veterans Against the War at the time stress that the suggestion for such a violent approach was angrily rejected. They say their memories do not include Kerry taking part in the radical discussion.
A statement Thursday by Kerry's camp said the Massachusetts Democrat did not recall the meeting, although FBI surveillance material and the group's archives clearly show that Kerry resigned from his national coordinator post at that November 1971 meeting.
In interviews last week, the senator's campaign insisted that the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee clearly remembered bolting from the group months earlier.
Responding to a request by The Kansas City Star that staffers question the candidate about the meeting, Kerry passed word March 12 that he “never, ever” attended a meeting of Vietnam Veterans Against the War after a heated and public argument with the group's executive secretary in St. Louis in June 1971.
In a prepared statement late Thursday night, however, campaign spokesman David Wade, traveling with the candidate in Idaho, said: “John Kerry had no personal recollection of this meeting 33 years ago. John Kerry does recall the disagreements with elements of VVAW leadership…that led to his resignation.
“If there are valid FBI surveillance reports from credible sources that place some of those disagreements in Kansas City, we accept that historical footnote in the account of his work to end the difficult and divisive war.”
Kerry's anti-war activities launched his political career but also have been used by opponents to portray him as a radical. One conservative tabloid has described the Kansas City meeting as a “dark plot.”
By all accounts, Kerry stood as a voice for moderation in Vietnam Veterans Against the War. In fact, several records from the group stored at the Wisconsin State Historical Society show that he quit over philosophical differences in the middle of the four-day gathering in Kansas City.
The Kerry campaign on Friday released a 1972 FBI surveillance memo from its records that states a “review of subject's (Kerry's) file indicated there is nothing to associate him with any violence or violent-prone group. …”
In the end, no violence has been attributed to the veterans' organization. Rather, historians view its so-called Dewey Canyon III demonstration — where veterans tossed their medals onto the Capitol steps — as a significant force in rejuvenating the anti-war movement.
The FBI teletypes based on informants' attendance at the meeting — with some sections and sources' names blacked out — appear to make no mention of any discussion of assassination plots, something sure to have caught the bureau's attention.
Gerald Nicosia, author of Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans Movement, obtained records that the FBI kept on Vietnam Veterans Against the War throughout much of the group's history. In poring over the records this week, Nicosia found reports stating that Kerry's resignation was accepted at the Kansas City meeting amid a heated confrontation with the group's executive secretary, Al Hubbard.
In a brief interview, Wade said last week's denial stemmed from Kerry's failure to remember the Kansas City meeting and the campaign's reliance on Home to War and two other books that all suggest he quit before
November.
After new evidence emerged this week, however, the campaign spokesman said Kerry simply mistook his recollection of the Kansas City meeting for the one in St. Louis in June 1971 — when records show Kerry was re-elected to the organization's executive committee despite growing resentment toward his celebrity and his push for moderation.
Last week, John Hurley, an organizer of veteran volunteers for Kerry's presidential run, called two men who were quoted in The Star as recalling Kerry attending the Kansas City meeting. John Musgrave of Baldwin City, Kan., said Hurley called him twice and in the second conversation asked the disabled veteran to contact the newspaper reporter to say he had doubts about the memory.
“He said, ‘I'd like you to consider that before that article comes out call him and tell him you were wrong,' ” said Musgrave, who has expressed disappointment with Kerry's position on issues regarding prisoners of war.
Hurley said Friday he believed last week Musgrave was simply mistaken.
“I asked him to be very sure of his recollection, not to change his recollection,” Hurley said. “I would apologize to John Musgrave if he thought in any way I was pressuring him.”
Another veteran, Randy Barnes of Kansas City, said Hurley had contacted him but did not prompt him to question his memory, although his certainty about the fact wavered after their conversation.
Minutes of the Kansas City meeting and internal Vietnam Veterans Against the War correspondence make clear that Kerry was active in the group — mostly as a strong draw on the lecture circuit of campuses and groups such as the Kansas City Rotary Club in September 1971 — in the months leading up to the November meeting. One FBI report suggests that despite his resignation from leadership, Kerry was willing to work for the group after November 1971. Three other national coordinators also resigned at the meeting.
None of the records show any indication of what then-Florida organizer Scott Camil dubbed a “domestic Phoenix Program” he was promoting to the Vietnam veterans group. Camil told The Star last week that his idea — modeled after a U.S. military effort to hollow out the leadership of Viet Cong sympathizers in South Vietnam — would have made targets of pro-war politicians to force the withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam.
“I'm sorry about those discussions now, but they did take place,” Camil, a Kerry supporter, said in a telephone interview last week. Camil said then he did not think Kerry attended the Kansas City meeting and that he did not recall ever making his suggestion of violence in the presence of the future U.S. senator.
That topic is absent from the group's archives — perhaps reflecting that it never gained credibility beyond a few members or that the discussion would have been too damaging to record.
“Was John obligated to go to the police on this?” asked Nicosia, the author who described himself as a Kerry supporter. “I think if the thing ever got off the ground, Kerry would do something to stop it.”
His book is mostly flattering to Vietnam Veterans Against the War and to Kerry, whom he portrays as struggling against radical elements for control of the group.
Interviews with 18 men who in the early 1970s were members of the group, most of them in leadership positions, offer varying accounts of whether the vague plot was discussed as a matter of organization business or merely the stuff of late-night chatter.
“In the business meeting, there was no consideration of violence,” said Dave Collins, then the group's Oklahoma coordinator. “The recollection I had was some guys saying, ‘We ought to go and off some of those (people).' …It was guys ticked off and talking big at midnight. No one in the group took any of it seriously.”
Collins, like others, did not remember Kerry attending the Kansas City meeting, which moved from the University of Missouri-Kansas City campus to different city churches over four days. At least two others who at the time were active in Vietnam Veterans Against the War said they thought Kerry was at the Kansas City meeting, although they did not connect their recollections of him to the debate over violent strategies.
Barnes of Kansas City first said he remembered Kerry attending the meeting and then, after talking about it with members of the campaign staff, said he could not be sure whether the budding politician was there. He also recalled the 1971 discussion of Camil's idea as a significant disruption to the Kansas City meeting.
“We're sitting there waiting for the joke. And it became clear that (Camil) was somewhat serious about it, so serious that people began to discuss it,” Barnes said. “Now when I say that, I don't mean real substance discussion about doing that, but along the lines of ‘that's what our government was doing to Vietnam.' Once people understood he (Camil) was serious, they told him he was crazy.”
Joe Bangert traveled from Philadelphia to the meeting and said the idea of killing was contrary to a group whose officers often closed correspondence with lines such as “peace and love and nonviolent action.”
“We were rebelling. We were decompressing from our time in Vietnam,” Bangert said. “But we were incapable of doing violence.”
CYBERCAST NEWS SERVICE
Kerry Lying About Anti-War Past, Supporter Alleges
By Marc Morano
CNSNews.com Senior Staff Writer
March 18, 2004
(CNSNews.com) - A Vietnam War historian and supporter of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry has told CNSNews.com that Kerry is lying about key events related to his anti-war activities in 1971.
Kerry said he hasn't spoken to former anti-war associate Al Hubbard since the two men appeared side by side on national television in April 1971, but according to author Gerald Nicosia, that assertion is wrong. So is Kerry's insistence that he did not attend a November 1971 meeting of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), at which group members discussed the possibility of assassinating U.S. senators who were still supporting the war in Vietnam, Nicosia said.
Nicosia backed up his comments regarding Kerry's presence at the November 1971 meeting by providing CNSNews.com with the FBI's redacted files about that meeting.
Questions about events that happened 33 years ago continue to nag the Kerry candidacy as the Massachusetts Democrat's November match-up against President Bush comes into sharper focus.
Kerry faces increasing skepticism about answers he gave to certain questions as well as recent statements he made, including his claim that some foreign leaders had told him they were hopeful Bush would be defeated this year.
Among the questions surrounding Kerry's involvement as a 27-year-old anti-war protester are those about his relationship with Hubbard, the former executive director of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Kerry and Hubbard appeared on NBC's Meet the Press on April 18, 1971 to argue for an end to the war.
But shortly thereafter, Hubbard, who had been introduced on the NBC program as a decorated Air Force captain, was exposed for having exaggerated his military credentials. A separate news investigation revealed that there were no military records showing that Hubbard had either served in Vietnam or was injured there.
Last week, during a Capitol Hill news conference, CNSNews.com asked Kerry whether he was still in touch with Hubbard or whether he was willing to repudiate Hubbard because of Hubbard's fabricated war record.
"I haven't talked to Al Hubbard since that week" of the Meet the Press appearance, Kerry replied. Kerry also said he did not believe that VVAW's credibility was hurt as a result of Hubbard falsifying his war record.
But Gerald Nicosia, author of the book Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans' Movement and a Kerry supporter, disagreed with Kerry's contention that he and Hubbard saw no more of each other after the week of April 18, 1971.
"That is bull****. No, no, [Kerry] saw [Hubbard] at numerous meetings after that, including the one I talk about in my book, the July meeting in St. Louis," Nicosia told CNSNews.com .
[Kerry] saw [Hubbard] in July, and according to FBI [files on Vietnam Veterans Against the War] and the minutes of those meetings, [Kerry] probably saw him in November [1971] too," Nicosia said.
Kerry and Hubbard had a heated argument at the St. Louis meeting in July that was "witnessed by 200 veterans," according to Nicosia.
Despite the presidential candidate's claim last week that Hubbard had not hurt the anti-war group's credibility in 1971, Kerry actually believed otherwise, according to Nicosia.
"There was a big fight with Al Hubbard in which Kerry confronted him and they were screaming at each other across the hall," Nicosia explained. Hubbard, who had ties to the radical Black Panthers group, and Kerry "couldn't have been more opposite personalities," Nicosia said.
The simmering tension between the two men finally reached a boil in St. Louis, Nicosia said, with Kerry shouting, "Who are you, Al Hubbard? Are you even really a veteran?
"So it was a big screaming match," he added.
Nicosia told CNSNews.com he was uncomfortable disputing Kerry's statements.
"I am in kind of an awkward position here. I am a Kerry supporter and I certainly don't want to do anything that hurts him. On the other hand, my number one allegiance is to truth. So I am going to go with where the facts are, and John is going to have to deal with that," Nicosia said.
"I am having some problems with the things he is saying right now, which are not matching up with accuracy," he added.
November 1971 meeting
Nicosia also disputed Kerry's denial that he was in attendance when VVAW members met in Kansas City in November 1971 to discuss the possibility of assassinating U.S. senators still committed to the Vietnam War.
Kerry was at the meeting, Nicosia insisted, pointing to FBI files and the minutes from the VVAW meeting, which he has obtained. "The minutes of the meeting -- November 12th through the15th -- it's got John Kerry there, it's got John Kerry resigning there on the third day," Nicosia said.
Nicosia provided CNSNews.com with a copy of the FBI's redacted files of that November 1971 VVAW meeting. The files refer to the fact that Kerry had "resigned for 'personal reasons.'"
"You are talking to a Kerry supporter, but I will tell you, after everything that I have heard and seen, I would conclude that he was there," he added.
Nicosia said he is not sure why Kerry is answering questions on the issue in the manner he is.
"Why didn't [former President Bill] Clinton say he [had sex with] Monica Lewinsky? It took him until he had to be confronted with the hard evidence before he said he did," Nicosia said.
"I think [Kerry] may be worried or the people around him may be worried that his association with VVAW is a very negative thing and they want John to back away from it," he added.
Nicosia concluded with advice for Kerry.
"The chickens are coming home to roost, and unfortunately he is starting to backtrack and I personally don't think backtracking is going to work because people are going to go at him and find the discrepancies," Nicosia said.
As recently as two days ago, Kerry's presidential campaign spokesman David Wade told the New York Sun that, "Kerry was not at the Kansas City meeting." Wade added that Kerry had resigned from the VVAW "sometime in the summer of 1971."
Nicosia is a good man, sure he is supporting Kerry. But to say, that the truth is more important speaks volumes about this man's character.
Posted by: James Stephenson | March 23, 2004 at 11:14 AM
I've been following this story for awhile (the NY Sun broke it over a week ago), wondering why the rest of the blogosphere seemed to be ignoring it. My take is that the story is incredibly damaging to Kerry, and that the mainstream media will ignore it unless it's forced on them. Kerry could have limited the damage by saying something like "Yeah, that's why I quit the VVAW, because there were kooky proposals like that floating around." By denying it though, he's moved the issue into the present, because with proof that he attended, he cannot now say "Oh, THAT meeting where we discussed killing US senators? I had completely forgotten about it."
Posted by: Pat Curley | March 23, 2004 at 11:30 AM
The NY Sun reported yesterday a vet's claim that he was pressured by the Kerry campaign to change his story on this.
Posted by: HH | March 23, 2004 at 11:33 AM
What is amusing is that he will not be able to effectively contradict witnesses from the meeting. After all, he can't remember the meeting. The Sun article mentioned 6 or so individiuals who saw Kerry give a speech there.
Posted by: Dog Peterson | March 23, 2004 at 11:36 AM
Regardless of how closely he was tied to the assassination talk, I think this episode really reveals that Kerry has a dark, pessimistic view of America. . The VVAW was an organization that thought the US was to blame for the war and that the Communist and their Soviet and Chinese backers were the good guys. That he associated himself with such an organization calls into to question his fundamental world view.
I think it telling that Kerry apparently lost an internal political struggle and was forced to resign in order to run for public office. That suggest the majority of the organization was at that to radical for a political aspirant to associate himself with. Such radicalism does not arise overnight. Kerry was willing to associate himself with VVAW until it appeared disadvantageous to do so. That does not speak well of his character.
Posted by: Shannon Love | March 23, 2004 at 12:18 PM
Let's think this through; shall we; Dewey Canyon, the group's first effort, was named after a paramilitary incursion, in support of the Kurds/
Contras/Cubans of the day; the Laotian Hmong; clearly, they meant to do more than just talk.
Next, the Winter Soldier investigation, by their
very name; suggest continuing on such an aggresive
campaign; Ironically, if Mr. Camil, had gone through with his plan; the backlash would have
rather significant; or a neglible effect. After
all, do you think the 'executive action' against
Stennis, or Thurmond, would realy win people to
your cause
Posted by: narciso | March 23, 2004 at 01:09 PM
Let's see -- 1) John Kerry states that he knew of many war crimes committed by Americans in Vietnam. Although a Navy officer, he refused to report any of these many atrocities.
2) John Kerry, recognized as an officer and gentleman by the US senate, is at a meeting of an organization of which he is a leader, where consideration is given to murdering some of the same senators that voted him his commission a few years earlier. Does Kerry, who still had a Navy commission at that time, report any of these plans to the FBI? Not a chance.
It's sort of interesting. John Kerry can remember vivid details about some stray mute named "VC" this was his units pet in Vietnam. But he can't remember anything at all about a three day meeting of the group that he was one of the leaders of that discussed killing US senators!!
Yep. . . . he would make a great president!!
Posted by: Narniaman | March 23, 2004 at 01:59 PM
New York Sun, now there’s a legitimate news source. It also reported the following:
The two NFL teams that made it to the 2004 super bowl are the Carolina Panthers of North Carolina and the New England Patriots of Massachusetts. Is it mere coincidence that John Edwards is senator for North Carolina and John Kerry is senator for Massachusetts? Or, as one source whispered, “Is it a conspiracy?”
Abram Gemeinschaft, a former Ufologist who still wears aluminum foil hats and wets the bed, has told this reporter that Kerry and Edwards fixed the Super Bowl. “They fixed the Super Bowl”, Gemeinschaft said.
Another source, who chooses to remain nameless because he doesn’t really exist quipped, “John Edwards, a southerner, also planned the assassination of Lincoln in a previous life.”
So if they fixed the Super Bowl, could they be part of a Martian invasion? “It’s possible”, Dick Cheney, not-for-long vice-president admitted, “They could be an advance team of proto-humanoid homosexual terrorist-aliens sent here to destroy the fabric of our American way of life as a prelude to gutting our defense system and making us look like fools. They are an imminent threat to flaming heterosexuals like me and the president.”
Posted by: bushgirlsgonewild | March 23, 2004 at 02:16 PM
NY Sun article
Posted by: HH | March 23, 2004 at 05:24 PM
Gotta love the lefties posting to this blog--desperately trying to change the subject.
Posted by: Pat Curley | March 23, 2004 at 06:13 PM
The question America wants answered: Did Kerry vote for the assassination plan before he voted against it?
Posted by: Paul Zrimsek | March 23, 2004 at 10:51 PM
LOL!
Posted by: TM | March 23, 2004 at 10:57 PM
The KC Star article states that Joe Bangert as being at the Kansas City VVAW meeting in 1971, but guess what? He wasn't there. So don't believe half of what you read in a newspaper and none of what you see.
Posted by: VVAW once upon a time | April 03, 2004 at 02:15 PM
Niemand, der damals in der Nationalgarde von Alabama Dienst geschoben hat, kann sich an George Bush erinnern. Kein Dokument belegt die Teilnahme des damals 22-jährigen am Training der Piloten. "Wir nennen solche wie Bush Chickenhawks", sagt Joe Bangert, Vietnamveteran und Kerry-Unterstützer. "Diese Chickenhawks, die nie gedient haben, sind die ersten, die zum Krieg aufrufen. Die sind infiziert vom Militarismus. Und Bush ist außer Kontrolle, der muss raus aus dem Weißen Haus."
Posted by: VVAW once upon a time | May 07, 2004 at 01:21 AM
Smear Boat Veterans for Bush
The "swift boat" veterans attacking John Kerry's war record are led by veteran right-wing operatives using the same vicious techniques they used against John McCain four years ago.
By Joe Conason
May 4, 2004
The latest conservative outfit to fire an angry broadside against John Kerry's heroic war record is Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which today launches a campaign to brand the Democrat "unfit to serve as commander in chief." Billing itself as representing the "other 97 percent of veterans" from Kerry's Navy unit who don't support his presidential candidacy, the group insists that all presidential candidates must be "totally honest and forthcoming" about their military service.
These "swift boat vets" claim still to be furious about Kerry's 1971 Senate testimony against the war in which he spoke about atrocities in Indochina's "free fire zones." More than three decades later, facing the complicated truth about Vietnam remains difficult. But this group's political connections make clear that its agenda is to target the election of 2004.
Behind the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth are veteran corporate media consultant and Texas Republican activist Merrie Spaeth, who is listed as the group's media contact; eternal Kerry antagonist and Houston attorney John E. O'Neill, law partner of Spaeth's late husband, Tex Lezar; and retired Rear Adm. Roy Hoffman, a cigar-chomping former Vietnam commander once described as "the classic body-count guy" who "wanted hooches destroyed and people killed."
Spaeth told Salon that O'Neill first approached her last winter to discuss his "concerns about Sen. Kerry." O'Neill has been assailing Kerry since 1971, when the former Navy officer was selected for the role by Charles Colson, Richard Nixon's dirty-tricks aide. Spaeth heard O'Neill out, but told him, she says, that he "sounded like a crazed extremist" and should "button his lip" and avoid speaking with the press. But since Kerry clinched the Democratic nomination, Spaeth has changed her mind and decided to donate her public relations services on a "pro bono" basis to O'Neill's latest anti-Kerry effort. "About three weeks ago, four weeks ago," she said, the group's leaders "met in my office for about 12 hours" to prepare for their Washington debut.
Although not as well known as Karen Hughes, Spaeth is among the most experienced and best connected Republican communications executives. During the Reagan administration she served as director of the White House Office of Media Liaison, where she specialized in promoting "news" items that boosted President Reagan to TV stations around the country. While living in Washington she met and married Lezar, a Reagan Justice Department lawyer who ran for lieutenant governor of Texas in 1994 with George W. Bush, then the party's candidate for governor. (Lezar lost; Bush won.)
Through Lezar, who died of a heart attack last January, she met O'Neill, his law partner in Clements, O'Neill, Pierce, Wilson & Fulkerson, a Dallas firm. (It also includes Margaret Wilson, the former counsel to Gov. Bush who followed him to Washington, where she served for a time as a deputy counsel in the Department of Commerce.)
Spaeth's partisanship runs still deeper, as does her history of handling difficult P.R. cases for Republicans. In 1998, for example, she coached Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel, to prepare him for his testimony urging the impeachment of President Clinton before the House Judiciary Committee. She even reviewed videotapes of his previous television appearances to give him pointers about his delivery and demeanor. The man responsible for arranging her advice to Starr was another old friend of her late husband's, Theodore Olson, who was counsel to the right-wing American Spectator when it acted as a front for the dirty-tricks campaign against Clinton known as the Arkansas Project; he is now the solicitor general in the Bush Justice Department. (Olson also happens to be the godfather of Spaeth's daughter.)
In 2000, Spaeth participated in the most subterranean episode of the Republican primary contest when a shadowy group billed as "Republicans for Clean Air" produced television ads falsely attacking the environmental record of Sen. John McCain in California, New York and Ohio. While the identity of those funding the supposedly "independent" ads was carefully hidden, reporters soon learned that Republicans for Clean Air was simply Sam Wyly -- a big Bush contributor and beneficiary of Bush administration decisions in Texas -- and his brother, Charles, another Bush "Pioneer" contributor. (One of the Wyly family's private capital funds, Maverick Capital of Dallas, had been awarded a state contract to invest $90 million for the University of Texas endowment.)
When the secret emerged, spokeswoman Spaeth caught the flak for the Wylys, an experience she recalled to me as "horrible" and "awful." Her job was to assure reporters that there had been no illegal coordination between the Bush campaign and the Wyly brothers in arranging the McCain-trashing message. Not everyone believed her explanation, including the Arizona senator.
The veteran group's founder, Rear Adm. Roy Hoffmann, first gained notoriety in Vietnam as a strutting, cigar-chewing Navy captain. But it was O'Neill, by now a familiar figure on the Kerry-bashing circuit, who came to Spaeth for assistance.
Until now, Hoffmann has been best known as the commanding officer whose obsession with body counts and "scorekeeping" may have provoked the February 1969 massacre of Vietnamese civilians at Thanh Phong by a unit led by Bob Kerrey -- the Medal of Honor winner who lost a leg in Nam, became a U.S. senator from Nebraska and now sits on the 9/11 commission.
After journalist Gregory Vistica exposed the Thanh Phong massacre and the surrounding circumstances in the New York Times magazine three years ago, conservative columnist Christopher Caldwell took particular note of the cameo role played by Kerrey's C.O., who had warned his men not to return from missions without enough kills. "One of the myths due to die as a result of Vistica's article is that which holds the war could have been won sensibly and cleanly if the 'suits' back in Washington had merely left the military men to their own devices," Caldwell wrote. "In this light, one of the great merits of Vistica's article is its portrait of the Kurtz-like psychopath who commanded Kerrey's Navy task force, Capt. Roy Hoffmann."
Arguments about the war in Vietnam seem destined to continue forever. For now, however, the lingering bitterness and ambiguity of those days provide smear material against an antiwar war hero with five medals on behalf of a privileged Guardsman with a dubious duty record. The president's Texas allies -- whose animus against his Democratic challenger dates back to the Nixon era -- are now deploying the same techniques and personnel they used to attack McCain's integrity four years ago. Bush's "independent" supporters would apparently rather talk about the Vietnam quagmire than about his deadly incompetence in Iraq.
salon.com
Posted by: Fragged Vets Counterattack with 411 | May 07, 2004 at 01:30 AM
Thanks, I hadn't felt like paying to read that.
First, I am faacinated that when Richard Clarke attacks Bush,and Republicans respond by questioning his credibility (what, for example,doid he do or say about Clinton's many long years in office?), Reps are accused of cowardly character assasination.
But when Joe Conason tells us that O'Neill and others "claim still to be furious", his clear implication is that they are liars. He also describes O'Neill as an "eternal Kerry antagonist", although the Boston Globe says they could not get a quote out of him during Kerry's many Senate campaigns. So who is smearing people now?
And the bit about their using Spaeth is a joke -does Salon seriously think a Dem consultant would help them?
Furtermore, let's maintain standards here - Conason says that in 2000, Spaeth "participated in the most subterranean episode of the Republican primary contest". We all know that he should be referring to the trashing of McCain in South Carolina with push polls, rumurs of illegitimate kids, and so on. But he is not.
And his conclusion is a joke - "Bush's "independent" supporters would apparently rather talk about the Vietnam quagmire than about his deadly incompetence in Iraq.
The folks Kerry accused of war crimes over thirty years ago would like to respond at a time when Kerry is campaigning on his Vietnam record and little else. The notion that it was the Bush people who brought up Vietnam is absurd.
Posted by: TM | May 07, 2004 at 06:37 AM