Reply #3: Exactly

[karynnj]

I remember Kerry answering in the last few weeks that one problem they had in dealing with it was that the media played with it for weeks after they had proven a large number of plain out lies. Lies - like that one and of soe people who described things when they were not even in the same place at the same tie.

The most galling thing is that the media demanded Kerry disprove every thing they said (in the midst of an election)- in spite of the fact that the SBVT contradicted the official record and did not have a single piece of substantiation. To me, this was a media condoned character assassination. The fact is that Richard Nixon, as bad as he was, accepted the results of his administration's research - done about 2 years after the fact - that Kerry was a war hero and clean.

Sam Fox, one of the funders of the SBVT, had to face Kerry on the SFRC when Fox was nominated to be the ambassador to Belgium. He tried to proactively deal with having done that to avoid (unsuccessfully) Kerry hitting him on this. He did this by saying to Senator Kerry in his remarks that Kerry was a war hero and he would always have that. But, in reality, this country's media and the Republicans repaid a young man putting himself at risk, unlike Cheney and others, who had other priorities, by turning what should, in a fair world, have been a major character validation into at best a wash. Fox and others actually did take away his status as a war hero at the time it should have been most valuable to him.