Kerry and the swift-boating victims - Wash Times Op-ed

[globalvillage]

Wade Sanders has a great op-ed in the Washington Times this morning. I agree with his conclusion:

"The Senate must reject Mr. Fox."

Kerry and the swift-boating victims

As the skipper of a Swift Boat during the Vietnam War, I recently watched with interest as Sam Fox, a Missouri multimillionaire, small-talked his way through a confirmation hearing on his nomination to be the United States ambassador to Belgium.

I have no personal interest in Belgium, but one feature on Mr. Fox's long list of support for all things Republican caught my attention: "Foxy," as President Bush affectionately calls him, had donated $50,000 to the distasteful smear machine known as the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth during the 2004 election.

Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but one of the lessons drilled into me by the military and preserved through the memory of friends who were lucky enough to come home from Vietnam alive, is that truth matters above all else. And as a military man, it doesn't matter much who is being attacked -- John McCain, Max Cleland, John Kerry, or Jack Murtha -- I just don't believe that assaults on the military records of veterans belong in our politics. Nor do I believe that those who finance smears of decorated Vietnam veterans deserve to represent America on the world stage.

more ...

http://washingtontimes.com/op-ed/20070308-101558-3290r.htm

This administration and its cronies have found every conceivable way to disrespect our active duty military and our veterans. From the policy to the medical care to the vile smears on decorated veterans, how can they continue to make the claim that they "support the troops"? This crony appointment by bush is just another example of the disdain they have for anyone who doesn't fall in lock step with their misguided ideology.

Hypocrites.

Fox can not be confirmed. It's a slap in the face to everyone who wore the uniform.

edit typos.

[dwahzon]

1. Nice op-ed

and I'm especially glad to see its placement in the Washington Times. Thanks Wade Sanders. It's great to see integrity in action.

[Mass]

2. Digby weighs also on the issue - The Empty Conscience

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2007/03/empty-conscience-by-digby-ive-written.html

The Empty Conscience

by digby

I've written a lot about how the Democrats need to hold Republicans accountable for what they do or they will rise from their electoral graves and return to do it again --- just as they have been doing since the dawn of the dirty tricks, modern conservative movement. Character assassins are not impressed by Christian forgiveness and the American people are too busy working two jobs to pay off their sub-prime mortgages and their 28% interest credit cards to notice the details. It's up to the Democrats to do this
...
During the hearing for this reprehensible GOP moneybags, John Kerry was appropriately steely eyed and angry. Jim Webb says he won't vote for the guy. The nomination has been tabled for now. But it still isn't settled and it really shouldn't even be a question.

Which leads us to this atrocity


...

It doesn't matter what he says or what he feels. He's a lying piece of garbage, as he proved when he bankrolled those swiftboat scum. If this guy is confirmed by a Democratic senate the word will once again go forth that there will be no price to pay for character assassination. Indeed, Republicans will laugh their asses off. Not only can you destroy a man's reputation, his friends and allies will reward you for it. (And then you can do it to them too!)
...
It's not that Democrats have to make a note of every slight and issue payback. But they do have to draw some bright lines. The swift boat project was beyond the pale and anyone who had anything to do with it should never be rewarded at the hands of Democrats. If they do not make it a point to hold these people accountable in any way they can, they are the architects of their own demise. The ghost of Don Segretti is working feverishly as we speak, training the zombies to do the same thing to the next presidential candidate. That's how Republican zombies and Joe Lieberman work. They don't have consciences.

[globalvillage]

6. I saw the Digby piece last night.

Excellent. Thanks for posting it here.
And I'm glad to hear Webb won't support this nomination. None of them should.

[Mass]

3. Good to read that in the Washington Times, of all newspapers.\nt

[JNelson6563]

4. I met Wade in 04

he hit the campaign trail in the weak, belated response to the sift boat liars. He was an excellent representative of Kerry. A great guy.

Julie

[blm]

22. Challenging Bush to debate their Vietnam era records was a VERY BOLD Counter. Too bad corpmedia

chose to not give it any coverage - in fact, many Democrats and media pundits never even repeated Kerry's challenge to Bush on this issue.

I wonder why the Dem spokespeople and media wouldn't repeat and carry that challenge even as the RW media was blasting Kerry for attacking Bush and the swifts in that speech to the Firefighters Convention on Aug 19, 2004.

Do you have any insight why we can only find RW attacks on Kerry after that speech, but we can't find any left media or mainstream coverage where they supported or even repeated Kerry's challenge to swifts and Bush on this?

[karynnj]

25. Very good question, BLM

Also, when the MSM did handle the SBVT issue, they always seemed to start from the perspective of there being 2 groups of people who had differing views of what happened.

They ignored that the Navy records from 35 years before were INTACT (unlike Bush's where some were burned in a fire or something)and were uniformly glowing in their praise of 1st lt Kerry, that Nixon and his administration were taped saying they had investigated Kerry and he was clean and a war hero. This was TWO years after the fact. If the SBVT's claims were fact, how many of Kerry's officers would have stayed quiet? Tour of Duty was written by a historian and Kerry had NO editorial control. Brinkley interviewed over 100 people actually involved and their stories agreed with Kerry's journals and his comments - other than Kerry was MORE restrained in his comments. Additionally, all but one of Kerry's crew were 100% behind him. All of this was easily available before the August SBVT attacks. (I'm sure Kerry did not put 150 plus pages of Navy records on his campaign web site to resolve the repeated argument on the Kerry blog over what color eyes he has. ("hazel" per his records.)

On little things, the media repeated the SBVT lies in their framing of the issue. The SBVT claimed to have served in Vietnam with John Kerry. In truth, some never served and for those that did, most did not serve at either the same time or place as John Kerry. At minimum, you would think the media should have identified the number of SBVT who actually were with John Kerry. Doing that alone would have shown the hollowness of the SBVT.

The second thing they should have done was asked the SBVT for some proof. They after all were countering the entire official record - which backed John Kerry. The SBVT who Kerry reported to had written official fitness reports praising him. At the end of his time in Vietnam, they transfered him to Brooklyn. One document that was on Kerry's web site related to this transfer was one that gave him the needed higher security clearance. His officers obviously had to attest to his character to get this. At minimum, these officers either lied on official Navy records in 1969 or they lied in 2004.

Instead, they gave the official Navy story (which they called Kerry's, though it wasn't a story he told), the SBVT counter story (or stories as they often had multiple contradicting stories), followed by whatever new proof the Kerry team dug up to support his record. They tended to question Kerry not the SBVT.

To me this seemed equivilent to asing a respected, competent employee to prove that his academic transcript was accurate because some guy, who may or may not have gone to same school at some point in time, said with no proof that he knew the grades were really different.

When people say Kerry's response was weak - they ignore that he HAD given the media more gold plated proof of the truth than I could provide on any fact of my own (thankfully boring) life. The media was COMPLICIT and like Fox, quilty of spreading known lies (or at the very minimum unproven contrary to the official record allegations). If this is acceptable, what stops them from making up any story about anyone.

[ProSense]

28. Exactly! This is the key point:

Also, when the MSM did handle the SBVT issue, they always seemed to start from the perspective of there being 2 groups of people who had differing views of what happened.

The premise being that the liars were a legitimate group that took issue with Kerry 1971 Senate testimony and were out to prove his statements false, when in actuality John O'Neill was linked to Nixon and his sole purpose since has been to perpetrate vicious lies to try to destroy Kerry.

Houston lawyer John O'Neill is a Republican -- as the Houston Chronicle noted the day after O'Neill's interview with Blitzer. According to the paper, O'Neill voted in the 1998 Republican state primary. But O'Neill's ties to the Republican Party extend far beyond party affiliation. During the CNN interview, Blitzer reported that former President Richard Nixon had urged O'Neill to publicly counter Kerry on The Dick Cavett Show, but there is more to the story. O'Neill was a creation of the Nixon administration, as Joe Klein detailed in the January 5 issue of The New Yorker. Former Nixon special counsel Chuck Colson told Klein that Kerry was an "articulate" and "credible leader" of those veterans calling for an end to the Vietnam War and therefore "an immediate target of the Nixon Administration." As such, the Nixon administration found it necessary to "create a counterfoil" to Kerry. Colson recounted, "We found a vet named John O'Neill and formed a group called Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace. We had O'Neill meet the President, and we did everything we could do to boost his group." Articles from the April 21 Houston Chronicle and the June 17, 2003, Boston Globe confirm close ties between O'Neill and the Nixon administration.

Beyond his role in the Nixon administration's strategy to undermine Kerry in the 1970s, O'Neill is also connected to Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist (a Nixon appointee) and to former President George H.W. Bush, according to Houston Chronicle articles from March 31 and April 21. In the late 1970s, O'Neill clerked for Rehnquist; in 1990, according to an October 7, 1991, report by Texas Lawyer, the former President Bush considered O'Neill for a federal judgeship vacancy.

link

[salin]

5. he and his wife each gave Lieberman $10,500 to his recent

campaign. Yep $21,000 directly to Lieberman - so of course along with the GOPers - Lieberman will support Fox. It s*cks but he will be confirmed.

[karynnj]

9. Leiberman is not on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee

It may be the best place to stop it is there. The Democrats have 11 Senators, the Republicans 10 on that committee. The Chair can refuse to send the nomination to the floor if it does not have a majority of the votes.

The Democrats are: Biden, Dodd, Kerry, Feingold, Boxer, Nelson, Obama, Menendez, Cardin, Casey, and Webb.

As seen upthread, Webb has said that he won't vote for him. Obama, the only Democrat there when Kerry grilled Fox, made some pretty strong comment that the SBVT perpetrated a massive fraud and hit him on not saying he now knows it was wrong.

If all these Democrats vote against his confirmation, then he doesn't make it to the floor. What would be great would be if at least one Republican has the decency to say that the SBVT attacks went too far. This could be a way that Senator Hagel shows that he, not McCain, is the real maverick. He has already long ago raised questions on Iraq - where he was out of line with the Republicans. He also has known Senator Kerry for years and knows that Kerry very quickly defended everyone else.

[City Lights]

7. Great Op-Ed, and even better that it's in the Moonie Times.

Thanks for posting. :-)

[mloutre]

8. Yup. Of all places.

I mean, we're talking about the Washington Times, which no one in his/er correct mind would ever call a left-wing or even a centrist publication.

Key point: you don't have to be a bleeding heart liberal to know that Sam Fox should not, repeat *not*, be confirmed by the Senate to a plum job as ambassador to Belgium -- no matter what his good buddy Heckuva-Job-Bushie thinks.

[saltpoint]

11. Wholly agree. Fox funded the Swiftboat liars who committed character

assassination on a war veteran.

Had I made even the faintest gesture of disrespect to any war veteran as a child my mother would have whomped me but good, and properly so.

Not a bad editorial at all, and let's hope the Senate gets a clue on this one.

[blm]

15. The Senate has to stop FEARING Lieberman who has gone out of his way to support this

lying asshat.

[saltpoint]

18. Hi, blm. Yep. We're a ways off still, but I'm thinking our chances of

increasing Senate seats in 08 are pretty encouraging. That will reduce Lieberman's role as potential spoiler.

Ben Nelson of Nebraska is more conservative than Lieberman, but he doesn't grandstand as Joe does. Joe has a far more progressive constituency than Nelson, yet he plays footsie with the Republicans.

[rox63]

10. Nice to see a reasonable op-ed in the Moonie Times

K&R! :kick:

[MH1]

12. I've heard recently that the real journalists there

- and apparently there are some who at least aspire to be real journalists - are trying to fight the right wing editorial slant of the paper and be more objective.

Maybe this means they are having a small amount of success. Good sign.

Or maybe it's just a token that the editors will later point to as "see we're really not right wing."

[karynnj]

13. That is a surprise

It does seem that this nomination is beginning to become controversial. The WSJ op-ed earlier this week was strident - so there must be some real concern that the Senate would do the right thing.

I seriously don't see how a Democrat can look John Kerry in the face if they vote for this. Senator Kerry was defamed by these ads and even now his reputation (though not his honor) still suffers from it.

Intentionally spreading lies about a person, or paying to have millions hear lies as Fox did, is such a serious transgression that it has its very own commandment against it. Years ago, when my kids were in Hebrew school, they were told a story about why it was so serious. In the story, a man, who had spread false stories and was repentant went to a Rabbi, who told him to cut open a few feather pillows. After doing that when he returned, he was told to go back and pick up all the feathers. This was, of course impossible, just as it is impossible to completely ensure that everyone who heard the SBVT lies knows they were politically motivated lies. Apparently, neither Sam Fox or his apologist, Joe Leiberman, learned this lesson.

[MH1]

20. "It's very own commandment" - important point.

How could anyone claiming to be a good Christian support this guy after he deliberately funded a clear violation of one of the Commandments?

Interestingly, the power of language is acknowledged in the tenets of other religions too - for example, in Buddhism, "right speech" is part of the eightfold path - iirc, it is the first of the principles of ethical conduct. ("Right speech" goes far beyond just abstaining from lying, though.)

It is not by accident that the proscription against speaking falsely takes such a high place in the tenets of major religions.

[karynnj]

26. Interesting that it is the FIRST principle of ethical conduct in Buddism

It seems that this may actually be a universal principle because it is so fundamental to everything else.

Here, it is particulary evil as Senator Kerry himself has always been scupulous about how he speaks of others and hsd a reputation based on living his values for over 50 years. He has been an unusually ethical, principled person, avoiding the easy corruption of DC.

[MH1]

31. It is also the first of "The Four Agreements"

"Be impeccable with your word"

The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom (A Toltec Wisdom Book)

http://www.amazon.com/Four-Agreements-Practical-Personal-Freedom/dp/1878424319/ref=pd_bbs_2/002-5599859-7532811?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1173462438&sr=1-2

So, that's three different religious traditions on three continents. I'll bet it's in most or all of the others as well.

I agree with you that it is especially evil for this weapon to be used against someone who does try so hard, as Senator Kerry does, to uphold this value.

I also think it's a red flag against the so-called "Christian" right when they are so willing to overlook the flouting of this commandment by people supporting their other positions, or even to break that commandment themselves.

And, if Christianity embraced the more comprehensive Buddhist and Toltec reverence for The Word, then many of their preachers would have to seriously rework the themes of their sermons.

[Atman]

14. Sheesh...why don't the democrats support our troops?

Oh, wait...never mind.

.

[Zandor]

16. It's not a Washington Times Op-Ed

It's a great op-ed written by a guest, not the Times. Big difference.

[MH1]

21. But if they printed it, or even just allowed it on their website, that's something. n/t

[karynnj]

35. It definately means something

because it will reach some people who only read the right wing stuff. The question is why the WSJ choose to print the garbage it did. Clearly this nomination may be in jeopardy.

[ginnyinWI]

17. and besides this guy's low character,

The questions Kerry put to him at the beginning of his time show clearly how very incompetent this guy is--he's another Brownie ignorant of the most basic facts about Belgium and the problems of Europe.

[karynnj]

19. His answers to those questions were embarrassingly arrogant

I think most of us here could have answered the SWIFT questions far better than he did. He said he only knew what he read in the paper - which was giving himself too much credit. Maybe he only reads the sports section. The SWIFT issue was covered in the main and the business secition of the paper I read.

I am shocked that he gave so little effort to learning about Belgium. I know that before going to a foreign country, everyone I know has bought books and tried to learn as much as they could so they could get as much as they could out of their visit. Imagine how much more would be done when faced with the opportunity to be an ambassador. Natural curiosity and interest should have lead to more knowledge. This is a sign of someone with no interest or respect for other cultures. (He did answer Kerry's question on visiting there by spoeaking of them buying some products a company Fox owned in Ireland produced.) An ambassadorship is wasted on someone like him. It won't help our relations wit Belguim.

[bumblebee1]

29. Funny, last July, my husband and I went on a four day trip to Niagara Falls

and Toronto. Before the trip, I bought a book titled "Toronto for Dummies." I read it before and during the trip. Unfortunately, our country has a habit of sending ignorant ambassadors to represent us.

[ProfessorGAC]

32. Well, That Was Good Of You

And, they speak English there. This idiot is going to Belgium and has not one iota of knowledge it the language. You went to an English speaking country, and still tried to do some homework first.

Talk about day and night.
The Professor

[karynnj]

36. You mean he should learn the language

No, he probably thinks that speaking English loudy and slowly will work. I bet little 10 year old John Kerry knew more about Germany when his dad was a diplomat there than this guy knows of Belguim. (I also wonder how giving ambassadorships for political reasons looks to a real diplomat.)

[bumblebee1]

37. Actually, Professor,

Belgium has two languages: Flemish and French. This idiot doesn't have an inkling about either language.

[ProSense]

23. Excellent op-ed! "Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but"

I don't want a despicable liar, who continues to lie when confronted about lying, to respresent America.

[mloutre]

24. Fox and friends

[jillan]

27. nothing sweeter than revenge

and I am so glad John Kerry has a chance to be on the offense concerning these bastards!

[karynnj]

30. I wouldn't say it was revenge

The issue is that the line has to be drawn. Fox supported with $50,000 a smear he had to have known was a lie in October 2004. This is not politics as usual. If we do not want that type of despicable politics to become the toxic norm, society - here in the form of the Senate - has to lead the this charge. I almost wish that someone else would have done this rather than Senator Kerry. It would have been nice to see someone else being the first to say - "this was wrong"

[tinfoilinfor2005]

33. I just emailed my Senator (Nelson) excerpts from the Digby blog

and asked him to vote NO on the Sam Fox confirmation. Hard to tell with him, though. But since the election, he has seemed to grow a bit more nerve. We'll see.

K & R for this very important thread, and I ask my fellow DUers, especially those whose Senators are on this committee to make some noise.

[politicasista]

34. K&R

:kick:

[_dynamicdems]

38. KICK!

Amen.

:kick: