Does Vietnam Matter?
By Ben Domenech Posted in User Blogs — Comments (1) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
Byron York has the response from the rest of the swift boat crew - the ones who weren't on stage at the DNC:
As for the first, more fundamental objection to the convention video, Thurlow says that Kerry's version of the events of March 13, 1969, is simply wrong. "His story is a total fabrication," Thurlow says. One of the Swift Boats did hit a mine that day, Thurlow says, but much of the rest of Kerry's story is inaccurate. "This thing about being under intense enemy fire is a falsehood...There was no fire off either bank [of the river]. This thing about getting Jim out of the river under a hail of bullets with these serious injuries is totally fabricated."
"We fired our weapons onto the bank to suppress any chance that there might be snipers that might try to pick off guys in the chaos," Thurlow says. "But I don't remember any fire from the banks." Thurlow also says he saw Kerry briefly toward the end of the day, and "he wasn't bleeding, and he wasn't hurt."
I guess my question to all of this is: how much should we care?
It seems clear that Kerry has always exaggerated his experiences from the four months he spent in Vietnam - both in the negative sense in his Winter Soldier testimony, and in the personal positive sense in his much-mocked collection of purple hearts - but he isn't the first veteran or politician to do so. No, I don't have any respect for a candidate once they start calling themself a war hero for political gain... but considering the lies Clinton told us for years, to our faces, are these exaggerations really that bad? Should we really care as much about this as some on the right think we should?
My basic point is just this: in the end, John Kerry still made the right decision about going to war so many years ago, and I feel our President made the wrong one. But it's the President's actions since Vietnam that have made him a good leader. And it's John Kerry's actions in the decades since he got back from Vietnam that will make him a lousy President.
I think we should care only to the extent that the Kerry campaign evidently cares, makes it an issue.
I think the Democrats embrace of Kerry's war record is pretty disingenous and opportunistic, but what's interesting to me about it is what it says about the Democratic party.
I thought Clinton and his crew essentially won the "is serving in the military a defacto requirement for serving as President" argument in the Nineties. His walloping of Dole in '96 sealed the deal, I think, and I think the Republicans paid attention to it. (After all, if military heroism was all it took, we'd be trying to reelect John McCain.)
That doesn't mean I approve of Clinton's draft-dodging escapades. Bush did better, although not as well as Kerry (or Gore, who I believe served longer in Vietnam). But truthfully, if Bush had sat out the Sixties skiing in Aspen it would not have bothered me overmuch. I'm more concerned with what he's doing and standing for today.
The obvious move from the Kerry campaign is to use his tour of service to inoculate Kerry against charges of weakness. This leads to amusing moments were apparently nothing he did in the Senate for many years is worth talking about as much as what he did for four months in Vietnam. And it's also leading them toward some logical conclusions I don't think most of them really share. Hitchens had a good piece on this some time back: there's some very strange miltaristic rhetoric coming out of some lefty camps (the "chickenhawk" meme, for instance).