University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Denies Recognition to Another Christian Group
CHAPEL HILL, N.C., August 12, 2004
For the second time in less than two years, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) has denied recognition to a Christian group, claiming that the group's desire to limit its membership to Christians constitutes "discrimination."
"A Christian group has a right to be Christian, a Muslim group has a right to be Muslim, and a Jewish group has a right to be Jewish," said David French, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). "It seems absurd that anyone in a free society would have to make this argument, but time and time again FIRE has had to fight for this constitutional right at universities."
The Alpha Iota Omega Christian fraternity (AIO) at UNC contacted FIRE when, according to AIO leaders, the university suspended the group's recognition and froze its university account and web access without warning. This occurred after AIO objected to signing an agreement which would have prohibited the use of religious affiliation as a criterion for membership—because following such a policy would defeat the very purpose of having a Christian fraternity. Unrecognized groups do not have official rights at UNC and may not reserve space on campus, apply for funding from mandatory student fees, or take advantage of a variety of other rights and privileges that all recognized groups enjoy.
UNC's decision is all the more shocking in light of the fact that this is the second time in less than two years that FIRE has had to intervene on behalf of a religious student group suffering from discrimination at the hands of UNC's administration. In December of 2002, the very same UNC administrators attempted to force the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship to remove a provision of its constitution that required the officers of that Christian group be Christian. UNC quickly reversed this decision after FIRE publicly exposed its unconstitutional and illiberal actions. Indeed, there have been dozens of cases in which universities have nonsensically punished religious organizations for alleged "discrimination" when they used religious criteria to make religiously significant decisions.
UNC's latest episode of discrimination against religious students began during the fall of 2003, when Segun Olagunju, at that time AIO's president, met with Jonathan Curtis, UNC's assistant director for student activities and organizations, to discuss his concerns about the group's application for recognition. Olagunju reports that during their meeting he offered to submit the fraternity's application to the administration along with an addendum objecting to the clause in the application that prohibits the use of religious affiliation as a criterion for membership. Curtis, the same administrator who initiated action against InterVarsity (and other Christian groups) in 2002, informed Olagunju that AIO was required to agree to the clause or face derecognition. Under these circumstances, AIO, which has been officially recognized every year since January of 1999, decided not to submit the application containing the nondiscrimination clause.
The members of AIO believe that the clause preventing the fraternity from choosing its members on the basis of religion would hinder its ability to maintain its religious character and mission. AIO defines its mission as, "to train Christian leaders… by upholding the Bible's true standard of righteousness."
"For more than twenty years, it has been the law that public universities must provide equal access to religious student organizations. These universities cannot condition that access on the adoption of nondiscrimination regulations that strike at the heart of the religious character of the group," said FIRE's French.
In July of 2004, FIRE wrote to UNC Chancellor James Moeser, saying, "UNC simply may not use its nondiscrimination policy to dictate how religious student organizations must deal with matters of faith. If UNC allows expressive organizations to exist at all on its campus, then it must allow religious organizations to exist, to select their own members, and to establish policies and practices in pursuit of their goals. No group can control the content of its message if it is unable to choose its messengers." While FIRE also expressed a desire to resolve the matter amicably, UNC has yet to attempt to refute the students' claims or even to defend its actions.
"It is particularly disappointing that UNC has once again denied basic constitutional rights to its religious student organizations. Unlike some other university administrations, UNC's leadership—because of its actions less than two years ago—is intimately familiar with the constitutional rights of religious students. UNC lacks any excuse for its shameful actions," said French.
FIRE is a nonprofit educational foundation that unites civil rights and civil liberties leaders, scholars, journalists, and public intellectuals from across the political and ideological spectrum on behalf of individual rights, due process, freedom of expression, academic freedom, and rights of conscience at our nation's colleges and universities. FIRE's efforts to preserve liberty at UNC and on campuses across America can be viewed at www.thefire.org.
CONTACT:
Greg Lukianoff, Director of Legal and Public Advocacy, FIRE: 215-717-3473; greg@thefire.org
David French, President, FIRE: 215-717-3473; david.french@thefire.org
James Moeser, Chancellor, UNC-Chapel Hill: 919-962-1365; james_moeser@unc.edu
Jonathan Curtis, Assistant Director for Student Activities and Organizations, UNC-Chapel Hill: 919-962-1461; jon@email.unc.edu
Saturday, August 14, 2004
From Captain's Quarters blog:
August 14, 2004
Alston Never Served Under Kerry
Thanks to reader Lori in Texas, I think we've just about pieced the record together on David Alston and his supposed service under John Kerry's command. Lori points out a sympathetic article on Del Sandusky, one of the few Swift boat veterans supporting Kerry and one that served on his boat, specifically gives the timing on Kerry's command of PCF-94:
In January 1969, Sandusky's boat, PCF-94, came under attack during one such ambush. Lt. Ted Peck, the officer in charge, and another crewman were seriously wounded. Sandusky had to take command.
The boat was sinking and on fire, but Sandusky steered it back to safety. They counted 155 bullet holes in the boat and found a live enemy rocket in the main cabin. It had come to rest in a sack of potatoes.
For his actions, Sandusky would receive the Bronze Star.
With their officer headed home, the crew of PCF-94 needed a leader. And Lt. j.g. John Kerry, whose crew on PCF-44 had rotated back home, needed men to lead.
"I was sure glad he came along," Sandusky said, "because to be honest, I didn't want to take command."
From Jan. 30 to March 13, 1969, Kerry and the crew of the PCF-94 would conduct 18 missions in the Mekong Delta river system. In that time, Kerry would earn a Silver Star, a Bronze Star and add two Purple Hearts to the one he received earlier.
Bingo! Yachtzee! Alston received his serious wounds in that same exact battle that took Peck out of service. On January 29th, Alston was medevaced out to a hospital with head wounds and no records indicate that he ever returned to the unit. Kerry took command of PCF-94 the next day. Alston never served a day under Kerry's command. In fact, Kerry received a replacement, Fred Short, on 28 February as a replacement for Alston.
Now what does that tell us about Kerry and his Viet Nam narrative?
1. He and Alston conspired to deceive people about Alston's service under Kerry. That conspiracy was intended to give John Kerry cover against exactly the kind of campaign he faces from the other Swiftvets.
2. The "end of January" language on Kerry's website was intentionally vague in order to fuzzy up the timeline and keep Alston's true status a secret. Obviously, Sandusky remembers the dates well enough, and Kerry could easily have gotten them from him if he wanted to be as specific as his other dates on the timeline.
3. The DNC either were saps or actively participated in the conspiracy in order to assist Kerry in his Viet Nam mythology. Otherwise, why would they have allowed David Alston to speak at the convention about his experiences serving with John Kerry on the boat?
4. Kerry's band of brothers have some complicity in this cover-up as well. Those who served on PCF-94 surely remember that Alston never served under Kerry; Sandusky specifically recalls Peck being wounded and removed from command, but he wouldn't remember that Alston left at the same time?
5. One could argue that they served on the same boat, of course, and I look forward to that Clintonian parsing used in Kerry's defense. After holding Alston up as an expert on his leadership, he'll be hard pressed to explain how that expertise came to Alston from a hospital bed miles away from Kerry and his old PCF.
If this gets out to the mainstream media, this story kills Kerry's campaign. This isn't just a guy embellishing his war record -- this is a deliberate and longstanding attempt to mislead and defraud people by creating his own witnesses after the fact. That he could have done such a clumsy job should disqualify him for higher office on that basis alone.
UPDATE: Corrected Sandusky's first name from Dale to Del. Hat tip to Menlo Bob; sorry about that.
UPDATE II: I see that Democratic Underground has linked back to this post with a suggestion that they dig up dirt on one of my readers who did research for this series. If you think all of this makes me happy, you're out of your minds. Having a candidate for the presidency who has apparently falsified large parts of his record and encouraged people to lie to back it up isn't funny, it's scary.
I suggest that instead of attacking people researching records in the public domain, you spend your time encouraging your candidate to do the same thing you demanded of George Bush -- sign the 180 and release all of his military records. You may not believe it, but I'd love to be proved wrong on this point. But until we see the records, all of the evidence at hand tells us that Alston lied, and that means that Kerry and his other band of brothers are complicit in the lie.
Posted by Captain Ed at August 14, 2004 01:25 AM
August 14, 2004
Alston Never Served Under Kerry
Thanks to reader Lori in Texas, I think we've just about pieced the record together on David Alston and his supposed service under John Kerry's command. Lori points out a sympathetic article on Del Sandusky, one of the few Swift boat veterans supporting Kerry and one that served on his boat, specifically gives the timing on Kerry's command of PCF-94:
In January 1969, Sandusky's boat, PCF-94, came under attack during one such ambush. Lt. Ted Peck, the officer in charge, and another crewman were seriously wounded. Sandusky had to take command.
The boat was sinking and on fire, but Sandusky steered it back to safety. They counted 155 bullet holes in the boat and found a live enemy rocket in the main cabin. It had come to rest in a sack of potatoes.
For his actions, Sandusky would receive the Bronze Star.
With their officer headed home, the crew of PCF-94 needed a leader. And Lt. j.g. John Kerry, whose crew on PCF-44 had rotated back home, needed men to lead.
"I was sure glad he came along," Sandusky said, "because to be honest, I didn't want to take command."
From Jan. 30 to March 13, 1969, Kerry and the crew of the PCF-94 would conduct 18 missions in the Mekong Delta river system. In that time, Kerry would earn a Silver Star, a Bronze Star and add two Purple Hearts to the one he received earlier.
Bingo! Yachtzee! Alston received his serious wounds in that same exact battle that took Peck out of service. On January 29th, Alston was medevaced out to a hospital with head wounds and no records indicate that he ever returned to the unit. Kerry took command of PCF-94 the next day. Alston never served a day under Kerry's command. In fact, Kerry received a replacement, Fred Short, on 28 February as a replacement for Alston.
Now what does that tell us about Kerry and his Viet Nam narrative?
1. He and Alston conspired to deceive people about Alston's service under Kerry. That conspiracy was intended to give John Kerry cover against exactly the kind of campaign he faces from the other Swiftvets.
2. The "end of January" language on Kerry's website was intentionally vague in order to fuzzy up the timeline and keep Alston's true status a secret. Obviously, Sandusky remembers the dates well enough, and Kerry could easily have gotten them from him if he wanted to be as specific as his other dates on the timeline.
3. The DNC either were saps or actively participated in the conspiracy in order to assist Kerry in his Viet Nam mythology. Otherwise, why would they have allowed David Alston to speak at the convention about his experiences serving with John Kerry on the boat?
4. Kerry's band of brothers have some complicity in this cover-up as well. Those who served on PCF-94 surely remember that Alston never served under Kerry; Sandusky specifically recalls Peck being wounded and removed from command, but he wouldn't remember that Alston left at the same time?
5. One could argue that they served on the same boat, of course, and I look forward to that Clintonian parsing used in Kerry's defense. After holding Alston up as an expert on his leadership, he'll be hard pressed to explain how that expertise came to Alston from a hospital bed miles away from Kerry and his old PCF.
If this gets out to the mainstream media, this story kills Kerry's campaign. This isn't just a guy embellishing his war record -- this is a deliberate and longstanding attempt to mislead and defraud people by creating his own witnesses after the fact. That he could have done such a clumsy job should disqualify him for higher office on that basis alone.
UPDATE: Corrected Sandusky's first name from Dale to Del. Hat tip to Menlo Bob; sorry about that.
UPDATE II: I see that Democratic Underground has linked back to this post with a suggestion that they dig up dirt on one of my readers who did research for this series. If you think all of this makes me happy, you're out of your minds. Having a candidate for the presidency who has apparently falsified large parts of his record and encouraged people to lie to back it up isn't funny, it's scary.
I suggest that instead of attacking people researching records in the public domain, you spend your time encouraging your candidate to do the same thing you demanded of George Bush -- sign the 180 and release all of his military records. You may not believe it, but I'd love to be proved wrong on this point. But until we see the records, all of the evidence at hand tells us that Alston lied, and that means that Kerry and his other band of brothers are complicit in the lie.
Posted by Captain Ed at August 14, 2004 01:25 AM
From Catholic website Cruxnews.com:
AN INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT SPENCER
Fear and political correctness in the age of terrorism
Robert Spencer, the director of Jihad Watch, is a writer and researcher who has studied Islam for more than twenty years. He is the author of Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West (Regnery) and Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World's Fastest Growing Faith (Encounter). He is co-author, with Daniel Ali, of Inside Islam: A Guide for Catholics (Ascension), and editor of the essay collection The Myth of Islamic Tolerance, forthcoming from Prometheus Books. Mr. Spencer is here interviewed by Cruxnews.com Executive Editor Michael S. Rose.
Cruxnews.com: One of the popular phrases going round the globe these days is "clash of civilizations," indicating an ongoing conflict between the cultures of Islam and the West. Incredibly, nearly every time we see this term used in the media, the whole idea of such a culture war is dismissed as rather ridiculous. American politicians, for example, insist that our current ongoing conflict with terrorism hasn't a thing to do with religion or a clash of civilizations. Well then, is there a clash of civilizations going on?
Spencer: According to the radical Muslims, there certainly is. They see this as a war of Islamic values against Western values. Is it up only to one side to determine the nature of a conflict?
Cruxnews.com: Why can't the mainstream media or Western politicians face up to this reality? Why can't we seem to acknowledge this as a society?
Spencer: The answer to that is simple: Fear and political correctness.
Cruxnews.com: Political correctness again? You wrote at length about the problems of political correctness in your book Onward Muslim Soldiers. It seems that political correctness in at least some of the European countries has led to tolerant laws for Islamic immigrants. Countries like France, Britain, and the Netherlands now have a significant population of Muslims. What are some of the ill effects of these nations' tolerant laws?
Spencer: The ill effects are many. Muslims in Norway are pushing to make it a crime to blaspheme the Prophet Muhammad. Britain is instituting religious hatred laws that would be aimed at muzzling criticism of Islam; a Protestant minister has been questioned by police recently after he noted that parts of the Qur’an teach aggression against unbelievers. Such laws are supposed to keep the peace between Muslims and non-Muslims, but they have the unintended effect of muzzling genuine questions that ought to be considered by the Islamic communities in Europe if they really want to live in peace in the existing secular societies.
Cruxnews.com: Cardinal Ratzinger recently made bold by suggesting that Turkey seek an association with Muslim-rooted countries rather than with Europe. President Bush, however, has lobbied the EU to admit Turkey into the European Union. In your opinion, is this a good idea, considering that Turkey is not rooted in Judeo-Christian Western culture as is the rest of Europe.
Spencer: No, it's not a good idea. Turkey is a secular state, but it continues to exist in an uneasy tension with jihadists in Turkey who want to roll back secularism and reinstitute the Sharia. In recent years the secular government has made a large number of concessions to the radicals. If Turkey were to become a Sharia state as an EU member, it could seriously disrupt all the societies of Europe.
Cruxnews.com: We hear the word 'jihad' quite a lot, but I'm not sure the majority of Europeans or Americans have an accurate understanding of what is jihad? How do you explain the concept?
Spencer: I'll give you the definition I offer on my website: Jihad is a central duty of every Muslim. Modern Muslim theologians have spoken of many things as jihads: defending the faith from critics, supporting its growth and defense financially, even migrating to non-Muslim lands for the purpose of spreading Islam. But it's important to note that violent jihad is a constant of Islamic history. Many passages of the Qur'an and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad are used by radical Muslims today to justify their actions and gain new recruits. No major Muslim group has ever repudiated the doctrines of armed jihad. The theology of jihad, which denies unbelievers equality of human rights and dignity, is available today for anyone with the will and means to bring it to life.
Cruxnews.com: If jihad is justified by the Qur'an, does Islam also sanction the beheading of non-combatants in war zones?
Spencer: Contrary to popular belief, yes. The Qur’an says: "when ye meet the Unbelievers (in fight), smite at their necks…" (47:4). Islamic law stipulates that prisoners of war may be killed, enslaved, ransomed, or freed, at the discretion of the Islamic leader — who is to make the decision based on what is best for the Islamic community.
Cruxnews.com: The leads to another controversial question. Does Islam really motivate the terrorists or are these terrorists simply perverting the Islamic faith, 'hi-jacking' and abusing religion to promote their own personal agenda?
Spencer: Islam most certainly does motivate the terrorists. Their stated motivation has consistently been to establish the rule of the Sharia, Islamic law, within the Islamic world, and to reestablish the caliphate. The caliph was the successor of Muhammad as the spiritual and political leader of the Islamic community; the caliphate was abolished by secular Turkey in 1924.
Cruxnews.com: Many commentators have suggested that if the United States were to adjust its policies in Israel and Iraq, terrorism would cease, and the 'war' would come to an end. Is this an accurate appraisal?
Spencer: No, not at all. In his exhaustive, 30-volume exposition of the Muslim holy book, Fi Zilal al-Quran (In the Shade of the Quran), Sayyid Qutb, a leading radical Muslim theorist, wrote: "As the only religion of truth that exists on earth today, Islam takes appropriate action to remove all physical and material obstacles that try to impede its efforts to liberate mankind from submission to anyone other than God. … The practical way to ensure the removal of those physical obstacles while not forcing anyone to adopt Islam is to smash the power of those authorities based on false beliefs until they declare their submission and demonstrate this by paying the submission tax."
Likewise, a contemporary high-school textbook entitled IslamicCulture, produced by the Palestinian Authority Ministry of Education, states: "Islam is Allah’s religion for all human beings. It should be proclaimed and invite [people] to join it wisely and through appropriate preaching and friendly discussions. However, such methods may encounter resistance and the preachers may be prevented from accomplishing their duty … then, jihad and the use of physical force against the enemies become inevitable.…"
These and many similar statements from Islamic radicals make it clear that they are pursuing an expansionist program that is based on Islamic theology. They will not be mollified by the removal of some or all of their grievances regarding Iraq and Israel; the globalist vision articulated by Qutb is not focused simply on the redressing of grievances.
Cruxnews.com: Doesn't the Church teach that Muslims and Christians worship the same God? After all the Pope kissed the Qur'an on at least one occassion.
Spencer: No. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says that "the plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator, in the first place among whom are the Muslims. These profess to hold the faith of Abraham, and together with us adore one Merciful God, mankind’s judge in the last day" (Article 841). This is a carefully worded statement that warrants close examination.
"The first place among whom are the Muslims; these profess to hold the faith of Abraham." This statement is not saying that Muslims actually believe in Abraham’s faith, but only that they profess to hold the faith of Abraham. Professing and possessing are two different things: certainly there are many more Christians who profess Christ than there are people who actually live for Him.
"Together with us [they] adore one Merciful God, mankind’s judge in the last day." Again, the statement is very careful: it doesn’t say that they adore the same merciful God, but only that, like us, they adore one merciful God. The Council simply doesn’t address the question of whether Allah is the same God Who is written about in the Old and New Testaments. Muslims would also reject this idea: many of them believe that Christians are polytheists for professing faith in the Sacred Trinity.
As for the Pope kissing the Qu'ran, he did so no doubt out of his overflowing sense of irenicism and desire to make the first move in charity. But this one was perhaps ill-judged and will never meet with reciprocation.
Cruxnews.com: I can't help but ask about the comments that are always made about the Crusades. Many commentators are fond of claiming that every religion be twisted to justify violence in the same way, and they invariably point to the Crusades.
Spencer: Obviously any religion can be used to justify violence, but that doesn’t mean that they all have an equal capacity to inspire violence. However well or poorly Christians have lived up to his words, Jesus in the New Testament teaches: "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you" (St. Matthew 5:44); the Qur’an, on the other hand, teaches: "Muhammad is the apostle of Allah. Those who follow him are merciful to one another, but ruthless to unbelievers" (48:39).
Cruxnews.com: That doesn't exactly sound like the 'religion of peace' I keep hearing about. If Islam is really a 'religion of peace,' why don't more Muslims fight against terrorism?
Spencer: Islam is the only major religion with a developed doctrine, theology, and law that mandates violence against unbelievers. One classic manual of Islamic sacred law, which bears an endorsement from Al-Azhar University in Cairo, the highest authority in Sunni Islam, stipulates that "the caliph makes war upon Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians . . . until they become Muslim or pay the non-Muslim poll tax." It adds a comment by Sheikh Nuh ‘Ali Salman, a Jordanian expert on Islamic jurisprudence: the caliph wages this war only "provided that he has first invited [Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians] to enter Islam in faith and practice, and if they will not, then invited them to enter the social order of Islam by paying the non-Muslim poll tax (jizya) . . . while remaining in their ancestral religions." But the manual also states that in the absence of a caliph, Muslims must still wage jihad.
Cruxnews.com: But how can the terrorists use Islam to justify what they're doing, when Islam forbids offensive warfare and the killing of the innocent?
Spencer: Traditional Islamic law allows for the killing of non-combatants when they are perceived to be aiding somehow in the war effort. This is used to justify suicide attacks on buses and in restaurants in Israel, and is also used by radical Muslims to justify the September 11 attacks in the U.S.
Cruxnews.com: What can be done to stop Islam-inspired terrorism?
Spencer: First, we must acknowledge its sources and roots. As long as we continue to delude ourselves that socioeconomic or political fixes will solve the problem, and ignore the fact that jihadists are being recruited in mosques around the world every day, we will continue to be faced with this threat. We must recognize that the roots are in Islamic theology, and call on the Islamic world to reform.
Cruxnews.com: But that would require the nations of the Western World to rid themselves of their high penchant for abiding by the strict laws of political correctness. How has political correctness in Europe and/or in the US hamstrung abilities to deal with Islamic terrorism?
Spencer: Because authorities refuse to acknowledge that Islam plays any significant role in global terrorism, they have declined to investigate mosques and other places where Islamic terrorists have recruited and planned. Luckily, this is changing.
Cruxnews.com: What is the final solution? Or isn't there one?
Spencer: There isn’t one. We must call on Islam to reform, but it is wildly unlikely that this will happen. We must keep up our defenses, recognize where the problem is coming from, and develop reasonable law enforcement and immigration policies. Above all, we must recover our own spiritual resources, for ultimately this is a spiritual conflict.
Robert Spencer can be contacted through his website at jihadwatch.com
AN INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT SPENCER
Fear and political correctness in the age of terrorism
Robert Spencer, the director of Jihad Watch, is a writer and researcher who has studied Islam for more than twenty years. He is the author of Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West (Regnery) and Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World's Fastest Growing Faith (Encounter). He is co-author, with Daniel Ali, of Inside Islam: A Guide for Catholics (Ascension), and editor of the essay collection The Myth of Islamic Tolerance, forthcoming from Prometheus Books. Mr. Spencer is here interviewed by Cruxnews.com Executive Editor Michael S. Rose.
Cruxnews.com: One of the popular phrases going round the globe these days is "clash of civilizations," indicating an ongoing conflict between the cultures of Islam and the West. Incredibly, nearly every time we see this term used in the media, the whole idea of such a culture war is dismissed as rather ridiculous. American politicians, for example, insist that our current ongoing conflict with terrorism hasn't a thing to do with religion or a clash of civilizations. Well then, is there a clash of civilizations going on?
Spencer: According to the radical Muslims, there certainly is. They see this as a war of Islamic values against Western values. Is it up only to one side to determine the nature of a conflict?
Cruxnews.com: Why can't the mainstream media or Western politicians face up to this reality? Why can't we seem to acknowledge this as a society?
Spencer: The answer to that is simple: Fear and political correctness.
Cruxnews.com: Political correctness again? You wrote at length about the problems of political correctness in your book Onward Muslim Soldiers. It seems that political correctness in at least some of the European countries has led to tolerant laws for Islamic immigrants. Countries like France, Britain, and the Netherlands now have a significant population of Muslims. What are some of the ill effects of these nations' tolerant laws?
Spencer: The ill effects are many. Muslims in Norway are pushing to make it a crime to blaspheme the Prophet Muhammad. Britain is instituting religious hatred laws that would be aimed at muzzling criticism of Islam; a Protestant minister has been questioned by police recently after he noted that parts of the Qur’an teach aggression against unbelievers. Such laws are supposed to keep the peace between Muslims and non-Muslims, but they have the unintended effect of muzzling genuine questions that ought to be considered by the Islamic communities in Europe if they really want to live in peace in the existing secular societies.
Cruxnews.com: Cardinal Ratzinger recently made bold by suggesting that Turkey seek an association with Muslim-rooted countries rather than with Europe. President Bush, however, has lobbied the EU to admit Turkey into the European Union. In your opinion, is this a good idea, considering that Turkey is not rooted in Judeo-Christian Western culture as is the rest of Europe.
Spencer: No, it's not a good idea. Turkey is a secular state, but it continues to exist in an uneasy tension with jihadists in Turkey who want to roll back secularism and reinstitute the Sharia. In recent years the secular government has made a large number of concessions to the radicals. If Turkey were to become a Sharia state as an EU member, it could seriously disrupt all the societies of Europe.
Cruxnews.com: We hear the word 'jihad' quite a lot, but I'm not sure the majority of Europeans or Americans have an accurate understanding of what is jihad? How do you explain the concept?
Spencer: I'll give you the definition I offer on my website: Jihad is a central duty of every Muslim. Modern Muslim theologians have spoken of many things as jihads: defending the faith from critics, supporting its growth and defense financially, even migrating to non-Muslim lands for the purpose of spreading Islam. But it's important to note that violent jihad is a constant of Islamic history. Many passages of the Qur'an and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad are used by radical Muslims today to justify their actions and gain new recruits. No major Muslim group has ever repudiated the doctrines of armed jihad. The theology of jihad, which denies unbelievers equality of human rights and dignity, is available today for anyone with the will and means to bring it to life.
Cruxnews.com: If jihad is justified by the Qur'an, does Islam also sanction the beheading of non-combatants in war zones?
Spencer: Contrary to popular belief, yes. The Qur’an says: "when ye meet the Unbelievers (in fight), smite at their necks…" (47:4). Islamic law stipulates that prisoners of war may be killed, enslaved, ransomed, or freed, at the discretion of the Islamic leader — who is to make the decision based on what is best for the Islamic community.
Cruxnews.com: The leads to another controversial question. Does Islam really motivate the terrorists or are these terrorists simply perverting the Islamic faith, 'hi-jacking' and abusing religion to promote their own personal agenda?
Spencer: Islam most certainly does motivate the terrorists. Their stated motivation has consistently been to establish the rule of the Sharia, Islamic law, within the Islamic world, and to reestablish the caliphate. The caliph was the successor of Muhammad as the spiritual and political leader of the Islamic community; the caliphate was abolished by secular Turkey in 1924.
Cruxnews.com: Many commentators have suggested that if the United States were to adjust its policies in Israel and Iraq, terrorism would cease, and the 'war' would come to an end. Is this an accurate appraisal?
Spencer: No, not at all. In his exhaustive, 30-volume exposition of the Muslim holy book, Fi Zilal al-Quran (In the Shade of the Quran), Sayyid Qutb, a leading radical Muslim theorist, wrote: "As the only religion of truth that exists on earth today, Islam takes appropriate action to remove all physical and material obstacles that try to impede its efforts to liberate mankind from submission to anyone other than God. … The practical way to ensure the removal of those physical obstacles while not forcing anyone to adopt Islam is to smash the power of those authorities based on false beliefs until they declare their submission and demonstrate this by paying the submission tax."
Likewise, a contemporary high-school textbook entitled IslamicCulture, produced by the Palestinian Authority Ministry of Education, states: "Islam is Allah’s religion for all human beings. It should be proclaimed and invite [people] to join it wisely and through appropriate preaching and friendly discussions. However, such methods may encounter resistance and the preachers may be prevented from accomplishing their duty … then, jihad and the use of physical force against the enemies become inevitable.…"
These and many similar statements from Islamic radicals make it clear that they are pursuing an expansionist program that is based on Islamic theology. They will not be mollified by the removal of some or all of their grievances regarding Iraq and Israel; the globalist vision articulated by Qutb is not focused simply on the redressing of grievances.
Cruxnews.com: Doesn't the Church teach that Muslims and Christians worship the same God? After all the Pope kissed the Qur'an on at least one occassion.
Spencer: No. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says that "the plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator, in the first place among whom are the Muslims. These profess to hold the faith of Abraham, and together with us adore one Merciful God, mankind’s judge in the last day" (Article 841). This is a carefully worded statement that warrants close examination.
"The first place among whom are the Muslims; these profess to hold the faith of Abraham." This statement is not saying that Muslims actually believe in Abraham’s faith, but only that they profess to hold the faith of Abraham. Professing and possessing are two different things: certainly there are many more Christians who profess Christ than there are people who actually live for Him.
"Together with us [they] adore one Merciful God, mankind’s judge in the last day." Again, the statement is very careful: it doesn’t say that they adore the same merciful God, but only that, like us, they adore one merciful God. The Council simply doesn’t address the question of whether Allah is the same God Who is written about in the Old and New Testaments. Muslims would also reject this idea: many of them believe that Christians are polytheists for professing faith in the Sacred Trinity.
As for the Pope kissing the Qu'ran, he did so no doubt out of his overflowing sense of irenicism and desire to make the first move in charity. But this one was perhaps ill-judged and will never meet with reciprocation.
Cruxnews.com: I can't help but ask about the comments that are always made about the Crusades. Many commentators are fond of claiming that every religion be twisted to justify violence in the same way, and they invariably point to the Crusades.
Spencer: Obviously any religion can be used to justify violence, but that doesn’t mean that they all have an equal capacity to inspire violence. However well or poorly Christians have lived up to his words, Jesus in the New Testament teaches: "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you" (St. Matthew 5:44); the Qur’an, on the other hand, teaches: "Muhammad is the apostle of Allah. Those who follow him are merciful to one another, but ruthless to unbelievers" (48:39).
Cruxnews.com: That doesn't exactly sound like the 'religion of peace' I keep hearing about. If Islam is really a 'religion of peace,' why don't more Muslims fight against terrorism?
Spencer: Islam is the only major religion with a developed doctrine, theology, and law that mandates violence against unbelievers. One classic manual of Islamic sacred law, which bears an endorsement from Al-Azhar University in Cairo, the highest authority in Sunni Islam, stipulates that "the caliph makes war upon Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians . . . until they become Muslim or pay the non-Muslim poll tax." It adds a comment by Sheikh Nuh ‘Ali Salman, a Jordanian expert on Islamic jurisprudence: the caliph wages this war only "provided that he has first invited [Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians] to enter Islam in faith and practice, and if they will not, then invited them to enter the social order of Islam by paying the non-Muslim poll tax (jizya) . . . while remaining in their ancestral religions." But the manual also states that in the absence of a caliph, Muslims must still wage jihad.
Cruxnews.com: But how can the terrorists use Islam to justify what they're doing, when Islam forbids offensive warfare and the killing of the innocent?
Spencer: Traditional Islamic law allows for the killing of non-combatants when they are perceived to be aiding somehow in the war effort. This is used to justify suicide attacks on buses and in restaurants in Israel, and is also used by radical Muslims to justify the September 11 attacks in the U.S.
Cruxnews.com: What can be done to stop Islam-inspired terrorism?
Spencer: First, we must acknowledge its sources and roots. As long as we continue to delude ourselves that socioeconomic or political fixes will solve the problem, and ignore the fact that jihadists are being recruited in mosques around the world every day, we will continue to be faced with this threat. We must recognize that the roots are in Islamic theology, and call on the Islamic world to reform.
Cruxnews.com: But that would require the nations of the Western World to rid themselves of their high penchant for abiding by the strict laws of political correctness. How has political correctness in Europe and/or in the US hamstrung abilities to deal with Islamic terrorism?
Spencer: Because authorities refuse to acknowledge that Islam plays any significant role in global terrorism, they have declined to investigate mosques and other places where Islamic terrorists have recruited and planned. Luckily, this is changing.
Cruxnews.com: What is the final solution? Or isn't there one?
Spencer: There isn’t one. We must call on Islam to reform, but it is wildly unlikely that this will happen. We must keep up our defenses, recognize where the problem is coming from, and develop reasonable law enforcement and immigration policies. Above all, we must recover our own spiritual resources, for ultimately this is a spiritual conflict.
Robert Spencer can be contacted through his website at jihadwatch.com
Friday, August 13, 2004
The 'Ring' and the remnants of the West
By Spengler
The most important cultural event of the past decade is the ongoing release of the film version of J R R Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. No better guide exists to the mood and morals of the United States. The rapturous response among popular audiences to the first two installments of the trilogy should alert us that something important is at work. Richard Wagner's 19th-century tetralogy of music dramas, The Ring of the Nibelungs, gave resonance to National Socialism during the inter-war years of the last century. Tolkien does the same for Anglo-Saxon democracy.
Tolkien well may have written his epic as an "anti-Ring" to repair the damage that Wagner had inflicted upon Western culture. Consciously or not, the Oxford philologist who invented Hobbits has ruined Wagner before the popular audience. It recalls the terrible moment in Thomas Mann's great novel Doktor Faustus when the composer Adrian Leverkuhn, finishing his Faust cantata in the throes of syphilitic dementia, announces: "I want to take it back!" His amanuensis asks, "What do you want to take back?" "Beethoven's 9th Symphony!" cries Leverkuhn. Leverkuhn (on the strength of a bargain with the Devil) has written a work whose objective is to ruin the ability of musical audiences to hear Beethoven.
Tolkien has taken back Wagner's Ring. That may be his greatest accomplishment, and a literary accomplishment without clear precedent. To be sure, The Lord of the Rings is not a great work of literature to be compared to Cervantes or Dostoyevsky. But it is a great landmark of culture nonetheless. Its revival in a reasonably faithful cinematic version has far-reaching effects on the popular mind.
Wagner had done as much to Beethoven. "People don't like music; they just like the way it sounds," quipped the English conductor Sir Thomas Beecham. Beethoven's musical devices are stations along a journey which has a goal. Wagner turned these musical devices into the haunted caves and dells of a world in which the listener wanders capriciously, abandoning all sense of time and direction. Audiences never liked Wagner's music, but they loved the way it sounded. Musical effects in Beethoven, however eccentric, are subordinate to the long-range musical goal. In Wagner, musical effects are capricious events. That well suits the introduction of Wagner's Uebermensch, the hero Siegfried, for reasons I will make clear in a moment.
It is hard for us today to imagine what a cult raised itself around Wagner after the 1876 premiere of his Ring cycle. Compared to it the combined fervor for Elvis, the Beatles, Madonna and Michael Jackson seems like a band concert in the park. Perfectly sensible people attended a Wagner opera and declared that their lives had changed. Bavaria's eccentric King Ludwig II literally fell in love with the composer and built him the Bayreuth Festival, to which the elite of Europe repaired in homage. It was something like the mood that swept the youth of the West in the late 1960s, but an order of magnitude more powerful.
In 1848, Wagner was a disgruntled emulator of French grand opera who stockpiled hand grenades for revolutionaries, a fugitive from justice after that year's uprising. A quarter-century later he stood at the pinnacle of European culture. What precisely did he do?
Wagner announced the death of the old order of aristocracy and Church, of order and rules. Not only was the old order dying, but also it deserved to die, the victim of its inherent flaws. As the old order died a New Man would replace the servile creatures of the old laws, and a New Art would become the New Man's religion. The New Man would be fearless, sensual, unconstrained, and could make the world according to his will. Wagner's dictum that the sources of Western civilization had failed was not only entirely correct, but also numbingly obvious to anyone who lived through the upheavals of 1848. But how should one respond to this? Wagner had a seductive answer: become your own god!
Using elements of old Norse sagas and medieval epic, Wagner cobbled together a new myth. The Norse god Wotan personifies the old order: he rules by the laws engraved on his spear, by which he himself is bound. To build his fortress Valhalla he requires the labor of the giants, and to pay the giants, he steals the treasure of the Nibelung dwarf Alberich. Alberich won the treasure with a magic ring he fashioned from the stolen Gold of the Rhine River. Wotan covets this ring, which gives its bearer world mastery, but is compelled to give it to the giants.
Wagner's audience had no trouble recognizing in Wotan and the other immortal gods the ancient aristocracy of Empire and Church, who made a fatal compromise with capital (the Ring of world domination) and thus sealed their own doom. Siegfried (Wotan's grandson) takes the Ring back from the giant Fafner, and then shatters the god's spear and wins as his bride the immortal Valkyrie Brunnhilde. Through the rest of a silly plot full of love potions and magic disguises, Siegfried is betrayed and stabbed in the back. Brunnhilde immolates herself on Siegfried's funeral pyre and the flames burn down Valhalla as well, gods and all. A New World Order emerges on the basis of heroic will. It is not hard to see how appetizing this stew was for Hitler.
Tolkien himself despised Wagner (whom he knew thoroughly) and rejected comparisons between his Ring and Wagner's cycle ("Both rings are round," is the extent of his published comment). But the parallels between the two works are so extensive as to raise the question as to Tolkien's intent. The Ring of Power itself is Wagner's invention (probably derived from the German Romantic de la Motte Fouque). Also to be found in both works are an immortal woman who renounces immortality for the love of a human, a broken sword reforged, a life-and-death game of riddles, and other elements which one doesn't encounter every day. Here is a compilation derived from sundry websites, along with a few of my own observations. For those who don't know the details of the Tolkien Ring - well, you will before long, because it is a story that everyone will learn.
Alberich forges a Ring of Power
Sauron forges a Ring of Power
Wotan needs the giants to build Valhalla
The Elves need Sauron to forge their Rings of Power
The Ring gives the bearer world domination
The Ring gives the bearer world domination
Wotan uses the Ring to pay the giants
Sauron betrays the Elves
The Ring is cursed and betrays its bearer
The Ring is evil and betrays its bearer
Fafner kills brother Fasolt to get the Ring
Smeagol kills friend Deagol for the Ring
Fafner hides in a cave for centuries
Smeagol-Gollum hides in a cave for centuries
Siegfried inherits the shards of his father's sword
Aragorn inherits the shards of his fathers' sword
Brunnhilde gives up immortality for Siegfried
Arwen gives up immortality for Aragorn
Wotan plays "riddles" for the life of Mime
Gollum plays "riddles" for the life of Bilbo
A dragon guards the Nibelungs' hoard
A dragon guards the dwarves' hoard
The gods renounce the world and await the end
The Elves renounce the world and prepare to depart
The Ring is returned to its origin, the River Rhine
The Ring is returned to its origin, Mount Doom
Hagen falls into the river
Gollum falls into the volcano
The immortals burn in Valhalla
The immortals leave Middle-earth
A new era emerges in the world
A new era emerges in the world
Men are left to their own devices
Men are left to their own devices
The details are far less important than the common starting point: the crisis of the immortals. Wagner's immortal gods must fall as a result of the corrupt bargain they have made with the giants who built Valhalla. Tolkien's immortal Elves must leave Middle-earth because of the fatal assistance they took from Sauron. The Elves' power to create a paradise on Middle-earth depends upon the power of the three Elven Rings which they forged with Sauron's help. Thus the virtue of the Elven Rings is inseparably bound up with the one Ring of Sauron. When it is destroyed, the power of the Elves must fade. More than anything else, The Lord of the Rings is the tragedy of the Elves and the story of their renunciation.
What Tolkien has in mind is nothing more than the familiar observation that the high culture of the West arose and fell with the aristocracy, which had the time and inclination to cultivate it. With the high culture came the abuse of power associated with the aristocracy; when this disappears, the great beauties of Western civilization and much of its best thought disappear with it. That is far too simple, and in some ways misleading, but it makes a grand premise for a roman-a-clef about Western civilization.
Tolkien enthusiasts emphasize his differences with Wagner, as if to ward off the disparagement that The Lord of the Rings is a derivative work. As Bradley Birzer, David Harvey, and other commentators observe, Tolkien detested Wagner's neo-paganism. He was a devout Roman Catholic, and explicitly philo-Semitic where Wagner was anti-Semitic. But this defense of Tolkien obscures a great accomplishment. He did not emulate Wagner's Ring, but he recast the materials into an entirely new form. "Recast" is an appropriate expression. A memorable scene in Wagner shows Siegfried filing the shards of his father's sword into dust, and casting a new sword out of the filings. That, more or less, is what Tolkien accomplished with the elements of Wagner's story. Wagner will still haunt the stages of opera houses, but audiences will see him through Tolkien's eyes.
What does one do when the immortals depart? One acts with simple English decency and tenacity, says Tolkien, and accepts one's fate. The Lord of the Rings is an anti-epic (as Norman Cantor puts it), whose protagonist is a weak, vulnerable and reluctant Hobbit, as opposed to the strong, wound-proof and fearless Siegfried. The Hobbit Frodo Baggins does his duty because he must. "I wish the Ring had never come to me! I wish none of this had happened!" he exclaims to the wizard Gandalf, who replies: "So do all that come to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us." No utopian is Gandalf; what one must do is to muddle through.
"I will remain Galadriel, and I will diminish," decides the Elf-Queen of Lothlorien, rejecting the chance to take possession of the One Ring and preserve her powers. The Elves choose between vanishing and accepting a taint of evil, and choose the former.
Modesty, forbearance, and renunciation are the virtues that Tolkien sets against Wagner's existential act of despair. The high culture of the West is gone. The world that remains after the Elves board their gray ships and sail into the West is devoid of beauty and wonder. The kingdom of Men that emerges from The Lord of the Rings is a humdrum affair, in which the best men can do is to get on with their lives. Even the anti-heroes of this anti-epic, the Hobbits who bear the evil Ring to its ultimate destruction, cannot remain in Middle-earth; they sail off along with the Elves.
Those who hold America in contempt for its lack of refinement (this writer always has held the term "American culture" to be an oxymoron) should think carefully about this conclusion. From their founding on Christmas Day 800 AD, when Charlemagne accepted the crown of the revived Roman Empire, the institutions of the West have been formed in response to external threat. The Holy Roman Empire of the High Middle Ages, Tolkien's conscious model for the Kingdom of Gondor, arose in response to the incursions of Arabs in the south, Vikings in the north, and Magyars in the West. Boorish and gruff as the new American Empire might seem, it is an anti-empire populated by reluctant heroes who want nothing more than to till their fields and mind their homes, much like Tolkien's Hobbits. Under pressure, though, it will respond with a fierceness and cohesion that will surprise its adversaries.
Orcs of the world: Take note and beware.
©2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd.
By Spengler
The most important cultural event of the past decade is the ongoing release of the film version of J R R Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. No better guide exists to the mood and morals of the United States. The rapturous response among popular audiences to the first two installments of the trilogy should alert us that something important is at work. Richard Wagner's 19th-century tetralogy of music dramas, The Ring of the Nibelungs, gave resonance to National Socialism during the inter-war years of the last century. Tolkien does the same for Anglo-Saxon democracy.
Tolkien well may have written his epic as an "anti-Ring" to repair the damage that Wagner had inflicted upon Western culture. Consciously or not, the Oxford philologist who invented Hobbits has ruined Wagner before the popular audience. It recalls the terrible moment in Thomas Mann's great novel Doktor Faustus when the composer Adrian Leverkuhn, finishing his Faust cantata in the throes of syphilitic dementia, announces: "I want to take it back!" His amanuensis asks, "What do you want to take back?" "Beethoven's 9th Symphony!" cries Leverkuhn. Leverkuhn (on the strength of a bargain with the Devil) has written a work whose objective is to ruin the ability of musical audiences to hear Beethoven.
Tolkien has taken back Wagner's Ring. That may be his greatest accomplishment, and a literary accomplishment without clear precedent. To be sure, The Lord of the Rings is not a great work of literature to be compared to Cervantes or Dostoyevsky. But it is a great landmark of culture nonetheless. Its revival in a reasonably faithful cinematic version has far-reaching effects on the popular mind.
Wagner had done as much to Beethoven. "People don't like music; they just like the way it sounds," quipped the English conductor Sir Thomas Beecham. Beethoven's musical devices are stations along a journey which has a goal. Wagner turned these musical devices into the haunted caves and dells of a world in which the listener wanders capriciously, abandoning all sense of time and direction. Audiences never liked Wagner's music, but they loved the way it sounded. Musical effects in Beethoven, however eccentric, are subordinate to the long-range musical goal. In Wagner, musical effects are capricious events. That well suits the introduction of Wagner's Uebermensch, the hero Siegfried, for reasons I will make clear in a moment.
It is hard for us today to imagine what a cult raised itself around Wagner after the 1876 premiere of his Ring cycle. Compared to it the combined fervor for Elvis, the Beatles, Madonna and Michael Jackson seems like a band concert in the park. Perfectly sensible people attended a Wagner opera and declared that their lives had changed. Bavaria's eccentric King Ludwig II literally fell in love with the composer and built him the Bayreuth Festival, to which the elite of Europe repaired in homage. It was something like the mood that swept the youth of the West in the late 1960s, but an order of magnitude more powerful.
In 1848, Wagner was a disgruntled emulator of French grand opera who stockpiled hand grenades for revolutionaries, a fugitive from justice after that year's uprising. A quarter-century later he stood at the pinnacle of European culture. What precisely did he do?
Wagner announced the death of the old order of aristocracy and Church, of order and rules. Not only was the old order dying, but also it deserved to die, the victim of its inherent flaws. As the old order died a New Man would replace the servile creatures of the old laws, and a New Art would become the New Man's religion. The New Man would be fearless, sensual, unconstrained, and could make the world according to his will. Wagner's dictum that the sources of Western civilization had failed was not only entirely correct, but also numbingly obvious to anyone who lived through the upheavals of 1848. But how should one respond to this? Wagner had a seductive answer: become your own god!
Using elements of old Norse sagas and medieval epic, Wagner cobbled together a new myth. The Norse god Wotan personifies the old order: he rules by the laws engraved on his spear, by which he himself is bound. To build his fortress Valhalla he requires the labor of the giants, and to pay the giants, he steals the treasure of the Nibelung dwarf Alberich. Alberich won the treasure with a magic ring he fashioned from the stolen Gold of the Rhine River. Wotan covets this ring, which gives its bearer world mastery, but is compelled to give it to the giants.
Wagner's audience had no trouble recognizing in Wotan and the other immortal gods the ancient aristocracy of Empire and Church, who made a fatal compromise with capital (the Ring of world domination) and thus sealed their own doom. Siegfried (Wotan's grandson) takes the Ring back from the giant Fafner, and then shatters the god's spear and wins as his bride the immortal Valkyrie Brunnhilde. Through the rest of a silly plot full of love potions and magic disguises, Siegfried is betrayed and stabbed in the back. Brunnhilde immolates herself on Siegfried's funeral pyre and the flames burn down Valhalla as well, gods and all. A New World Order emerges on the basis of heroic will. It is not hard to see how appetizing this stew was for Hitler.
Tolkien himself despised Wagner (whom he knew thoroughly) and rejected comparisons between his Ring and Wagner's cycle ("Both rings are round," is the extent of his published comment). But the parallels between the two works are so extensive as to raise the question as to Tolkien's intent. The Ring of Power itself is Wagner's invention (probably derived from the German Romantic de la Motte Fouque). Also to be found in both works are an immortal woman who renounces immortality for the love of a human, a broken sword reforged, a life-and-death game of riddles, and other elements which one doesn't encounter every day. Here is a compilation derived from sundry websites, along with a few of my own observations. For those who don't know the details of the Tolkien Ring - well, you will before long, because it is a story that everyone will learn.
Alberich forges a Ring of Power
Sauron forges a Ring of Power
Wotan needs the giants to build Valhalla
The Elves need Sauron to forge their Rings of Power
The Ring gives the bearer world domination
The Ring gives the bearer world domination
Wotan uses the Ring to pay the giants
Sauron betrays the Elves
The Ring is cursed and betrays its bearer
The Ring is evil and betrays its bearer
Fafner kills brother Fasolt to get the Ring
Smeagol kills friend Deagol for the Ring
Fafner hides in a cave for centuries
Smeagol-Gollum hides in a cave for centuries
Siegfried inherits the shards of his father's sword
Aragorn inherits the shards of his fathers' sword
Brunnhilde gives up immortality for Siegfried
Arwen gives up immortality for Aragorn
Wotan plays "riddles" for the life of Mime
Gollum plays "riddles" for the life of Bilbo
A dragon guards the Nibelungs' hoard
A dragon guards the dwarves' hoard
The gods renounce the world and await the end
The Elves renounce the world and prepare to depart
The Ring is returned to its origin, the River Rhine
The Ring is returned to its origin, Mount Doom
Hagen falls into the river
Gollum falls into the volcano
The immortals burn in Valhalla
The immortals leave Middle-earth
A new era emerges in the world
A new era emerges in the world
Men are left to their own devices
Men are left to their own devices
The details are far less important than the common starting point: the crisis of the immortals. Wagner's immortal gods must fall as a result of the corrupt bargain they have made with the giants who built Valhalla. Tolkien's immortal Elves must leave Middle-earth because of the fatal assistance they took from Sauron. The Elves' power to create a paradise on Middle-earth depends upon the power of the three Elven Rings which they forged with Sauron's help. Thus the virtue of the Elven Rings is inseparably bound up with the one Ring of Sauron. When it is destroyed, the power of the Elves must fade. More than anything else, The Lord of the Rings is the tragedy of the Elves and the story of their renunciation.
What Tolkien has in mind is nothing more than the familiar observation that the high culture of the West arose and fell with the aristocracy, which had the time and inclination to cultivate it. With the high culture came the abuse of power associated with the aristocracy; when this disappears, the great beauties of Western civilization and much of its best thought disappear with it. That is far too simple, and in some ways misleading, but it makes a grand premise for a roman-a-clef about Western civilization.
Tolkien enthusiasts emphasize his differences with Wagner, as if to ward off the disparagement that The Lord of the Rings is a derivative work. As Bradley Birzer, David Harvey, and other commentators observe, Tolkien detested Wagner's neo-paganism. He was a devout Roman Catholic, and explicitly philo-Semitic where Wagner was anti-Semitic. But this defense of Tolkien obscures a great accomplishment. He did not emulate Wagner's Ring, but he recast the materials into an entirely new form. "Recast" is an appropriate expression. A memorable scene in Wagner shows Siegfried filing the shards of his father's sword into dust, and casting a new sword out of the filings. That, more or less, is what Tolkien accomplished with the elements of Wagner's story. Wagner will still haunt the stages of opera houses, but audiences will see him through Tolkien's eyes.
What does one do when the immortals depart? One acts with simple English decency and tenacity, says Tolkien, and accepts one's fate. The Lord of the Rings is an anti-epic (as Norman Cantor puts it), whose protagonist is a weak, vulnerable and reluctant Hobbit, as opposed to the strong, wound-proof and fearless Siegfried. The Hobbit Frodo Baggins does his duty because he must. "I wish the Ring had never come to me! I wish none of this had happened!" he exclaims to the wizard Gandalf, who replies: "So do all that come to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us." No utopian is Gandalf; what one must do is to muddle through.
"I will remain Galadriel, and I will diminish," decides the Elf-Queen of Lothlorien, rejecting the chance to take possession of the One Ring and preserve her powers. The Elves choose between vanishing and accepting a taint of evil, and choose the former.
Modesty, forbearance, and renunciation are the virtues that Tolkien sets against Wagner's existential act of despair. The high culture of the West is gone. The world that remains after the Elves board their gray ships and sail into the West is devoid of beauty and wonder. The kingdom of Men that emerges from The Lord of the Rings is a humdrum affair, in which the best men can do is to get on with their lives. Even the anti-heroes of this anti-epic, the Hobbits who bear the evil Ring to its ultimate destruction, cannot remain in Middle-earth; they sail off along with the Elves.
Those who hold America in contempt for its lack of refinement (this writer always has held the term "American culture" to be an oxymoron) should think carefully about this conclusion. From their founding on Christmas Day 800 AD, when Charlemagne accepted the crown of the revived Roman Empire, the institutions of the West have been formed in response to external threat. The Holy Roman Empire of the High Middle Ages, Tolkien's conscious model for the Kingdom of Gondor, arose in response to the incursions of Arabs in the south, Vikings in the north, and Magyars in the West. Boorish and gruff as the new American Empire might seem, it is an anti-empire populated by reluctant heroes who want nothing more than to till their fields and mind their homes, much like Tolkien's Hobbits. Under pressure, though, it will respond with a fierceness and cohesion that will surprise its adversaries.
Orcs of the world: Take note and beware.
©2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd.
Thursday, August 12, 2004
This is a great article from Esquire. It's a lot longer than the usual posts I save, but it's too valuable to not be able to access. It gives plenty of reasons why, even if someone may have reservations about Bush, it's hard to justify a vote for Kerry.
The Case for George W. Bush
i.e., what if he's right?
by Tom Junod | Aug 01 '04
It happened again this morning. I saw a picture of our president—my president—and my feelings about him were instantly rekindled. The picture was taken after his speech to the graduating seniors at the Air Force Academy. He was wearing a dark suit, a light-blue tie, and a white shirt. His unsmiling visage was grim and purposeful, in pointed contrast to the face of the elaborately uniformed cadet standing next to him, which was lit up with a cocky grin. Indeed, as something more than a frozen moment—as a political statement—the picture might have served, and been intended to serve, as a tableau of the resolve necessary to lift this nation out of this steep and terrible time. The cadet represented the best of what America has to offer, all devil-may-care enthusiasm and willingness to serve. The president, his hair starting to whiten, might have represented something even more essential: the kind of brave and, in his case, literally unblinking leadership that generates enough moral capital to summon the young to war. Although one man was essentially being asked to stake his life on the wisdom of the other, both were melded in an attitude of common purpose, and so both struck a common pose. With the cadet bent slightly forward and the commander in chief leaning slightly back, each man cocked his right arm and made a muscle. They flexed! I didn't know anything about the cadet. About President George W. Bush, though, I felt the satisfaction of absolute certainty, and so uttered the words as essential to my morning as my cup of Kenyan and my dose of high-minded outrage on the editorial page of the Times : "What an asshole."
Ah. That feels better. George W. Bush is an asshole, isn't he? Moreover, he's the first president who seems merely that, at least in my lifetime. From Kennedy to Clinton, there is not a single president who would have been capable of striking such a pose after concluding a speech about a war in which hundreds of Americans and thousands of Iraqis are being killed. There is not a single president for whom such a pose would seem entirely characteristic—not a single president who might be tempted to confuse a beefcakey photo opportunity with an expression of national purpose. He has always struck me as a small man, or at least as a man too small for the task at hand, and therefore a man doomed to address the discrepancy between his soul and his situation with displays of political muscle that succeed only in drawing attention to his diminution. He not only has led us into war, he seems to get off on war, and it's the greedy pleasure he so clearly gets from flexing his biceps or from squaring his shoulders and setting his jaw or from landing a plane on an aircraft carrier—the greedy pleasure the war president finds in playacting his own attitudes of belligerence—that permitted me the greedy pleasure of hating him.
Then I read the text of the speech he gave and was thrown from one kind of certainty—the comfortable kind—into another. He was speaking, as he always does, of the moral underpinnings of our mission in Iraq. He was comparing, as he always does, the challenge that we face, in the evil of global terrorism, to the challenge our fathers and grandfathers faced, in the evil of fascism. He was insisting, as he always does, that the evil of global terrorism is exactly that, an evil—one of almost transcendent dimension that quite simply must be met, lest we be remembered for not meeting it . . . lest we allow it to be our judge. I agreed with most of what he said, as I often do when he's defining matters of principle. No, more than that, I thought that he was defining principles that desperately needed defining, with a clarity that those of my own political stripe demonstrate only when they're decrying either his policies or his character. He was making a moral proposition upon which he was basing his entire presidency—or said he was basing his entire presidency—and I found myself in the strange position of buying into the proposition without buying into the presidency, of buying into the words while rejecting, utterly, the man who spoke them. There is, of course, an easy answer for this seeming moral schizophrenia: the distance between the principles and the policy, between the mission and "Mission Accomplished," between the war on terror and the war in Iraq. Still, I have to admit to feeling a little uncertain of my disdain for this president when forced to contemplate the principle that might animate his determination to stay the course in a war that very well may be the end of him politically. I have to admit that when I listen to him speak, with his unbending certainty, I sometimes hear an echo of the same nagging question I ask myself after I hear a preacher declaim the agonies of hellfire or an insurance agent enumerate the cold odds of the actuarial tables. Namely: What if he's right?
As easy as it is to say that we can't abide the president because of the gulf between what he espouses and what he actually does , what haunts me is the possibility that we can't abide him because of us—because of the gulf between his will and our willingness. What haunts me is the possibility that we have become so accustomed to ambiguity and inaction in the face of evil that we find his call for decisive action an insult to our sense of nuance and proportion.
The people who dislike George W. Bush have convinced themselves that opposition to his presidency is the most compelling moral issue of the day. Well, it's not. The most compelling moral issue of the day is exactly what he says it is, when he's not saying it's gay marriage. The reason he will be difficult to unseat in November—no matter what his approval ratings are in the summer—is that his opponents operate out of the moral certainty that he is the bad guy and needs to be replaced, while he operates out of the moral certainty that terrorists are the bad guys and need to be defeated. The first will always sound merely convenient when compared with the second. Worse, the gulf between the two kinds of certainty lends credence to the conservative notion that liberals have settled for the conviction that Bush is distasteful as a substitute for conviction—because it's easier than conviction.
IN 1861, AFTER CONFEDERATE FORCES shelled Fort Sumter, President Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus from Philadelphia to Washington and thereby made the arrest of American citizens a matter of military or executive say-so. When the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court objected to the arrest of a Maryland man who trained troops for Confederate muster, Lincoln essentially ignored his ruling. He argued that there was no point fixating on one clause in the Constitution when Southern secession had shredded the whole document, and asked, "Are all the laws but one to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?" During the four-year course of the Civil War, he also selectively abridged the rights of free speech, jury trial, and private property. Not that the war went well: His army was in the habit of losing long before it learned to win, and Lincoln did not find a general to his liking until he found Ulysses S. Grant, whose idea of war was total. He financed the bloodbath by exposing the nation to ruinous debt and taxation, and by 1864 he had to contend with an antiwar challenge from Democrats and a political challenge from a member of his own Cabinet. On August 23, 1864, he was motivated to write in a memorandum that "it seems exceedingly probable that this administration will not be reelected," and yet his position on peace never wavered: He rejected any terms but the restoration of the union and the abolition of slavery. The war was, from first to last, portrayed as his war, and after he won landslide reelection, he made a vow not only to stay the course but to prosecute it to the brink of catastrophe and beyond: "Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.' "
Today, of course, those words, along with Lincoln's appeal to the better angels of our nature, are chiseled into the wall of his memorial, on the Mall in Washington. And yet if George Bush were to speak anything like them today, we would accuse him of pandering to his evangelical base. We would accuse him of invoking divine authority for a war of his choosing, and Maureen Dowd would find a way to read his text in light of the cancellation of some Buffy spin-off. Believe me: I am not comparing George W. Bush to Abraham Lincoln. The latter was his own lawyer as well as his own writer, and he was alive to the possibilities of tragedy and comedy—he was human —in a way that our president doesn't seem to be. Neither am I looking to justify Bush's forays into shady constitutional ground by invoking Lincoln's precedents with the same; I'm not a lawyer. I am, however, asking if the crisis currently facing the country—the crisis, that is, that announced itself on the morning of September 11, 2001, in New York and Pennsylvania and the District of Columbia—is as compelling a justification for the havoc and sacrifice of war as the crisis that became irrevocable on April 12, 1861, in South Carolina, or, for that matter, the crisis that emerged from the blue Hawaiian sky on December 7, 1941. I, for one, believe it is and feel somewhat ashamed having to say so: having to aver that 9/11/01 was a horror sufficient to supply Bush with a genuine moral cause rather than, as some would have it, a mere excuse for his adventurism.
We were attacked three years ago, without warning or predicate event. The attack was not a gesture of heroic resistance nor the offshoot of some bright utopian resolve, but the very flower of a movement that delights in the potential for martyrdom expressed in the squalls of the newly born. It is a movement that is about death—that honors death, that loves death, that fetishizes death, that worships death, that seeks to accomplish death wherever it can, on a scale both intimate and global—and if it does not warrant the expenditure of what the self-important have taken to calling "blood and treasure," then what does? Slavery? Fascism? Genocide? Let's not flatter ourselves: If we do not find it within ourselves to identify the terrorism inspired by radical Islam as an unequivocal evil—and to pronounce ourselves morally superior to it—then we have lost the ability to identify any evil at all, and our democracy is not only diminished, it dissolves into the meaninglessness of privilege.
YEAH, YEAH, I KNOW: Nobody who opposes Bush thinks that terrorism is a good thing. The issue is not whether the United States should be involved in a war on terrorism but rather whether the war on terrorism is best served by war in Iraq. And now that the war has defied the optimism of its advocates, the issue is no longer Bush's moral intention but rather his simple competence. He got us in when he had no idea how to get us out. He allowed himself to be blinded by ideology and blindsided by ideologues. His arrogance led him to offend the very allies whose participation would have enabled us to win not just the war but the peace. His obsession with Saddam Hussein led him to rush into a war that was unnecessary. Sure, Saddam was a bad guy. Sure, the world is a better place without him. But . . .
And there it is: the inevitable but . Trailed by its uncomfortable ellipsis, it sits squirming at the end of the argument against George Bush for very good reason: It can't possibly sit at the beginning. Bush haters have to back into it because there's nothing beyond it. The world is a better place without Saddam Hussein, but . . . but what ? But he wasn't so bad that we had to do anything about him? But he wasn't so bad that he was worth the shedding of American blood? But there are other dictators just as bad whom we leave in place? But he provided Bush the opportunity to establish the doctrine of preemptive war, in which case the cure is worse than the disease? But we should have secured Afghanistan before invading Iraq? But we should have secured the cooperation of allies who were no more inclined to depose Saddam than they—or we, as head of an international coalition of the unwilling—were to stop the genocide in Rwanda ten years before? Sure, genocide is bad, but . . .
We might as well credit the president for his one great accomplishment: replacing but with and as a basis for foreign policy. The world is a better place without Saddam Hussein, and we got rid of him. And unless we have become so wedded to the politics of regret that we are obligated to indulge in a perverse kind of nostalgia for the days of Uday and Qusay, we have to admit that it's hard to imagine a world with Saddam still in it. And even before the first stem-winder of the Democratic convention, the possibility of even limited success in Iraq has reduced the loyal opposition to two strategies: either signing up for the oversight role they had envisioned for the UN, or else declaring the whole thing a lost cause, in their own war of preemption.
Of course, Iraq might be a lost cause. It might be a disaster unmitigated and unprecedented. But if we permit ourselves to look at it the way the Republicans look at it—as a historical cause rather than just a cause assumed to be lost—we might be persuaded to see that it's history's judgment that matters, not ours. The United States, at this writing, has been in Iraq fifteen months. At the same point in the Civil War, Lincoln faced, well, a disaster unmitigated and unprecedented. He was losing . He didn't lose, at least in part because he was able to both inspire and draw on the kind of moral absolutism necessary to win wars. Bush has been unable to do the same, at least in part because he is undercut by evidence of his own dishonesty, but also because moral absolutism is nearly impossible to sustain in the glare of a twenty-four-hour news cycle. In a nation incapable of feeling any but the freshest wounds, Bush cannot seek to inspire moral absolutism without his moral absolutism becoming itself an issue—indeed, the issue. He cannot seek to engender certainty without being accused of sowing disarray. And he cannot speak the barest terms necessary for victory in any war—that we will stay the course, through good or through ill, because our cause is right and just, and God is on our side—without inspiring a goodly number of his constituents to aspire to the moral prestige of surrender.
THERE IS SUPPOSED TO BE a straight line between Bush's moral absolutism—between his penchant for calling our enemies "evildoers" or even, well, "enemies"—and Guantánamo, and then between Guantánamo and the case of Jose Padilla, and then between Padilla and the depravities of Abu Ghraib. More than a mere demonstration of cause and effect, the line is supposed by those opposed to a second Bush presidency to function as a geometric proof of the proposition that the American position in Iraq is not only untenable but ignoble. It's supposed to prove that victory in any such enterprise is not worth the taint and that withdrawal is tantamount to victory, because it will save the national soul. In fact, it proves something quite different: It proves that just as the existence of the animal-rights movement is said to depend on the increasing American distance from the realities of the farm, the liberal consensus on the war in Iraq depends on the increasing American distance from the realities of soldiering. All Abu Ghraib proves is what Lincoln made clear in his writings, and what any soldier has to know from the moment he sizes up another soldier in the sight of his rifle: that war is undertaken at the risk of the national soul. The moral certainty that makes war possible is certain only to unleash moral havoc, and moral havoc becomes something the nation has to rise above. We can neither win a war nor save the national soul if all we seek is to remain unsullied—pristine. Anyway, we are well beyond that now. The question is not, and has never been, whether we can fight a war without perpetrating outrages of our own. The question is whether the rightness of the American cause is sufficient not only to justify war but to withstand war's inevitable outrages. The question is whether—if the cause is right—we are strong enough to make it remain right in the foggy moral battleground of war.
In 1861, Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus, and historians today applaud the restraint he displayed in throwing thousands of American citizens in jail. By the middle of 2002, George W. Bush had declared two American citizens enemy combatants, and both men are still in jail at this writing, uncharged. Both presidents used war as a rationale for their actions, citing as their primary constitutional responsibility the protection of the American people. It was not until two years later that Congress took up Lincoln's action and pronounced it constitutionally justified. Our willingness to extend Bush the same latitude will depend on our perception of what exactly we're up against, post-9/11. Lincoln was fighting for the very soul of this country; he was fighting to preserve this country, as a country, and so he had to challenge the Constitution in order to save it. Bush seems to think that he's fighting for the very soul of this country, but that's exactly what many people regard as a dangerous presumption. He seems to think that he is fighting for our very survival, when all we're asking him to fight for is our security, which is a very different thing. A fight for our security? We can handle that; it means we have to get to the airport early. A fight for our survival? That means we have to live in a different country altogether. That means the United States is changing and will continue to change, the way it did during and after the Civil War, with a fundamental redefinition of executive authority. That means we have to endure the constitutional indignity of the president's declaring Jose Padilla an enemy combatant for contemplating the still-uncommitted crime of blowing up a radioactive device in an American city, which seems a constitutional indignity too great to endure, unless we think of the constitutional indignities we'd have to endure if Padilla had actually committed the crime he's accused of planning. Unless we think of how this country might change if we get hit again, and hit big. In defending his suspension of habeas corpus, Lincoln sought to draw the distinction between liberties that are absolute and those that are sustainable in time of war. Bush seems to be relying on the same question, and the same distinction, as an answer to all the lawyers and editorial writers who suggest that if Jose Padilla stays in jail, we are losing the war on terror by abrogating our own ideals.
Losing the war on terror? The terrible truth is that we haven't begun to find out what that really means.
I WILL NEVER FORGET the sickly smile that crossed the president's face when he asked us all to go shopping in the wake of 9/11. It was desperate and a little craven, and I never forgave him for it. As it turned out, though, his appeal succeeded all too well. We've found the courage to go shopping. We've welcomed the restoration of the rule of celebrity. For all our avowals that nothing would ever be the same, the only thing that really changed is our taste in entertainment, which has forsaken the frivolity of the sitcom for the grit on display in The Apprentice . The immediacy of the threat was replaced by the inexplicability of the threat level. A universal war—the war on terror—was succeeded by a narrow one, an elective one, a personal one, in Iraq. Eventually, the president made it easy to believe that the threat from within was as great as the threat from without. That those at home who declared American moral primacy were as dangerous as those abroad who declared our moral degeneracy. That our national security was not worth the risk to our soul. That Abu Ghraib disproved the rightness of our cause and so represented the symbolic end of the war that began on 9/11. And that the very worst thing that could happen to this country would be four more years of George W. Bush. In a nation that loves fairy tales, the president seemed so damned eager to cry wolf that we decided he was just trying to keep us scared and that maybe he was just as big a villain as the wolf he insisted on telling us about. That's the whole point of the story, isn't it? The boy cries wolf for his own ends, and after a while people stop believing in the reality of the threat.
I know how this story ends, because I've told it many times myself. I've told it so many times, in fact, that I'm always surprised when the wolf turns out to be real, and shows up hungry at the door, long after the boy is gone.
Copyright © 1997-2004 by the Hearst Corporation.
The Case for George W. Bush
i.e., what if he's right?
by Tom Junod | Aug 01 '04
It happened again this morning. I saw a picture of our president—my president—and my feelings about him were instantly rekindled. The picture was taken after his speech to the graduating seniors at the Air Force Academy. He was wearing a dark suit, a light-blue tie, and a white shirt. His unsmiling visage was grim and purposeful, in pointed contrast to the face of the elaborately uniformed cadet standing next to him, which was lit up with a cocky grin. Indeed, as something more than a frozen moment—as a political statement—the picture might have served, and been intended to serve, as a tableau of the resolve necessary to lift this nation out of this steep and terrible time. The cadet represented the best of what America has to offer, all devil-may-care enthusiasm and willingness to serve. The president, his hair starting to whiten, might have represented something even more essential: the kind of brave and, in his case, literally unblinking leadership that generates enough moral capital to summon the young to war. Although one man was essentially being asked to stake his life on the wisdom of the other, both were melded in an attitude of common purpose, and so both struck a common pose. With the cadet bent slightly forward and the commander in chief leaning slightly back, each man cocked his right arm and made a muscle. They flexed! I didn't know anything about the cadet. About President George W. Bush, though, I felt the satisfaction of absolute certainty, and so uttered the words as essential to my morning as my cup of Kenyan and my dose of high-minded outrage on the editorial page of the Times : "What an asshole."
Ah. That feels better. George W. Bush is an asshole, isn't he? Moreover, he's the first president who seems merely that, at least in my lifetime. From Kennedy to Clinton, there is not a single president who would have been capable of striking such a pose after concluding a speech about a war in which hundreds of Americans and thousands of Iraqis are being killed. There is not a single president for whom such a pose would seem entirely characteristic—not a single president who might be tempted to confuse a beefcakey photo opportunity with an expression of national purpose. He has always struck me as a small man, or at least as a man too small for the task at hand, and therefore a man doomed to address the discrepancy between his soul and his situation with displays of political muscle that succeed only in drawing attention to his diminution. He not only has led us into war, he seems to get off on war, and it's the greedy pleasure he so clearly gets from flexing his biceps or from squaring his shoulders and setting his jaw or from landing a plane on an aircraft carrier—the greedy pleasure the war president finds in playacting his own attitudes of belligerence—that permitted me the greedy pleasure of hating him.
Then I read the text of the speech he gave and was thrown from one kind of certainty—the comfortable kind—into another. He was speaking, as he always does, of the moral underpinnings of our mission in Iraq. He was comparing, as he always does, the challenge that we face, in the evil of global terrorism, to the challenge our fathers and grandfathers faced, in the evil of fascism. He was insisting, as he always does, that the evil of global terrorism is exactly that, an evil—one of almost transcendent dimension that quite simply must be met, lest we be remembered for not meeting it . . . lest we allow it to be our judge. I agreed with most of what he said, as I often do when he's defining matters of principle. No, more than that, I thought that he was defining principles that desperately needed defining, with a clarity that those of my own political stripe demonstrate only when they're decrying either his policies or his character. He was making a moral proposition upon which he was basing his entire presidency—or said he was basing his entire presidency—and I found myself in the strange position of buying into the proposition without buying into the presidency, of buying into the words while rejecting, utterly, the man who spoke them. There is, of course, an easy answer for this seeming moral schizophrenia: the distance between the principles and the policy, between the mission and "Mission Accomplished," between the war on terror and the war in Iraq. Still, I have to admit to feeling a little uncertain of my disdain for this president when forced to contemplate the principle that might animate his determination to stay the course in a war that very well may be the end of him politically. I have to admit that when I listen to him speak, with his unbending certainty, I sometimes hear an echo of the same nagging question I ask myself after I hear a preacher declaim the agonies of hellfire or an insurance agent enumerate the cold odds of the actuarial tables. Namely: What if he's right?
As easy as it is to say that we can't abide the president because of the gulf between what he espouses and what he actually does , what haunts me is the possibility that we can't abide him because of us—because of the gulf between his will and our willingness. What haunts me is the possibility that we have become so accustomed to ambiguity and inaction in the face of evil that we find his call for decisive action an insult to our sense of nuance and proportion.
The people who dislike George W. Bush have convinced themselves that opposition to his presidency is the most compelling moral issue of the day. Well, it's not. The most compelling moral issue of the day is exactly what he says it is, when he's not saying it's gay marriage. The reason he will be difficult to unseat in November—no matter what his approval ratings are in the summer—is that his opponents operate out of the moral certainty that he is the bad guy and needs to be replaced, while he operates out of the moral certainty that terrorists are the bad guys and need to be defeated. The first will always sound merely convenient when compared with the second. Worse, the gulf between the two kinds of certainty lends credence to the conservative notion that liberals have settled for the conviction that Bush is distasteful as a substitute for conviction—because it's easier than conviction.
IN 1861, AFTER CONFEDERATE FORCES shelled Fort Sumter, President Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus from Philadelphia to Washington and thereby made the arrest of American citizens a matter of military or executive say-so. When the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court objected to the arrest of a Maryland man who trained troops for Confederate muster, Lincoln essentially ignored his ruling. He argued that there was no point fixating on one clause in the Constitution when Southern secession had shredded the whole document, and asked, "Are all the laws but one to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?" During the four-year course of the Civil War, he also selectively abridged the rights of free speech, jury trial, and private property. Not that the war went well: His army was in the habit of losing long before it learned to win, and Lincoln did not find a general to his liking until he found Ulysses S. Grant, whose idea of war was total. He financed the bloodbath by exposing the nation to ruinous debt and taxation, and by 1864 he had to contend with an antiwar challenge from Democrats and a political challenge from a member of his own Cabinet. On August 23, 1864, he was motivated to write in a memorandum that "it seems exceedingly probable that this administration will not be reelected," and yet his position on peace never wavered: He rejected any terms but the restoration of the union and the abolition of slavery. The war was, from first to last, portrayed as his war, and after he won landslide reelection, he made a vow not only to stay the course but to prosecute it to the brink of catastrophe and beyond: "Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.' "
Today, of course, those words, along with Lincoln's appeal to the better angels of our nature, are chiseled into the wall of his memorial, on the Mall in Washington. And yet if George Bush were to speak anything like them today, we would accuse him of pandering to his evangelical base. We would accuse him of invoking divine authority for a war of his choosing, and Maureen Dowd would find a way to read his text in light of the cancellation of some Buffy spin-off. Believe me: I am not comparing George W. Bush to Abraham Lincoln. The latter was his own lawyer as well as his own writer, and he was alive to the possibilities of tragedy and comedy—he was human —in a way that our president doesn't seem to be. Neither am I looking to justify Bush's forays into shady constitutional ground by invoking Lincoln's precedents with the same; I'm not a lawyer. I am, however, asking if the crisis currently facing the country—the crisis, that is, that announced itself on the morning of September 11, 2001, in New York and Pennsylvania and the District of Columbia—is as compelling a justification for the havoc and sacrifice of war as the crisis that became irrevocable on April 12, 1861, in South Carolina, or, for that matter, the crisis that emerged from the blue Hawaiian sky on December 7, 1941. I, for one, believe it is and feel somewhat ashamed having to say so: having to aver that 9/11/01 was a horror sufficient to supply Bush with a genuine moral cause rather than, as some would have it, a mere excuse for his adventurism.
We were attacked three years ago, without warning or predicate event. The attack was not a gesture of heroic resistance nor the offshoot of some bright utopian resolve, but the very flower of a movement that delights in the potential for martyrdom expressed in the squalls of the newly born. It is a movement that is about death—that honors death, that loves death, that fetishizes death, that worships death, that seeks to accomplish death wherever it can, on a scale both intimate and global—and if it does not warrant the expenditure of what the self-important have taken to calling "blood and treasure," then what does? Slavery? Fascism? Genocide? Let's not flatter ourselves: If we do not find it within ourselves to identify the terrorism inspired by radical Islam as an unequivocal evil—and to pronounce ourselves morally superior to it—then we have lost the ability to identify any evil at all, and our democracy is not only diminished, it dissolves into the meaninglessness of privilege.
YEAH, YEAH, I KNOW: Nobody who opposes Bush thinks that terrorism is a good thing. The issue is not whether the United States should be involved in a war on terrorism but rather whether the war on terrorism is best served by war in Iraq. And now that the war has defied the optimism of its advocates, the issue is no longer Bush's moral intention but rather his simple competence. He got us in when he had no idea how to get us out. He allowed himself to be blinded by ideology and blindsided by ideologues. His arrogance led him to offend the very allies whose participation would have enabled us to win not just the war but the peace. His obsession with Saddam Hussein led him to rush into a war that was unnecessary. Sure, Saddam was a bad guy. Sure, the world is a better place without him. But . . .
And there it is: the inevitable but . Trailed by its uncomfortable ellipsis, it sits squirming at the end of the argument against George Bush for very good reason: It can't possibly sit at the beginning. Bush haters have to back into it because there's nothing beyond it. The world is a better place without Saddam Hussein, but . . . but what ? But he wasn't so bad that we had to do anything about him? But he wasn't so bad that he was worth the shedding of American blood? But there are other dictators just as bad whom we leave in place? But he provided Bush the opportunity to establish the doctrine of preemptive war, in which case the cure is worse than the disease? But we should have secured Afghanistan before invading Iraq? But we should have secured the cooperation of allies who were no more inclined to depose Saddam than they—or we, as head of an international coalition of the unwilling—were to stop the genocide in Rwanda ten years before? Sure, genocide is bad, but . . .
We might as well credit the president for his one great accomplishment: replacing but with and as a basis for foreign policy. The world is a better place without Saddam Hussein, and we got rid of him. And unless we have become so wedded to the politics of regret that we are obligated to indulge in a perverse kind of nostalgia for the days of Uday and Qusay, we have to admit that it's hard to imagine a world with Saddam still in it. And even before the first stem-winder of the Democratic convention, the possibility of even limited success in Iraq has reduced the loyal opposition to two strategies: either signing up for the oversight role they had envisioned for the UN, or else declaring the whole thing a lost cause, in their own war of preemption.
Of course, Iraq might be a lost cause. It might be a disaster unmitigated and unprecedented. But if we permit ourselves to look at it the way the Republicans look at it—as a historical cause rather than just a cause assumed to be lost—we might be persuaded to see that it's history's judgment that matters, not ours. The United States, at this writing, has been in Iraq fifteen months. At the same point in the Civil War, Lincoln faced, well, a disaster unmitigated and unprecedented. He was losing . He didn't lose, at least in part because he was able to both inspire and draw on the kind of moral absolutism necessary to win wars. Bush has been unable to do the same, at least in part because he is undercut by evidence of his own dishonesty, but also because moral absolutism is nearly impossible to sustain in the glare of a twenty-four-hour news cycle. In a nation incapable of feeling any but the freshest wounds, Bush cannot seek to inspire moral absolutism without his moral absolutism becoming itself an issue—indeed, the issue. He cannot seek to engender certainty without being accused of sowing disarray. And he cannot speak the barest terms necessary for victory in any war—that we will stay the course, through good or through ill, because our cause is right and just, and God is on our side—without inspiring a goodly number of his constituents to aspire to the moral prestige of surrender.
THERE IS SUPPOSED TO BE a straight line between Bush's moral absolutism—between his penchant for calling our enemies "evildoers" or even, well, "enemies"—and Guantánamo, and then between Guantánamo and the case of Jose Padilla, and then between Padilla and the depravities of Abu Ghraib. More than a mere demonstration of cause and effect, the line is supposed by those opposed to a second Bush presidency to function as a geometric proof of the proposition that the American position in Iraq is not only untenable but ignoble. It's supposed to prove that victory in any such enterprise is not worth the taint and that withdrawal is tantamount to victory, because it will save the national soul. In fact, it proves something quite different: It proves that just as the existence of the animal-rights movement is said to depend on the increasing American distance from the realities of the farm, the liberal consensus on the war in Iraq depends on the increasing American distance from the realities of soldiering. All Abu Ghraib proves is what Lincoln made clear in his writings, and what any soldier has to know from the moment he sizes up another soldier in the sight of his rifle: that war is undertaken at the risk of the national soul. The moral certainty that makes war possible is certain only to unleash moral havoc, and moral havoc becomes something the nation has to rise above. We can neither win a war nor save the national soul if all we seek is to remain unsullied—pristine. Anyway, we are well beyond that now. The question is not, and has never been, whether we can fight a war without perpetrating outrages of our own. The question is whether the rightness of the American cause is sufficient not only to justify war but to withstand war's inevitable outrages. The question is whether—if the cause is right—we are strong enough to make it remain right in the foggy moral battleground of war.
In 1861, Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus, and historians today applaud the restraint he displayed in throwing thousands of American citizens in jail. By the middle of 2002, George W. Bush had declared two American citizens enemy combatants, and both men are still in jail at this writing, uncharged. Both presidents used war as a rationale for their actions, citing as their primary constitutional responsibility the protection of the American people. It was not until two years later that Congress took up Lincoln's action and pronounced it constitutionally justified. Our willingness to extend Bush the same latitude will depend on our perception of what exactly we're up against, post-9/11. Lincoln was fighting for the very soul of this country; he was fighting to preserve this country, as a country, and so he had to challenge the Constitution in order to save it. Bush seems to think that he's fighting for the very soul of this country, but that's exactly what many people regard as a dangerous presumption. He seems to think that he is fighting for our very survival, when all we're asking him to fight for is our security, which is a very different thing. A fight for our security? We can handle that; it means we have to get to the airport early. A fight for our survival? That means we have to live in a different country altogether. That means the United States is changing and will continue to change, the way it did during and after the Civil War, with a fundamental redefinition of executive authority. That means we have to endure the constitutional indignity of the president's declaring Jose Padilla an enemy combatant for contemplating the still-uncommitted crime of blowing up a radioactive device in an American city, which seems a constitutional indignity too great to endure, unless we think of the constitutional indignities we'd have to endure if Padilla had actually committed the crime he's accused of planning. Unless we think of how this country might change if we get hit again, and hit big. In defending his suspension of habeas corpus, Lincoln sought to draw the distinction between liberties that are absolute and those that are sustainable in time of war. Bush seems to be relying on the same question, and the same distinction, as an answer to all the lawyers and editorial writers who suggest that if Jose Padilla stays in jail, we are losing the war on terror by abrogating our own ideals.
Losing the war on terror? The terrible truth is that we haven't begun to find out what that really means.
I WILL NEVER FORGET the sickly smile that crossed the president's face when he asked us all to go shopping in the wake of 9/11. It was desperate and a little craven, and I never forgave him for it. As it turned out, though, his appeal succeeded all too well. We've found the courage to go shopping. We've welcomed the restoration of the rule of celebrity. For all our avowals that nothing would ever be the same, the only thing that really changed is our taste in entertainment, which has forsaken the frivolity of the sitcom for the grit on display in The Apprentice . The immediacy of the threat was replaced by the inexplicability of the threat level. A universal war—the war on terror—was succeeded by a narrow one, an elective one, a personal one, in Iraq. Eventually, the president made it easy to believe that the threat from within was as great as the threat from without. That those at home who declared American moral primacy were as dangerous as those abroad who declared our moral degeneracy. That our national security was not worth the risk to our soul. That Abu Ghraib disproved the rightness of our cause and so represented the symbolic end of the war that began on 9/11. And that the very worst thing that could happen to this country would be four more years of George W. Bush. In a nation that loves fairy tales, the president seemed so damned eager to cry wolf that we decided he was just trying to keep us scared and that maybe he was just as big a villain as the wolf he insisted on telling us about. That's the whole point of the story, isn't it? The boy cries wolf for his own ends, and after a while people stop believing in the reality of the threat.
I know how this story ends, because I've told it many times myself. I've told it so many times, in fact, that I'm always surprised when the wolf turns out to be real, and shows up hungry at the door, long after the boy is gone.
Copyright © 1997-2004 by the Hearst Corporation.
Blogging Brothers (and Sisters)
Pioneers on the Net.
By Dan LeRoy
Avery Tooley describes himself simply as "a regular brother with some right-leaning political tendencies." In other words, he's the kind of black American that — if you listen to the Left and our self-proclaimed "black leaders" — doesn't really exist.
Yet not only is Tooley, a University of Maryland grad student, a real person, he's also sharing his conservatism with the world daily via a blog titled "Stereo Describes My Scenario." Taking its title from a lyric by hip-hop legends Public Enemy, it's a wide-ranging discussion of music and politics underlaid by a no-nonsense philosophy: "(T)he right's focus on the individual is the only practical way" to solve the problems of black America.
Tooley isn't alone in propagating this heresy in the blogosphere, either. He's one of several black bloggers who make up The Conservative Brotherhood — a group of writers which also includes some women, like La Shawn Barber, a 37-year-old legal assistant and reformed liberal from Washington, D.C., whose own "Corner" features a Christian conservative's perspective on the issues of the day.
"I didn't really have a lot of ambitions for it. It started out as a semi-personal journal," says Barber. But after nine months of blogging and building her audience, "I almost feel like it's an obligation to stay out in the public eye."
Right-of-center black bloggers, in fact, seem to be entering that public eye almost daily. That shouldn't be a surprise, given statistics on growing Internet usage among black Americans, and the revelation that a quarter of young blacks consider themselves conservative (from an eye-opening study conducted by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies and released last month at the Democratic National Convention.)
From the veteran's perspective of Baldilocks to the playful philosophizing of Ambra Nykol, the Internet is suddenly full of great black writers whose views aren't monolithic — you'll find almost-daily disagreements about affirmative action, President Bush or the morality of gangsta rap — but instead offer a vibrant, hip-hop generation alternative to the broken record of the civil-rights establishment.
One of the most recent additions is also one of the most comprehensive: Booker Rising, a daily news clearinghouse that targets black moderates and conservatives and "seeks to counteract negativity, victimology and defeatism" in the name of the much-maligned Booker T. Washington.
The site's founder, 33-year-old Chicagoan Shamara Riley, began the blog last May, in part after becoming "frustrated with attacks" on modern-day black moderates and conservatives. Riley keeps a running tally of statistics on nearly every aspect of black America, from economics to health, "so folks can argue against claims that there has been little or no progress since the 1960s, or that all blacks think alike."
"(E)ven many of our bad statistics are in decline, but the media isn't covering it," says Riley, via e-mail, "further reinforcing defeatism and a sense that we common folks can't make change in our communities."
Of course, a discussion of black conservative bloggers and the changes they're capable of effecting must include the following caveat, to keep commentators on the Left from getting their knickers any more twisted than usual: Blogging, while growing rapidly, still represents only a small part of the Internet experience. The number of blogs maintained by black Americans is, based on population figures, in all probability a small percentage of the overall total, and of that small percentage, it seems likely that the majority lean leftward. Most black conservative blogs number their visits per day in the hundreds, a far cry from the six-digit traffic generated by the best-known blogs, like Instapundit.
"We're a tiny voice in the Internet wilderness," admits Riley. And Tooley believes that his fellow bloggers won't begin to challenge black political orthodoxy until they gain entry to the mainstream media. (Barber, who's written for the Washington Post and has a biweekly column on several conservative websites, is already making strides in this direction.)
Even among their limited audiences, however, these bloggers are providing black conservatives with something crucial that they often lack: ready access to other black conservatives. One reason celebrated figures like Condoleezza Rice, Clarence Thomas, Thomas Sowell, and Walter Williams can be derided as "tokens" and "sellouts" is because many people don't know the black conservatives in their own communities.
"They're out there, but I think there's an extent to which we've been told that if you disagree with the civil-rights industry that your blackness is somehow inauthentic," says Tooley, "and so we've been kind of isolated from each other." Blogging, he believes, is helping bridge those gaps.
It will likely be a long, unglamourous process, though, and these bloggers aren't queuing for any credit. "I'm not a pioneer," insists La Shawn Barber, describing herself instead as "a proud, patriotic American who's exercising her right to free speech."
Even if the daily wounds she and her fellow bloggers are inflicting on the civil-rights establishment aren't always visible, however, it's worth frequent visits to their online worlds — to remind yourself that the battle for the soul of black America hasn't been conceded, not by a longshot.
— Dan LeRoy is a freelance writer from Connecticut whose work has appeared in the New York Times and Vibe.
Pioneers on the Net.
By Dan LeRoy
Avery Tooley describes himself simply as "a regular brother with some right-leaning political tendencies." In other words, he's the kind of black American that — if you listen to the Left and our self-proclaimed "black leaders" — doesn't really exist.
Yet not only is Tooley, a University of Maryland grad student, a real person, he's also sharing his conservatism with the world daily via a blog titled "Stereo Describes My Scenario." Taking its title from a lyric by hip-hop legends Public Enemy, it's a wide-ranging discussion of music and politics underlaid by a no-nonsense philosophy: "(T)he right's focus on the individual is the only practical way" to solve the problems of black America.
Tooley isn't alone in propagating this heresy in the blogosphere, either. He's one of several black bloggers who make up The Conservative Brotherhood — a group of writers which also includes some women, like La Shawn Barber, a 37-year-old legal assistant and reformed liberal from Washington, D.C., whose own "Corner" features a Christian conservative's perspective on the issues of the day.
"I didn't really have a lot of ambitions for it. It started out as a semi-personal journal," says Barber. But after nine months of blogging and building her audience, "I almost feel like it's an obligation to stay out in the public eye."
Right-of-center black bloggers, in fact, seem to be entering that public eye almost daily. That shouldn't be a surprise, given statistics on growing Internet usage among black Americans, and the revelation that a quarter of young blacks consider themselves conservative (from an eye-opening study conducted by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies and released last month at the Democratic National Convention.)
From the veteran's perspective of Baldilocks to the playful philosophizing of Ambra Nykol, the Internet is suddenly full of great black writers whose views aren't monolithic — you'll find almost-daily disagreements about affirmative action, President Bush or the morality of gangsta rap — but instead offer a vibrant, hip-hop generation alternative to the broken record of the civil-rights establishment.
One of the most recent additions is also one of the most comprehensive: Booker Rising, a daily news clearinghouse that targets black moderates and conservatives and "seeks to counteract negativity, victimology and defeatism" in the name of the much-maligned Booker T. Washington.
The site's founder, 33-year-old Chicagoan Shamara Riley, began the blog last May, in part after becoming "frustrated with attacks" on modern-day black moderates and conservatives. Riley keeps a running tally of statistics on nearly every aspect of black America, from economics to health, "so folks can argue against claims that there has been little or no progress since the 1960s, or that all blacks think alike."
"(E)ven many of our bad statistics are in decline, but the media isn't covering it," says Riley, via e-mail, "further reinforcing defeatism and a sense that we common folks can't make change in our communities."
Of course, a discussion of black conservative bloggers and the changes they're capable of effecting must include the following caveat, to keep commentators on the Left from getting their knickers any more twisted than usual: Blogging, while growing rapidly, still represents only a small part of the Internet experience. The number of blogs maintained by black Americans is, based on population figures, in all probability a small percentage of the overall total, and of that small percentage, it seems likely that the majority lean leftward. Most black conservative blogs number their visits per day in the hundreds, a far cry from the six-digit traffic generated by the best-known blogs, like Instapundit.
"We're a tiny voice in the Internet wilderness," admits Riley. And Tooley believes that his fellow bloggers won't begin to challenge black political orthodoxy until they gain entry to the mainstream media. (Barber, who's written for the Washington Post and has a biweekly column on several conservative websites, is already making strides in this direction.)
Even among their limited audiences, however, these bloggers are providing black conservatives with something crucial that they often lack: ready access to other black conservatives. One reason celebrated figures like Condoleezza Rice, Clarence Thomas, Thomas Sowell, and Walter Williams can be derided as "tokens" and "sellouts" is because many people don't know the black conservatives in their own communities.
"They're out there, but I think there's an extent to which we've been told that if you disagree with the civil-rights industry that your blackness is somehow inauthentic," says Tooley, "and so we've been kind of isolated from each other." Blogging, he believes, is helping bridge those gaps.
It will likely be a long, unglamourous process, though, and these bloggers aren't queuing for any credit. "I'm not a pioneer," insists La Shawn Barber, describing herself instead as "a proud, patriotic American who's exercising her right to free speech."
Even if the daily wounds she and her fellow bloggers are inflicting on the civil-rights establishment aren't always visible, however, it's worth frequent visits to their online worlds — to remind yourself that the battle for the soul of black America hasn't been conceded, not by a longshot.
— Dan LeRoy is a freelance writer from Connecticut whose work has appeared in the New York Times and Vibe.
Wednesday, August 11, 2004
Brothers Band Together Against Kerry
by Ann Coulter
August 11, 2004
Democrats haven't been this upset about an American engaging in free speech since Juanita Broaddrick opened her yap.
Two hundred fifty-four Swift Boat Veterans have signed a letter saying John Kerry is not fit to be commander in chief, a point developed in some detail in the blockbuster new book by John O'Neill, aptly titled "Unfit for Command." At the 2003 reunion of Swift Boat Veterans, about 300 men showed up: 85 percent of them think Kerry is unfit to be president. (On the bright side, Kerry was voted, in absentia, "Most Likely to Run for President on His Phony War Record.") Fewer than 10 percent of all Swift Boat Veterans contacted refused to sign the letter.
Kerry was in Vietnam for only four months, which, coincidentally, is less than the combined airtime he's spent talking about it. It takes a special kind of person to get that many people to hate your guts in so little time. The last time this many people hated one person after only four months was when Margaret Cho had her own sitcom.
But our young Eddie Haskell managed to annoy other servicemen even before he came home and called them war criminals. About 60 eyewitnesses to Kerry's service are cited in the book, describing Kerry fleeing comrades who were under attack, disregarding orders, putting others in danger, sucking up to his commanders, creating phony film footage of his exploits with a home-movie camera, and recommending himself for medals and Purple Hearts in vainglorious reports he wrote himself. (This was apparently before the concept of "fragging" put limits on such behavior.)
After three months of combat, Kerry had collected enough film footage for his political campaigns, so he went home. He even shot three different endings to the episode where he chases down a VC guy after test audiences thought Kerry shooting a wounded teenager in the back was too much of a "downer." After filming his last staged exploit, Kerry reportedly told a buddy, "That's a wrap. See you at the convention in about 35 years."
Kerry is demanding to be made president on the basis of spending four months in Vietnam 35 years ago. And yet the men who know what he did during those four months don't think he's fit to be dogcatcher. That seems newsworthy to me, but I must be wrong since the media have engineered a total blackout of the Swift Boat Veterans.
In May, the Swiftees held a spellbinding press conference in Washington, D.C. In front of a photo being used by the Kerry campaign to tout Kerry's war service, the officers stood up, one by one, pointed to their own faces in the campaign photo, and announced that they believed Kerry unfit for command. Only one officer in the photo supports Kerry for president. Seventeen say he is not fit to be president.
The press covered it much as they covered Paula Jones' first press conference.
With the media playing their usual role as Truth Commissar for the now-dead Soviet Union, the Swiftees are having to purchase ad time in order to be heard. No Tim Russert interviews, no "Today" show appearances, no New York Times editorials or Vanity Fair hagiographies for these heretics against the liberal religion. The only way Swift Boat Veterans for Truth could get less attention would be to go on "Air America" radio.
If the 254 veterans against Kerry got one-tenth as much media coverage for calling Kerry a liar as Clown Joe Wilson did for calling Bush a liar, the veterans wouldn't need to buy ad time to get their message out. (Wilson, you'll recall, was a media darling for six or seven months before being exposed as a fantasist by Senate investigators.)
With their commitment to free speech and a robust exchange of ideas (i.e., "child pornography" and "sedition"), the Democratic National Committee is threatening to sue TV stations that run the Swift Boat Veterans' paid ads. Sue? Can you tell already that there are two lawyers at the top of the Democratic ticket? These are the same people who accuse John Ashcroft of shredding the Bill of Rights. WHY ISN'T THE PRESS COVERING THIS??? Wait, now I remember. OK, never mind. (Contribute to the Swift Boat Veterans here.)
The threat to sue is absurd, but will allow the very same TV stations that are already censoring the Swiftees to have an excuse to censor even purchased airtime.
Leave aside the fact that Kerry is a presidential candidate and – judging by the ads being run against George Bush – I gather there's nothing you can't say about a presidential candidate, including calling him Hitler. After reading "Unfit for Command," I am pretty sure Kerry doesn't want a neutral tribunal deciding who's telling the truth here.
The Swift Boat Veterans provide detailed accounts from dozens and dozens of eyewitnesses to Kerry's Uriah Heep-like behavior – which "Unfit for Command" contrasts with Kerry's boastful descriptions of the exact same incidents.
By contrast, Kerry's supporters have their usual off-the-rack denunciations of any witness against a Democrat. The veterans are: liars, bigots, idiots, politically motivated, and I was never alone in a hotel with Paula Jones.
Ron Brownstein, Los Angeles Times reporter and Bill Clinton's favorite reporter, compared the Swift Boat Veterans' ad to a "snuff film." He claimed the veterans have "strong Republican ties."
Apparently, before being permitted to engage in free speech against Democrats in this country you have to: (1) prove that you are not a Republican, (2) take a vow of poverty, and (3) purchase the right to speak in a TV ad. On the basis of Clown Wilson, Michael Moore, George Soros, Moveon.org, etc., etc., etc., I gather the requirements for engaging in free speech against a Republican are somewhat less rigorous. Hey! Maybe John Edwards is right: There really are two Americas!
O'Neill, the author of "Unfit for Command" and founder of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, can be heard on the Nixon tapes – unaware that he was being taped – telling Nixon that he came from a family of Democrats and voted for Hubert Humphrey in the prior election. Unlike Joe Wilson, Anita Hill or Richard Clarke, Woodward and Bernstein, et al., O'Neill has said he will take no royalties on his book but will donate all his profits to the Navy. So I think even under liberals' rules, O'Neill is allowed to have an opinion.
Before the book was released and O'Neill could appear to defend it, liberals were on television denouncing the book. If memory serves, the last book Democrats tried this hard to suppress was the Bible. The DNC is threatening to sue to prevent the Swift Boat Veterans from buying ad time. When Democrats are this terrified of a book, it's not because they have a good answer. Howard Dean can accuse Ashcroft of book-burning all he wants, but it's the Democrats who are doing everything in their power to prevent you from reading "Unfit for Command." In bookstores beginning this week
by Ann Coulter
August 11, 2004
Democrats haven't been this upset about an American engaging in free speech since Juanita Broaddrick opened her yap.
Two hundred fifty-four Swift Boat Veterans have signed a letter saying John Kerry is not fit to be commander in chief, a point developed in some detail in the blockbuster new book by John O'Neill, aptly titled "Unfit for Command." At the 2003 reunion of Swift Boat Veterans, about 300 men showed up: 85 percent of them think Kerry is unfit to be president. (On the bright side, Kerry was voted, in absentia, "Most Likely to Run for President on His Phony War Record.") Fewer than 10 percent of all Swift Boat Veterans contacted refused to sign the letter.
Kerry was in Vietnam for only four months, which, coincidentally, is less than the combined airtime he's spent talking about it. It takes a special kind of person to get that many people to hate your guts in so little time. The last time this many people hated one person after only four months was when Margaret Cho had her own sitcom.
But our young Eddie Haskell managed to annoy other servicemen even before he came home and called them war criminals. About 60 eyewitnesses to Kerry's service are cited in the book, describing Kerry fleeing comrades who were under attack, disregarding orders, putting others in danger, sucking up to his commanders, creating phony film footage of his exploits with a home-movie camera, and recommending himself for medals and Purple Hearts in vainglorious reports he wrote himself. (This was apparently before the concept of "fragging" put limits on such behavior.)
After three months of combat, Kerry had collected enough film footage for his political campaigns, so he went home. He even shot three different endings to the episode where he chases down a VC guy after test audiences thought Kerry shooting a wounded teenager in the back was too much of a "downer." After filming his last staged exploit, Kerry reportedly told a buddy, "That's a wrap. See you at the convention in about 35 years."
Kerry is demanding to be made president on the basis of spending four months in Vietnam 35 years ago. And yet the men who know what he did during those four months don't think he's fit to be dogcatcher. That seems newsworthy to me, but I must be wrong since the media have engineered a total blackout of the Swift Boat Veterans.
In May, the Swiftees held a spellbinding press conference in Washington, D.C. In front of a photo being used by the Kerry campaign to tout Kerry's war service, the officers stood up, one by one, pointed to their own faces in the campaign photo, and announced that they believed Kerry unfit for command. Only one officer in the photo supports Kerry for president. Seventeen say he is not fit to be president.
The press covered it much as they covered Paula Jones' first press conference.
With the media playing their usual role as Truth Commissar for the now-dead Soviet Union, the Swiftees are having to purchase ad time in order to be heard. No Tim Russert interviews, no "Today" show appearances, no New York Times editorials or Vanity Fair hagiographies for these heretics against the liberal religion. The only way Swift Boat Veterans for Truth could get less attention would be to go on "Air America" radio.
If the 254 veterans against Kerry got one-tenth as much media coverage for calling Kerry a liar as Clown Joe Wilson did for calling Bush a liar, the veterans wouldn't need to buy ad time to get their message out. (Wilson, you'll recall, was a media darling for six or seven months before being exposed as a fantasist by Senate investigators.)
With their commitment to free speech and a robust exchange of ideas (i.e., "child pornography" and "sedition"), the Democratic National Committee is threatening to sue TV stations that run the Swift Boat Veterans' paid ads. Sue? Can you tell already that there are two lawyers at the top of the Democratic ticket? These are the same people who accuse John Ashcroft of shredding the Bill of Rights. WHY ISN'T THE PRESS COVERING THIS??? Wait, now I remember. OK, never mind. (Contribute to the Swift Boat Veterans here.)
The threat to sue is absurd, but will allow the very same TV stations that are already censoring the Swiftees to have an excuse to censor even purchased airtime.
Leave aside the fact that Kerry is a presidential candidate and – judging by the ads being run against George Bush – I gather there's nothing you can't say about a presidential candidate, including calling him Hitler. After reading "Unfit for Command," I am pretty sure Kerry doesn't want a neutral tribunal deciding who's telling the truth here.
The Swift Boat Veterans provide detailed accounts from dozens and dozens of eyewitnesses to Kerry's Uriah Heep-like behavior – which "Unfit for Command" contrasts with Kerry's boastful descriptions of the exact same incidents.
By contrast, Kerry's supporters have their usual off-the-rack denunciations of any witness against a Democrat. The veterans are: liars, bigots, idiots, politically motivated, and I was never alone in a hotel with Paula Jones.
Ron Brownstein, Los Angeles Times reporter and Bill Clinton's favorite reporter, compared the Swift Boat Veterans' ad to a "snuff film." He claimed the veterans have "strong Republican ties."
Apparently, before being permitted to engage in free speech against Democrats in this country you have to: (1) prove that you are not a Republican, (2) take a vow of poverty, and (3) purchase the right to speak in a TV ad. On the basis of Clown Wilson, Michael Moore, George Soros, Moveon.org, etc., etc., etc., I gather the requirements for engaging in free speech against a Republican are somewhat less rigorous. Hey! Maybe John Edwards is right: There really are two Americas!
O'Neill, the author of "Unfit for Command" and founder of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, can be heard on the Nixon tapes – unaware that he was being taped – telling Nixon that he came from a family of Democrats and voted for Hubert Humphrey in the prior election. Unlike Joe Wilson, Anita Hill or Richard Clarke, Woodward and Bernstein, et al., O'Neill has said he will take no royalties on his book but will donate all his profits to the Navy. So I think even under liberals' rules, O'Neill is allowed to have an opinion.
Before the book was released and O'Neill could appear to defend it, liberals were on television denouncing the book. If memory serves, the last book Democrats tried this hard to suppress was the Bible. The DNC is threatening to sue to prevent the Swift Boat Veterans from buying ad time. When Democrats are this terrified of a book, it's not because they have a good answer. Howard Dean can accuse Ashcroft of book-burning all he wants, but it's the Democrats who are doing everything in their power to prevent you from reading "Unfit for Command." In bookstores beginning this week
Tuesday, August 10, 2004
In the Cold War, Kerry Froze
Ever since Vietnam, he's been a dove.
By Joshua Muravchik
Suddenly, the presidential race has devolved into a debate about young John Kerry's actions in Vietnam. First, Kerry made his military service the central theme of the Democratic convention. Now some anti-Kerry veterans have issued a book and television ads that impugn that record.
Kerry's strategy was not hard to understand. In normal times, the Democrats' strong suit — domestic policy — counterbalances the GOP's advantage on national security issues. With the country at war, however, national security trumps. So Kerry promised a "more effective war on terror," and he labored to make the case, as columnist E.J. Dionne put it, that he "was actually tougher than Bush."
The detractors may only be playing into his hands by focusing on what he did or did not do on the Mekong 35 years ago. The more telling point is that nothing he has done since then sustains the claim that he would be an effective leader in the war we face today — any more than George McGovern's 35 combat missions in World War II, which won him the Distinguished Flying Cross, qualified him to lead us in the Cold War.
The Cold War also provides our best measuring stick for estimating how Kerry might perform as commander in chief, and in that conflict Kerry's instincts were always awry. Had the country heeded his counsel, we might not yet have won it.
Many leaders had a hand in Washington's Cold War triumph, but Ronald Reagan's contributions were pivotal, and Kerry opposed every one of them. Reagan's defense buildup disabused Soviet leaders of any hope that they could ultimately come out ahead of the United States. Kerry derided these military expenditures as "bloated" and "without any relevancy to the threat." In particular, Reagan's plan to seek a missile defense system against Soviet ICBMs and NATO's decision to station new missiles in Europe to counteract the new Soviet deployment there rendered futile the Kremlin's vast investment in nuclear supremacy. Instead of these measures, Kerry advocated that we adopt a one-sided "nuclear freeze."
Reagan also showed the Soviets that history was not necessarily on their side by ousting the erratic communist regime in Grenada and arming anti-communist guerrillas to challenge the leftist oligarchs of Nicaragua. Kerry condemned the U.S. action in Grenada as "a bully's show of force," and he opposed our support for guerrillas in Nicaragua as vociferously as anyone in the Senate, even traveling to Managua to try to cut a deal with Sandinista strongman Daniel Ortega to thwart Reagan's policy.
Reagan also put the U.S. on the ideological offensive when he branded the Soviet Union an "evil empire." But Kerry's harshest words were reserved for our own country, which he accused — during his years as an antiwar leader — of "crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command."
Not only in the Cold War but also in other events that foreshadowed today's challenges, Kerry consistently got it wrong. In 1986, Reagan bombed Moammar Kadafi's residence when intelligence intercepts showed that the Libyan dictator was behind the terrorist bombing of a nightclub full of American soldiers in Germany. Kerry denounced the U.S. retaliatory strike as "not proportional." And when Saddam Hussein swallowed Kuwait in 1990, Kerry opposed using force to drive him out, calling instead for reliance on economic sanctions.
All in all, in his 20 years in the Senate, Kerry ranks as one of the five most dovish or liberal members on foreign policy if you tally up the key votes selected by the liberal advocacy group, Americans for Democratic Action. Is it any wonder that Kerry is seeking to focus voters' attention on his courage as a Navy officer rather than his judgment as a political leader?
Since 1972, when McGovern jettisoned the tradition of Harry Truman, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and made the Democrats the party of dovishness, only two Democrats have won the White House. Both of them, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, presented themselves as more hawkish than their Republican opponents. In 1976, Carter targeted the detente policies of Gerald Ford. In 1992, Clinton lambasted George H.W. Bush's refusal to defend Bosnia or criticize Beijing. Once in office, each pursued softer foreign policies than the Republican he had defeated.
That Kerry comes from Massachusetts — the only state that opted for McGovern in 1972 — makes his projection of hawkishness a harder sell. The military veterans with whom he surrounded himself at the convention, and the reminders of the honor with which he himself served, make the claim more plausible. Until you look at the political record.
Joshua Muravchik is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
Ever since Vietnam, he's been a dove.
By Joshua Muravchik
Suddenly, the presidential race has devolved into a debate about young John Kerry's actions in Vietnam. First, Kerry made his military service the central theme of the Democratic convention. Now some anti-Kerry veterans have issued a book and television ads that impugn that record.
Kerry's strategy was not hard to understand. In normal times, the Democrats' strong suit — domestic policy — counterbalances the GOP's advantage on national security issues. With the country at war, however, national security trumps. So Kerry promised a "more effective war on terror," and he labored to make the case, as columnist E.J. Dionne put it, that he "was actually tougher than Bush."
The detractors may only be playing into his hands by focusing on what he did or did not do on the Mekong 35 years ago. The more telling point is that nothing he has done since then sustains the claim that he would be an effective leader in the war we face today — any more than George McGovern's 35 combat missions in World War II, which won him the Distinguished Flying Cross, qualified him to lead us in the Cold War.
The Cold War also provides our best measuring stick for estimating how Kerry might perform as commander in chief, and in that conflict Kerry's instincts were always awry. Had the country heeded his counsel, we might not yet have won it.
Many leaders had a hand in Washington's Cold War triumph, but Ronald Reagan's contributions were pivotal, and Kerry opposed every one of them. Reagan's defense buildup disabused Soviet leaders of any hope that they could ultimately come out ahead of the United States. Kerry derided these military expenditures as "bloated" and "without any relevancy to the threat." In particular, Reagan's plan to seek a missile defense system against Soviet ICBMs and NATO's decision to station new missiles in Europe to counteract the new Soviet deployment there rendered futile the Kremlin's vast investment in nuclear supremacy. Instead of these measures, Kerry advocated that we adopt a one-sided "nuclear freeze."
Reagan also showed the Soviets that history was not necessarily on their side by ousting the erratic communist regime in Grenada and arming anti-communist guerrillas to challenge the leftist oligarchs of Nicaragua. Kerry condemned the U.S. action in Grenada as "a bully's show of force," and he opposed our support for guerrillas in Nicaragua as vociferously as anyone in the Senate, even traveling to Managua to try to cut a deal with Sandinista strongman Daniel Ortega to thwart Reagan's policy.
Reagan also put the U.S. on the ideological offensive when he branded the Soviet Union an "evil empire." But Kerry's harshest words were reserved for our own country, which he accused — during his years as an antiwar leader — of "crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command."
Not only in the Cold War but also in other events that foreshadowed today's challenges, Kerry consistently got it wrong. In 1986, Reagan bombed Moammar Kadafi's residence when intelligence intercepts showed that the Libyan dictator was behind the terrorist bombing of a nightclub full of American soldiers in Germany. Kerry denounced the U.S. retaliatory strike as "not proportional." And when Saddam Hussein swallowed Kuwait in 1990, Kerry opposed using force to drive him out, calling instead for reliance on economic sanctions.
All in all, in his 20 years in the Senate, Kerry ranks as one of the five most dovish or liberal members on foreign policy if you tally up the key votes selected by the liberal advocacy group, Americans for Democratic Action. Is it any wonder that Kerry is seeking to focus voters' attention on his courage as a Navy officer rather than his judgment as a political leader?
Since 1972, when McGovern jettisoned the tradition of Harry Truman, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and made the Democrats the party of dovishness, only two Democrats have won the White House. Both of them, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, presented themselves as more hawkish than their Republican opponents. In 1976, Carter targeted the detente policies of Gerald Ford. In 1992, Clinton lambasted George H.W. Bush's refusal to defend Bosnia or criticize Beijing. Once in office, each pursued softer foreign policies than the Republican he had defeated.
That Kerry comes from Massachusetts — the only state that opted for McGovern in 1972 — makes his projection of hawkishness a harder sell. The military veterans with whom he surrounded himself at the convention, and the reminders of the honor with which he himself served, make the claim more plausible. Until you look at the political record.
Joshua Muravchik is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
Nuanced? Kerry's story just doesn't add up
By Mark Steyn
John Kerry is too strange to be president. I don't mean "strange" in the way of his predecessor. Al Gore, the first Android-American to run for president, was weird. But Kerry's strangeness is of an entirely different order.
For purposes of comparison, go back a couple of months to that fevered few weeks when Michael Moore, bigshot Democrats and the media were hounding Bush over his allegedly spotty attendance in the Texas Air National Guard during the early Seventies.
The point is, even if it were true, it fits the Bush narrative: he was a lackadaisical son of privilege who goofed around, drank too much, found Jesus, sobered up and got his life together. If you've got 30-year-old pictures of him dancing naked on a bar in Mexico when he was supposed to be back at the air base, so what? It's compatible with the official version. That's Bush: the bad stuff still fits the picture.
But with Kerry, even before any gaffes or scandals, the official narrative makes no sense. He's publicly opposed to the Vietnam War. But he volunteers for it. Then he comes back disgusted with his experience in war, publicly hurls his medals away (or someone else's: that story keeps changing), denounces his fellow veterans as war criminals, torturers and rapists, and claims that he personally committed atrocities.
But then he decides to run for president and suddenly Jane Fonda morphs into John Wayne and all those war criminals are war heroes he wants at every rally and he's got his medals back and his disgust at his wartime experience has mysteriously turned into pride in his wartime experience to the exclusion of all else.
If Steven Spielberg, Barbra Streisand or any of his other Hollywood supporters got a script like that, they'd send it to rewrite. Either that or they'd figure they'd got an early, rejected draft of the new Manchurian Candidate.
That's what people mean when they talk about how "complex" and "nuanced" Kerry is. They don't mean his positions on the great questions of the day are complex and nuanced.
Quite the contrary: for the purposes of this campaign, his entire political career – 20 years as Senator, Lieutenant-Governor to Michael Dukakis – has been dropped from his CV. If Kerry had exhibited the slightest trace of any interestingly complex view of any policy matter, you can be sure we'd have heard about it. But he hasn't.
So the only "complex" aspect of the Kerry campaign is the man himself, who's complex in ways that don't seem entirely healthy. My chums across the page were rather dismissive yesterday about "Swift Boat Veterans For Truth", a group of fellow officers who think he's unfit to be president.
Let's take it as read that Swiftees who support or oppose Kerry are "politically motivated": the fact is, the Swiftees opposed to him significantly outnumber the four who support him, which is interesting in itself. But consider just one of the items from their new book about him.
For decades, John Kerry has told anyone who'd listen that at Christmas 1968 he was on an illegal mission inside Cambodia. On the floor of the Senate in 1986, while attacking President Reagan for turning Central America into another Vietnam quagmire (wrong as usual), Kerry said: "I remember Christmas of 1968 sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia. I remember what it was like to be shot at by the Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge and Cambodians, and have the President of the United States telling the American people that I was not there; the troops were not in Cambodia. I have that memory which is seared – seared – in me."
The illegal Yuletide foray was so seared into him that he brought it up at every opportunity.
As he told the Boston Herald in 1979, "I remember spending Christmas Eve of 1968 five miles across the Cambodian border being shot at by our South Vietnamese allies who were drunk and celebrating Christmas. The absurdity of almost being killed by our own allies in a country in which President Nixon claimed there were no American troops was very real."
LBJ was President on Christmas Eve 1968, but let that pass. Here's an Associated Press story from 1992: "Navy Lt John Kerry knew he had no business steering his Mekong River patrol boat across the border into Cambodia, but orders were orders… By Christmas 1968, part of Kerry's patrol extended across the border of South Vietnam into Cambodia."
Just one problem. It never happened. Every living officer up his chain of command says Kerry was never ordered to Cambodia. At least three of his five crewmen say their boat was never in Cambodia. And if you don't believe any of his fellow veterans, read the excerpt from Kerry's own journal published in Tour Of Duty, the recent hagiography by Douglas Brinkley.
On December 24 1968, Kerry was at Sa Dec – that's well inside Vietnam, 55 miles from the Cambodian border – and waxing wistful to his diary about a quiet Christmas far from home: "Visions of sugarplums really do dance through your head and you think of stockings and snow and roast chestnuts and fires with birch logs and all that is good and warm and real. It's Christmas Eve."
I'm Vietnammed out. But it's the centrepiece of Kerry's campaign: the other day, asked a straightforward question about 9/11, he stuck to the current millennium for a good 20 seconds and then veered off into "the war that I fought in was a war where we saw America lose its support for the war, where the soldiers came back having had to do what our soldiers are doing today, carry an M-16 in another country, try to tell the difference between friend and foe. I know what it's like to go out at night on patrol", etc, etc. So, since Vietnam seems to be the only subject on which he has anything to say, it would be reassuring to know that at least he's got that right.
For most of his adult life John Kerry has peddled as his central Vietnam anecdote – the one that drove him to turn on his nation's leaders – what appears to be a complete fantasy. Why would he do such a thing? If there's a good answer to that question, maybe someone in his doting press pack would like to ask it.
© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2004.
By Mark Steyn
John Kerry is too strange to be president. I don't mean "strange" in the way of his predecessor. Al Gore, the first Android-American to run for president, was weird. But Kerry's strangeness is of an entirely different order.
For purposes of comparison, go back a couple of months to that fevered few weeks when Michael Moore, bigshot Democrats and the media were hounding Bush over his allegedly spotty attendance in the Texas Air National Guard during the early Seventies.
The point is, even if it were true, it fits the Bush narrative: he was a lackadaisical son of privilege who goofed around, drank too much, found Jesus, sobered up and got his life together. If you've got 30-year-old pictures of him dancing naked on a bar in Mexico when he was supposed to be back at the air base, so what? It's compatible with the official version. That's Bush: the bad stuff still fits the picture.
But with Kerry, even before any gaffes or scandals, the official narrative makes no sense. He's publicly opposed to the Vietnam War. But he volunteers for it. Then he comes back disgusted with his experience in war, publicly hurls his medals away (or someone else's: that story keeps changing), denounces his fellow veterans as war criminals, torturers and rapists, and claims that he personally committed atrocities.
But then he decides to run for president and suddenly Jane Fonda morphs into John Wayne and all those war criminals are war heroes he wants at every rally and he's got his medals back and his disgust at his wartime experience has mysteriously turned into pride in his wartime experience to the exclusion of all else.
If Steven Spielberg, Barbra Streisand or any of his other Hollywood supporters got a script like that, they'd send it to rewrite. Either that or they'd figure they'd got an early, rejected draft of the new Manchurian Candidate.
That's what people mean when they talk about how "complex" and "nuanced" Kerry is. They don't mean his positions on the great questions of the day are complex and nuanced.
Quite the contrary: for the purposes of this campaign, his entire political career – 20 years as Senator, Lieutenant-Governor to Michael Dukakis – has been dropped from his CV. If Kerry had exhibited the slightest trace of any interestingly complex view of any policy matter, you can be sure we'd have heard about it. But he hasn't.
So the only "complex" aspect of the Kerry campaign is the man himself, who's complex in ways that don't seem entirely healthy. My chums across the page were rather dismissive yesterday about "Swift Boat Veterans For Truth", a group of fellow officers who think he's unfit to be president.
Let's take it as read that Swiftees who support or oppose Kerry are "politically motivated": the fact is, the Swiftees opposed to him significantly outnumber the four who support him, which is interesting in itself. But consider just one of the items from their new book about him.
For decades, John Kerry has told anyone who'd listen that at Christmas 1968 he was on an illegal mission inside Cambodia. On the floor of the Senate in 1986, while attacking President Reagan for turning Central America into another Vietnam quagmire (wrong as usual), Kerry said: "I remember Christmas of 1968 sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia. I remember what it was like to be shot at by the Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge and Cambodians, and have the President of the United States telling the American people that I was not there; the troops were not in Cambodia. I have that memory which is seared – seared – in me."
The illegal Yuletide foray was so seared into him that he brought it up at every opportunity.
As he told the Boston Herald in 1979, "I remember spending Christmas Eve of 1968 five miles across the Cambodian border being shot at by our South Vietnamese allies who were drunk and celebrating Christmas. The absurdity of almost being killed by our own allies in a country in which President Nixon claimed there were no American troops was very real."
LBJ was President on Christmas Eve 1968, but let that pass. Here's an Associated Press story from 1992: "Navy Lt John Kerry knew he had no business steering his Mekong River patrol boat across the border into Cambodia, but orders were orders… By Christmas 1968, part of Kerry's patrol extended across the border of South Vietnam into Cambodia."
Just one problem. It never happened. Every living officer up his chain of command says Kerry was never ordered to Cambodia. At least three of his five crewmen say their boat was never in Cambodia. And if you don't believe any of his fellow veterans, read the excerpt from Kerry's own journal published in Tour Of Duty, the recent hagiography by Douglas Brinkley.
On December 24 1968, Kerry was at Sa Dec – that's well inside Vietnam, 55 miles from the Cambodian border – and waxing wistful to his diary about a quiet Christmas far from home: "Visions of sugarplums really do dance through your head and you think of stockings and snow and roast chestnuts and fires with birch logs and all that is good and warm and real. It's Christmas Eve."
I'm Vietnammed out. But it's the centrepiece of Kerry's campaign: the other day, asked a straightforward question about 9/11, he stuck to the current millennium for a good 20 seconds and then veered off into "the war that I fought in was a war where we saw America lose its support for the war, where the soldiers came back having had to do what our soldiers are doing today, carry an M-16 in another country, try to tell the difference between friend and foe. I know what it's like to go out at night on patrol", etc, etc. So, since Vietnam seems to be the only subject on which he has anything to say, it would be reassuring to know that at least he's got that right.
For most of his adult life John Kerry has peddled as his central Vietnam anecdote – the one that drove him to turn on his nation's leaders – what appears to be a complete fantasy. Why would he do such a thing? If there's a good answer to that question, maybe someone in his doting press pack would like to ask it.
© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2004.
More good stuff from Instapundit:
KERRY ENDORSES IRAQ WAR!
No, really:
Stripes: The charge is out there that Republicans are much better suited to handle defense issues. How do you counter that?
Kerry: My record counters that, and my friends counter that. . . .
They went into Iraq ina brilliant military strategy, which we all adopted and supported, but they didn’t have a plan to win the peace. They didn’t bring other [countries] to our side. They didn’t give our troops all the equipment — the body armor and the armored Humvees and things they need and deserve.
There’s a great tradition of Democratic presidents who’ve led us in war.
(Emphasis added). Leaving aside the "other countries" bit, which is bogus unless "other countries" is just a synonym for France and Germany, note that this is an endorsement of the war, and seems to completely undercut earlier statements that Bush "misled the country." Will this be the new Kerry position -- the war was justified, but the peace was bungled? And I'll handle the wars I start better? Is it a return to the 2001/2002 pro-war Kerry?
I'm not terribly averse to that, but I wonder how it'll play with the antiwar base? (Via Sarah). Probably no better than this even stronger statement:
GRAND CANYON, Ariz. (Reuters) - Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry said on Monday he would have voted for the congressional resolution authorizing force against Iraq even if he had known then no weapons of mass destruction would be found.
Taking up a challenge from President Bush, whom he will face in the Nov. 2 election, the Massachusetts senator said: "I'll answer it directly. Yes, I would have voted for the authority. I believe it is the right authority for a president to have but I would have used that authority effectively."
This really seems to undercut the "Bush lied, people died" line, doesn't it?
posted at 09:17 PM by Glenn Reynolds
KERRY ENDORSES IRAQ WAR!
No, really:
Stripes: The charge is out there that Republicans are much better suited to handle defense issues. How do you counter that?
Kerry: My record counters that, and my friends counter that. . . .
They went into Iraq ina brilliant military strategy, which we all adopted and supported, but they didn’t have a plan to win the peace. They didn’t bring other [countries] to our side. They didn’t give our troops all the equipment — the body armor and the armored Humvees and things they need and deserve.
There’s a great tradition of Democratic presidents who’ve led us in war.
(Emphasis added). Leaving aside the "other countries" bit, which is bogus unless "other countries" is just a synonym for France and Germany, note that this is an endorsement of the war, and seems to completely undercut earlier statements that Bush "misled the country." Will this be the new Kerry position -- the war was justified, but the peace was bungled? And I'll handle the wars I start better? Is it a return to the 2001/2002 pro-war Kerry?
I'm not terribly averse to that, but I wonder how it'll play with the antiwar base? (Via Sarah). Probably no better than this even stronger statement:
GRAND CANYON, Ariz. (Reuters) - Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry said on Monday he would have voted for the congressional resolution authorizing force against Iraq even if he had known then no weapons of mass destruction would be found.
Taking up a challenge from President Bush, whom he will face in the Nov. 2 election, the Massachusetts senator said: "I'll answer it directly. Yes, I would have voted for the authority. I believe it is the right authority for a president to have but I would have used that authority effectively."
This really seems to undercut the "Bush lied, people died" line, doesn't it?
posted at 09:17 PM by Glenn Reynolds
Monday, August 09, 2004
Some thought provoking commentary from Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit:
Northwestern Univ. law professor Jim Lindgren emails:
"What strikes me about Kerry's "Christmas in Cambodia" story is not that Kerry almost certainly repeatedly told falsehoods (whether intentionally or not) but that the mainstream press is barely covering the story. If Bush were caught lying about his service in the National Guard, it would be leading the TV news. This is not just a hypothetical. The network news repeatedly led with charges that Bush MIGHT not have been present when he said he was during his National Guard service. Once the pay records were released, it turned out that the charges were false, but few news organizations bothered to correct the earlier false rumors they spread.
This press coverage follows the pattern. Kerry almost certainly falsely stated that he resigned from Viet Nam Vets Against the War BEFORE the fateful meeting at which the plot to assassinate several pro-war US Senators was debated. Yet when both FBI records and some of his supporters verified that Kerry had spoken forcefully against the proposal to murder Senators (to Kerry's credit at the time), most of the press did nothing. Can you imagine if Bush had been caught in such a falsehood, saying that he didn't attend a meeting where others were proposing to murder US Senators when he had been present and helped to persuade them not to do it?
Just yesterday it was revealed that when Kerry heard about the second plane hitting the World Trade Center, he admitted that he was too stunned to think clearly for quite a while. This contrasts with among Bush's first statements to his aides that we are at war (i.e., moving out of the "criminal act" mode of the Clinton administration). Bush was praised for being among the first to understand that the world had changed. Then Kerry had the nerve to criticize Bush for acting calmly in the initial minutes after the attack. If Bush had done this--criticizing Kerry for not thinking clearly when he had admitted that he was paralyzed in shock--the press would crucify Bush. But Kerry will get another pass--just wait and see.
Likewise, the statements that Bush lied about the foreign intelligence reports regarding uranium: It was a big story when the press thought that Bush might be lying, but it was mostly a non-story when it turned out that he wasn't.
If one were just watching the network news, one would think that Bush was the one with the honesty problem. Why doesn't the press just cover the stories on both sides and let the voters decide whom to vote for? Frankly, I find the press bias this year pretty frightening, not because Kerry as president will be so terrible (I doubt that he will be), but for what it says about the future of democracy in a world where traditional media still dominate public discourse. Kerry would not stand a chance if the press bias were reversed.
I think that the press will choose the president this year; I hope that they have chosen wisely."
Evan Thomas famously told us that the press wants Kerry to win, and added "They're going to portray Kerry and Edwards as being young and dynamic and optimistic and there's going to be this glow about them, collective glow, the two of them, that's going to be worth maybe 15 points."
That's enough to swing almost any presidential election, and -- if it's right -- it raises the question of whether we can have an established press, and democracy, at the same time.
Northwestern Univ. law professor Jim Lindgren emails:
"What strikes me about Kerry's "Christmas in Cambodia" story is not that Kerry almost certainly repeatedly told falsehoods (whether intentionally or not) but that the mainstream press is barely covering the story. If Bush were caught lying about his service in the National Guard, it would be leading the TV news. This is not just a hypothetical. The network news repeatedly led with charges that Bush MIGHT not have been present when he said he was during his National Guard service. Once the pay records were released, it turned out that the charges were false, but few news organizations bothered to correct the earlier false rumors they spread.
This press coverage follows the pattern. Kerry almost certainly falsely stated that he resigned from Viet Nam Vets Against the War BEFORE the fateful meeting at which the plot to assassinate several pro-war US Senators was debated. Yet when both FBI records and some of his supporters verified that Kerry had spoken forcefully against the proposal to murder Senators (to Kerry's credit at the time), most of the press did nothing. Can you imagine if Bush had been caught in such a falsehood, saying that he didn't attend a meeting where others were proposing to murder US Senators when he had been present and helped to persuade them not to do it?
Just yesterday it was revealed that when Kerry heard about the second plane hitting the World Trade Center, he admitted that he was too stunned to think clearly for quite a while. This contrasts with among Bush's first statements to his aides that we are at war (i.e., moving out of the "criminal act" mode of the Clinton administration). Bush was praised for being among the first to understand that the world had changed. Then Kerry had the nerve to criticize Bush for acting calmly in the initial minutes after the attack. If Bush had done this--criticizing Kerry for not thinking clearly when he had admitted that he was paralyzed in shock--the press would crucify Bush. But Kerry will get another pass--just wait and see.
Likewise, the statements that Bush lied about the foreign intelligence reports regarding uranium: It was a big story when the press thought that Bush might be lying, but it was mostly a non-story when it turned out that he wasn't.
If one were just watching the network news, one would think that Bush was the one with the honesty problem. Why doesn't the press just cover the stories on both sides and let the voters decide whom to vote for? Frankly, I find the press bias this year pretty frightening, not because Kerry as president will be so terrible (I doubt that he will be), but for what it says about the future of democracy in a world where traditional media still dominate public discourse. Kerry would not stand a chance if the press bias were reversed.
I think that the press will choose the president this year; I hope that they have chosen wisely."
Evan Thomas famously told us that the press wants Kerry to win, and added "They're going to portray Kerry and Edwards as being young and dynamic and optimistic and there's going to be this glow about them, collective glow, the two of them, that's going to be worth maybe 15 points."
That's enough to swing almost any presidential election, and -- if it's right -- it raises the question of whether we can have an established press, and democracy, at the same time.
Viet record ripples
By Mark Steyn
Anti-Kerry ad mars presidential campaign
-- Headline in the Melbourne Age of Australia.
"Mars" it? Reminds me of the old war song -- World War I, that is, for anyone who can remember any other wars but Vietnam -- "If You Were the Only Girl In the World":
"A garden of Eden just made for two
With nothing to mar our joy ... "
That's what the Democrats and their media cheerleaders wanted for John Kerry: a jungle of South Asian Eden, with nothing to mar his joy. All the Massachusetts senator had to do was talk about his four months in Vietnam for two years and somehow tootle along to victory, untroubled and untouchable. Now some guy's marred it, by declaring in this ad that "John Kerry has not been honest" about his time in Vietnam.
Oh, yeah? Sez who? Some neoconservative chickenhawk dilettante National Guardsman?
No. It's an admiral. He also was on a Swift boat in Vietnam, as were the other fellows in the ad, and they're all saying things like "John Kerry betrayed the men and women he served with."
Look, I would rather talk about the war. The current one, I mean -- not the one that ended three decades ago. But, insofar as I understand the rules of Campaign 2004, every time any member of the administration says anything about the present conflict, he is accused by Democrats of shamelessly "politicizing" it. Whereas every time John Kerry waxes nostalgic about those fragrant memories of the Mekong Delta, he should be allowed to take his unending stroll down memory lane unmolested. After all, as everyone from John Edwards to Max Cleland to Bill Clinton has assured us, being a Swift boat commander for four months is the indispensable qualification for being president. When Hillary runs in 2008, no doubt she'll be leaning heavily on her four months running a Swift boat up and down the Shatt al-Arab during the Iraq war.
But hang on, most of these fellows in the anti-Kerry ad -- the ones talking about how he can't be trusted, etc -- are also Swift boat commanders? If being a Swiftee is the most important thing in American life, why are all these "Swift Boat Veterans For Truth" less entitled to be heard than John Kerry?
Well, because they're part of the "Republican smear machine". Apparently, it's the GOP's fault that only one of the 22 surviving Swift boat officers who served with Mr. Kerry is willing to support him, and that a big bunch of the remaining Swiftees feel strongly enough about his conduct 35 years ago to appear in one of the most remarkable political ads ever seen.
Had enough of Vietnam yet?
Most Americans had enough of it at the time. The clever clogs at the Democratic Party should have figured that out before they decided to relaunch John Kerry and John Edwards as Bob Hope and Jill St. John on their USO tour for the presidency. They should never have signed on to this vanity candidacy, even before the multiplying barnacles began encrusting the hull of the campaign boat.
The one thing the Democratic Party owed America this campaign season was a candidate credible on the current war. The Democrats needed their own Tony Blair, a bloke who's a big socialist pantywaist when it comes to health and education and the other nanny-state hooey but believes in robust projection of military force in the national interest.
John Kerry fails that test. If you wanted to pick a candidate on the wrong side of every major defense and foreign policy question of the last two decades, you would be hard put to find anyone with judgment as comprehensively poor as Mr. Kerry: total up his votes and statements on everything from Grenada to the Gulf war, Saddam to the Sandinistas, the Cold War to missile defense to every major weapons system of the 1980s and '90s. He called them all wrong.
But that's not how the Democratic Party muscle saw John Kerry. Since the notion of a credible war president wasn't important to them, they looked at the war on terror merely as a Bush wedge issue to be neutralized. And they figured their best shot at neutralizing it was Lt. Kerry on a Swift boat.
In certain circumstances, it might even have worked. But the Democrats let their contempt for Mr. Bush run away with them. It wasn't enough to argue Mr. Kerry's four months in the Mekong Delta gave him authority on national security issues. Instead, they saw an opening to diminish Mr. Bush, to reduce him from the 21st century commander in chief who had toppled two enemy regimes to the 1970s pampered frat boy with the spotty National Guard record. And so they made the strategic error of hammering on about what their man was doing vs. what the Republicans' guy was doing during the Vietnam War. And they were having such fun at Mr. Bush's expense and getting so high on those four months from the 1960s that they gave not a thought to the great wasteland of John Kerry's 1970s, '80s and '90s.
That's one of the defects of living in the media-political echo chamber, where you're so hip to the spin and counterspin and counter-counterspin you forget that back on Planet Earth folks don't look at things that way. On the big speech night in Boston, with Mr. Kerry's crewmates and triple-amputee Max Cleland and "I'm John Kerry and I'm reporting for duty," the Dems and the media saw it as an ingenious way of downgrading Mr. Bush. But every normal person that night saw only a strange man with nothing to say about anything that has happened since the early 1970s.
And most Americans don't want a Vietnam candidate. Vietnam veterans mostly loathe Mr. Kerry for riding the war-what-is-it-good-for-absolutely-nothing movement to celebrity status and, just as they thought they couldn't despise him any more, here comes the old opportunist riding the I-was-proud-to-do-my-patriotic-duty shtick to the presidency.
Older veterans think the endless exhibitionist preening about one's war record is cheap and vulgar. To everybody else, the Vietnam act is just a bummer, a reminder of a bad time in the national story. Doesn't matter whether it's John Kerry in "The Green Berets" or John Kerry in "Apocalypse Now."
The Bush-haters outsmarted themselves: Nobody wants to hear about Vietnam. And Mr. Kerry hasn't anything else to run on.
Or as Country Joe and the Fish would put it: And it's one, two, three, what is he fighting for?
Mark Steyn is the senior contributing editor for Hollinger Inc. Publications, senior North American columnist for Britain's Telegraph Group, North American editor for the Spectator, and a nationally syndicated columnist.
By Mark Steyn
Anti-Kerry ad mars presidential campaign
-- Headline in the Melbourne Age of Australia.
"Mars" it? Reminds me of the old war song -- World War I, that is, for anyone who can remember any other wars but Vietnam -- "If You Were the Only Girl In the World":
"A garden of Eden just made for two
With nothing to mar our joy ... "
That's what the Democrats and their media cheerleaders wanted for John Kerry: a jungle of South Asian Eden, with nothing to mar his joy. All the Massachusetts senator had to do was talk about his four months in Vietnam for two years and somehow tootle along to victory, untroubled and untouchable. Now some guy's marred it, by declaring in this ad that "John Kerry has not been honest" about his time in Vietnam.
Oh, yeah? Sez who? Some neoconservative chickenhawk dilettante National Guardsman?
No. It's an admiral. He also was on a Swift boat in Vietnam, as were the other fellows in the ad, and they're all saying things like "John Kerry betrayed the men and women he served with."
Look, I would rather talk about the war. The current one, I mean -- not the one that ended three decades ago. But, insofar as I understand the rules of Campaign 2004, every time any member of the administration says anything about the present conflict, he is accused by Democrats of shamelessly "politicizing" it. Whereas every time John Kerry waxes nostalgic about those fragrant memories of the Mekong Delta, he should be allowed to take his unending stroll down memory lane unmolested. After all, as everyone from John Edwards to Max Cleland to Bill Clinton has assured us, being a Swift boat commander for four months is the indispensable qualification for being president. When Hillary runs in 2008, no doubt she'll be leaning heavily on her four months running a Swift boat up and down the Shatt al-Arab during the Iraq war.
But hang on, most of these fellows in the anti-Kerry ad -- the ones talking about how he can't be trusted, etc -- are also Swift boat commanders? If being a Swiftee is the most important thing in American life, why are all these "Swift Boat Veterans For Truth" less entitled to be heard than John Kerry?
Well, because they're part of the "Republican smear machine". Apparently, it's the GOP's fault that only one of the 22 surviving Swift boat officers who served with Mr. Kerry is willing to support him, and that a big bunch of the remaining Swiftees feel strongly enough about his conduct 35 years ago to appear in one of the most remarkable political ads ever seen.
Had enough of Vietnam yet?
Most Americans had enough of it at the time. The clever clogs at the Democratic Party should have figured that out before they decided to relaunch John Kerry and John Edwards as Bob Hope and Jill St. John on their USO tour for the presidency. They should never have signed on to this vanity candidacy, even before the multiplying barnacles began encrusting the hull of the campaign boat.
The one thing the Democratic Party owed America this campaign season was a candidate credible on the current war. The Democrats needed their own Tony Blair, a bloke who's a big socialist pantywaist when it comes to health and education and the other nanny-state hooey but believes in robust projection of military force in the national interest.
John Kerry fails that test. If you wanted to pick a candidate on the wrong side of every major defense and foreign policy question of the last two decades, you would be hard put to find anyone with judgment as comprehensively poor as Mr. Kerry: total up his votes and statements on everything from Grenada to the Gulf war, Saddam to the Sandinistas, the Cold War to missile defense to every major weapons system of the 1980s and '90s. He called them all wrong.
But that's not how the Democratic Party muscle saw John Kerry. Since the notion of a credible war president wasn't important to them, they looked at the war on terror merely as a Bush wedge issue to be neutralized. And they figured their best shot at neutralizing it was Lt. Kerry on a Swift boat.
In certain circumstances, it might even have worked. But the Democrats let their contempt for Mr. Bush run away with them. It wasn't enough to argue Mr. Kerry's four months in the Mekong Delta gave him authority on national security issues. Instead, they saw an opening to diminish Mr. Bush, to reduce him from the 21st century commander in chief who had toppled two enemy regimes to the 1970s pampered frat boy with the spotty National Guard record. And so they made the strategic error of hammering on about what their man was doing vs. what the Republicans' guy was doing during the Vietnam War. And they were having such fun at Mr. Bush's expense and getting so high on those four months from the 1960s that they gave not a thought to the great wasteland of John Kerry's 1970s, '80s and '90s.
That's one of the defects of living in the media-political echo chamber, where you're so hip to the spin and counterspin and counter-counterspin you forget that back on Planet Earth folks don't look at things that way. On the big speech night in Boston, with Mr. Kerry's crewmates and triple-amputee Max Cleland and "I'm John Kerry and I'm reporting for duty," the Dems and the media saw it as an ingenious way of downgrading Mr. Bush. But every normal person that night saw only a strange man with nothing to say about anything that has happened since the early 1970s.
And most Americans don't want a Vietnam candidate. Vietnam veterans mostly loathe Mr. Kerry for riding the war-what-is-it-good-for-absolutely-nothing movement to celebrity status and, just as they thought they couldn't despise him any more, here comes the old opportunist riding the I-was-proud-to-do-my-patriotic-duty shtick to the presidency.
Older veterans think the endless exhibitionist preening about one's war record is cheap and vulgar. To everybody else, the Vietnam act is just a bummer, a reminder of a bad time in the national story. Doesn't matter whether it's John Kerry in "The Green Berets" or John Kerry in "Apocalypse Now."
The Bush-haters outsmarted themselves: Nobody wants to hear about Vietnam. And Mr. Kerry hasn't anything else to run on.
Or as Country Joe and the Fish would put it: And it's one, two, three, what is he fighting for?
Mark Steyn is the senior contributing editor for Hollinger Inc. Publications, senior North American columnist for Britain's Telegraph Group, North American editor for the Spectator, and a nationally syndicated columnist.
Sunday, August 08, 2004
As posted on Captain's Quarters blog. A very long, important post:
The Swifties Fire Back
The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth have hired their own lawyers in response to the Kerry/Edwards campaign's threat of ruinous lawsuits for anyone who allows the independent 527 to purchase ad time at their media outlet. For some reason, the Democrats seem to have a problem with the actual practice of free speech, even after having their party chairman, Terry McAuliffe, call George Bush a deserter and John Kerry question the quality of his National Guard service. When the shoe moves to the other foot, suddenly the Democrats switch from "Bring It On" to "We'll Sue You Into Silence," quite a difference in tone.
Does America need a President this pusillanimous? At least now we understand the reason Kerry selected John Edwards as his vice-president. I suppose that we can expect trial attorneys to attack anyone who dares criticize John Kerry during a Kerry administration, only those trial attorneys will work for the legal offices of the FBI and US Attorneys General.
At any rate, the Swifties intend to stand their ground, showing a bit more character than anyone at the Kerry/Edwards campaign. I've been forwarded a copy of their legal team's response to Kerry's extortionate threats that they have sent to media outlets in which they've made their ad buys. I'm posting the letter below, placing most of it in the extended entry. I think it aptly demonstrates the specificity of the recollections of more than 200 men who have nothing to gain and everything to lose by coming forward -- except for setting the record straight.
They've made a convert out of me.
UPDATE, 8/8: Big thanks to Instapundit and Power Line for their links this morning. Not so incidentally, it was Rocket Man who pointed out to me the Nixon inconsistency of Kerry's Christmas in Cambodia fantasy.
UPDATE II: Also, welcome to readers from Lucianne and The Corner!
Dear Station Manager:
The purpose of this letter is to present some of the factual support for the advertisement "Any Questions?" produced and used by Swift Boat Veterans For Truth ("Swiftvets"), an organization properly registered under Internal Revenue Code § 527, and which has filed all required reports. Swiftvets is an organization led by Rear Admiral Roy Hoffmann, USN (retired), Commander of all Swift boats in Vietnam during the period of John Kerry's four-month abbreviated tour in Swift boats between late November 1968 and mid-March 1969. A list of the 254 members may be found on www.swiftvets.com. A large majority of those who served with John Kerry in Swift boats in Vietnam and whose location is known have joined the organization. Thus, for example, sixteen of the twenty-three surviving officers who served in Coastal Division 11 with Kerry (the place where Kerry spent most of his time) have joined the organization, together with most of Kerry's Vietnam commanders and 254 sailors from Coastal Squadron One, ranging from Vice-Admirals to Seamen.
The purpose of Swiftvets is to present the truth about John Kerry's post-Vietnam charges of war crimes and John Kerry's own Vietnam record. Swiftvets is uniquely positioned to do so since it includes most of the locatable sailors and officers who served with John Kerry in Vietnam.
John Kerry has made his Vietnam record the central focus of his presidential candidacy, depicting purported Vietnam events in nearly $100 million in advertising. Copies of ads such as "Lifetime" and "No Man Left Behind" may be found on Kerry's website. Kerry's authorized campaign biography, Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War, by Douglas Brinkley (New York: HarperCollins, 2004) ("Tour"), centers on his short Vietnam tour and contains Kerry's account of these events. Additional accounts by Kerry of his Vietnam experience may be found on his website.
The Advertisement
A true and correct transcript of the advertisement entitled "Any Questions?" is attached as Exhibit 1. Affidavits are attached (as Exhibits 2 through 14) from each participant in the advertisement, except from John Edwards, the Democratic Vice Presidential nominee, whose often-repeated invitation to learn about John Kerry by speaking to the men who served with him begins the advertisement. The filmed comment of Senator Edwards has been made so many times as to be general knowledge.
As described in the attached affidavits, Al French (Exhibit 2), Bob Elder (Exhibit 3), Jack Chenoweth (Exhibit 7), Larry Thurlow (Exhibit 10), and Bob Hildreth (Exhibit 14) were all officers in charge of Swift boats in Vietnam in Coastal Division 11 with John Kerry. Coastal Division 11 was a small naval unit with about one hundred sailors and fifteen or sixteen boats which operated in groups of two to six boats. Each of these boat officers operated directly with John Kerry on numerous occasions. Van Odell (Exhibit 6) is a retired Navy enlisted man who also served in Coastal Division 11 on the Chenoweth boat, a few yards from John Kerry during Kerry's March 13, 1969 Bronze Star action.
Captain George Elliott, USN (retired), (Exhibit 4) was John Kerry's direct commander in Coastal Division 11, while Captain Adrian Lonsdale, USCG (retired), (Exhibit 9) was Kerry's administrative commander. Rear Admiral Roy Hoffmann, USN (retired), (Exhibit 8) commanded all Swift boats (including Kerry's) in Vietnam. Each of these commanders interacted on numerous occasions with Kerry and, for example, are discussed for many pages in Kerry's own authorized book, Tour.
Dr. Louis Letson (Exhibit 5) was the doctor in Cam Rahn Bay who treated Kerry's first Purple Heart "wound," while Commander Grant Hibbard (Exhibit 11) was John Kerry's commander at Coastal Division 14 where Kerry claimed to have suffered the wound. Finally, Joe Ponder (Exhibit 13) and Shelton White (Exhibit 12) are veterans of Coastal Division 11 who were badly wounded near the Song Bo De River where Kerry served most of his short tour.
The Kerry campaign has utilized a revolving group of eight veterans from Coastal Division 11 (none of whom served with Kerry as much as two months). In stark contrast to this small stable of supporters, the veterans on "Any Questions?" have intimate knowledge of John Kerry or (in the case of Ponder and White) of the falsehood and injury of his false war crimes charges. Although many more of the over 250 signers of the Swiftvets' letter served directly with John Kerry, it would be hard to locate people with more detailed and first-hand knowledge of John Kerry's short Vietnam stay than those in the advertisement. They are well-suited to respond with first-hand knowledge to Edward's invitation. Their sworn affidavits are attached (in order of appearance in the advertisement) as Exhibits 2 through 14.
Kerry's obtaining of three Purple Hearts permitted him to leave Vietnam some 243 days short of the normal one-year tour. See Exhibit 20, Thrice Wounded Reassignment. Whether or not he fraudulently obtained these awards (the Purple Heart being among the most sacred of all awards) is critical to his true Vietnam story.
A. March 13, 1969: "No Man Left Behind" Incident
Attached as Exhibit 15 is Kerry's account of "no man left behind" where, in Tour of Duty, Kerry repeats his now-familiar story of returning, wounded by an underwater mine, to recover a Special Forces soldier, Jim Rassman, in a hail of fire pulling Rassman from the water with his bleeding arm. Tour, at 313-17. The story of Kerry's return to save Rassman, under fire and wounded from the mine, has been told in many millions of dollars of Kerry advertising. See Kerry website; see also, e.g., Kerry's full-page advertisement in The New York Times, which is attached as Exhibit 16.
Kerry's after-action report for that day is featured on his website. See Exhibit 17. KJW identifies the report as Kerry's. Likewise, Kerry reported his shrapnel wounds to the Navy in an injury report:
"LTJG Kerry suffered shrapnel wounds in his left buttocks and contusions on his right forearm when a mine detonated close aboard PCF-94."
Exhibit 18. Exhibit 17 likewise identifies Kerry's "injuries" as contusion right forearm (minor) (i.e., a small bruise) and a shrapnel wound left buttocks.
The regulations for the Purple Heart are attached as Exhibit 19 and, of course, exclude accidental injury and self-inflicted wounds (except non-negligent wounds in the heat of battle). Although Kerry's "minor" bruise could never entitle him to a Purple Heart, Kerry's reported shrapnel wound to his "buttocks" (although minor according to the treating physician) from an enemy mine would have entitled him to such an award (had he not been lying about its origin). Receiving the third Purple Heart, within three days Kerry had requested reassignment from Vietnam on the basis of three Purple Hearts -- some 243 days early. See Exhibit 20.
(i) The Purple Heart Lie
Kerry's third Purple Heart was his ticket home. It also was much of the basis of his Bronze Star, repeating "his bleeding arm" and shrapnel wound from the mine story. The problem is that his operating report was a total lie since Kerry's shrapnel wound "in the buttocks" came not from a mine at all as he falsely reported, but at his own hand. Larry Thurlow, an officer on shore with Kerry that day, recounts that Kerry's shrapnel wound came not from any mine, but from a self-inflicted wound when Kerry (with no enemy to be seen) threw a concussion grenade into a rice pile and stayed too close. See Exhibit 10, ¶ 3. This "brown rice" incident with rice/shrapnel lodged in Kerry from his own grenade is also recounted by James Rassman, a Kerry supporter and "the no man left behind" on page 105 of John F. Kerry: The Complete Biography By The Boston Globe Reporters Who Know Him Best, by Michael Kranish, Brian C. Mooney, and Nina J. Easton (New York: Public Affairs, 2004) (the "Kranish book"). See Exhibit 21.
Most surprisingly, John Kerry himself (while falsely reporting to the Navy and public that he suffered a shrapnel wound from a mine explosion so as to get a third Purple Heart and go home) reflected in his own journal that his buttocks' wound came, not from any mine but, rather, from a grenade tossed into a rice cache by himself or friendly troops (in the absence of any enemy fire). "I got a piece of small grenade in my ass from one of the rice bin explosions." Exhibit 15, Tour, at 313; see also Exhibit 15, Tour, at 317. "Kerry . . . also had the bits of shrapnel and rice extracted from his backside." See also the sworn statement of participants that there was no hostile fire (Exhibits 6, 7, and 10). It also should be noted that the rice extracted from Kerry's backside could hardly be the result of an underwater mine, as Kerry claimed in his operating report.
The conclusion is inescapable: that Kerry lied by reporting to the Navy that he had been wounded by shrapnel in his backside from an enemy mine when in reality he negligently wounded himself and then lied about the wound in order to secure a third Purple Heart and a quick trip home.
(ii) The Bronze Star Lie
As recounted in the attached affidavits of three on-scene participants (and verified by many others present) Kerry's operating report, Bronze Star story, and subsequent "no man left behind" story are a total hoax on the Navy and the nation. As recounted in the affidavits of Van Odell (Exhibit 6), Jack Chenoweth (Exhibit 7), and Larry Thurlow (Exhibit 10) (and verified by every other officer present and many others), a mine went off under PCF 3 -- some yards from Kerry's boat. The force of the explosion disabled PCF 3 and knocked several sailors, dazed, into the water. All boats, except one, closed to rescue the sailors and defend the disabled boat. That boat -- Kerry's boat -- fled the scene. After a short period, it was evident to all on the scene that there was no additional hostile fire. Thurlow began the daring rescue of disabled PCF 3, while Chenoweth began to pluck dazed survivors of PCF 3 from the water. Midway through the process, after it was apparent that there was no hostile fire, Kerry finally returned, picking up Rassman who was only a few yards from Chenoweth's boat which was also going to pick Rassman up. Each of the affiants (and many other Swiftees on the scene that day) are certain that Kerry has wholly lied about the incident. Consider this: How could the disabled PCF abandon the scene of the mine? Why did Kerry have to "return" to the scene?
Kerry's account of this action, which was used to secure the Bronze Star and a third Purple Heart, is an extraordinary example of fraud. Kerry describes "boats rcd heavy A/W and S/A from both banks. Fire continued for about 5000 meters." Exhibit 17. In other words, the boats went through a double gauntlet at about 50 yards distance that was 3.2 miles long (comparable to Seminary Ridge at Gettysburg on two sides), and yet none of the other boats within feet of Kerry's boat heard a shot or suffered an injury after the PCF 3 mine explosion, except for John Kerry's buttocks rice wound of earlier origin.
Clearly, Van Odell is right when he says, "John Kerry lied to get his Bronze Star . . . I know. I was there. I saw what happened." As Jack Chenoweth swore, "his account of what happened and what actually happened are the difference between night and day." Most poignantly, Larry Thurlow, whose brave actions saved the PCF 3 boat that day after Kerry fled, has the right to say, "When the chips were down, you could not count on John Kerry."
B. December 2, 1968 Purple Heart
On February 28, 1969, John Kerry received his first Purple Heart for an incident three months earlier, on or about December 2, 1968. Kerry's account of the incident is contained in Tour of Duty, pages 147 and 148 (Exhibit 23). Kerry claims to have been with two crewmen, Zaldonis and Runyon. See Exhibit 23. Neither Kerry, Zaldonis, nor Runyon claim to have seen any hostile fire. See Exhibit 24 (Kranish book, pp. 72-73). A Purple Heart cannot be given for a self-inflicted wound under the attached regulations.
Unmentioned in Kerry's Tour Of Duty version are the actual surrounding facts. Kerry, Lieutenant William Schachte, USN, and an enlisted man were on the whaler. Seeing movement from an unknown source, the sailors opened fire on the movement. There was no hostile fire. When Kerry's rifle jammed, he picked up an M-79 grenade launcher and fired a grenade at a nearby object. This sprayed the boat with shrapnel from Kerry's own grenade, a tiny piece of which embedded in Kerry's arm.
Kerry managed to keep the tiny fragment embedded until he saw Dr. Louis Letson. Dr. Letson's affidavit is attached as Exhibit 5. When Letson inquired why Kerry was there, Kerry said that he had been wounded by hostile fire. The accompanying crewmen indicated that Kerry was the new "JFK" and that he had actually wounded himself with an M-79. Letson removed the tiny fragment with tweezers and placed a band aid over the tiny scratch. The tiny fragment removed by Letson appeared to be an M-79 fragment, as described by the personnel accompanying Kerry.
The next morning Kerry showed up at Division Commander Grant Hibbard's office. Hibbard had already spoken to Schachte and conducted an investigation. Hibbard's affidavit is attached as Exhibit 11. Hibbard's investigation revealed that Kerry's "rose thorn" scratch had been self-inflicted in the absence of hostile fire. Hibbard, therefore, booted Kerry out of his office and denied the Purple Heart.
Some three months later, cf. Exhibit 22, after all personnel actually familiar with the events of December 2, 1969 had left Vietnam, Kerry somehow managed to obtain a Purple Heart for the December 2, 1968 event from an officer with no connection to Coastal Division 14 or knowledge of the December 2, 1968 event or of Commander Hibbard's prior turn down of the Purple Heart request. All normal documentation supporting a Purple Heart is missing. There is absolutely no casualty report (i.e., spot report) or hostile fire report or after-action report in the Navy's files to support this "Purple Heart" because there was no casualty, hostile fire, or action on which to report. The sole document relied upon by Kerry is a record showing the band aid and tweezers treatment by Dr. Letson recorded by deceased corpsman, Jess Carreon.
There are no witnesses who claim to have seen hostile fire -- necessary for a Purple Heart (even a rose thorn Purple Heart) -- that day. At least three witnesses, Dr. Letson (who spoke to the participants and removed the M-79 fragment), Lt. Bill Schachte (on the boat), and Cmdr. Grant Hibbard (whose investigation revealed Kerry's application for a Purple Heart to be fraudulent), are able to testify directly or based upon contemporaneous investigation that Kerry's first Purple Heart was a fraud. Thus, Lewis Letson's statement that "I know John Kerry is lying about a first Purple Heart" is conclusively established by the evidence. Like the third Purple Heart, Kerry's first Purple Heart was essential to his quick trip home.
C. Christmas In Cambodia
If there is a consistent[1] repeated story by John Kerry about his Vietnam experience, it is his story about how he and his boat spent Christmas Eve and Christmas of 1968 illegally present in Cambodia and, listening to President Nixon's contrary assurances, developed "a deep mistrust of U.S. government pronouncements." See Exhibit 24, Kranish book, p. 84. The point of his story was that his government and his commanders were lying about Kerry's presence in Cambodia on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. During a critical debate on the floor of the United States Senate on March 27, 1986, Senator John Kerry said:
Mr. President, I remember Christmas of 1968 sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia. I remember what it was like to be shot at by Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge and Cambodians, and have the President of the United States telling the American people that I was not there; the troops were not in Cambodia.
I have that memory which is seared -- seared -- in me . . . .
Exhibit 25, Congressional Record - Senate of March 27, 1986, page 3594.
By way of further example, Kerry wrote an article for the Boston Herald on October 14, 1979:
"I remember spending Christmas Eve of 1968 five miles across the Cambodian border being shot at by our South Vietnamese allies who were drunk and celebrating Christmas. The absurdity of almost killed by our own allies in a country in which President Nixon claimed there were no American troops was very real."
See Exhibit 26.
The Christmas in Cambodia story of John Kerry was repeated as recently as July 7, 2004 by Michael Kranish, a principal biographer of Kerry from The Boston Globe. On the Hannity & Colmes television show, Kranish indicated that Kerry's Christmas in Cambodia was a critical turning point in Kerry's life.
The story is a total preposterous fabrication by Kerry. Exhibit 8 is an affidavit by the Commander of the Swift boats in Vietnam, Admiral Roy Hoffmann, stating that Kerry's claim to be in Cambodia for Christmas Eve and Christmas of 1968 is a total lie. If necessary, similar affidavits are available from the entire chain of command. In reality, Kerry was at Sa Dec -- easily locatable on any map more than fifty miles from Cambodia. Kerry himself inadvertently admits that he was in Sa Dec for Christmas Eve and Christmas and not in Cambodia, as he had stated for so many years on the Senate Floor, in the newspapers, and elsewhere. Exhibit 27, Tour, pp. 213-219. Sa Dec is hardly "close" to the Cambodian border. In reality, far from being ordered secretly to Cambodia, Kerry spent a pleasant night at Sa Dec with "visions of sugar plums" dancing in his head. Exhibit 27, p. 219. At Sa Dec where the Swift boat patrol area ended, there were many miles of other boats (PBR's) leading to the Cambodian border. There were also gunboats on the border to prevent any crossing. If Kerry tried to get through, he would have been arrested. Obviously, Kerry has hardly been honest about his service in Vietnam.
D. War Crimes
Returning to the United States, Kerry made speeches charging that U.S. forces in Vietnam were "like the army of Genghis Khan," that "crimes were committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of all levels of command," and that our officers in Coastal Division were like Lieutenant Calley. Kerry met on least two occasions with the North Vietnamese in Paris and is, in fact, honored as a hero in the war museum in Ho Chi Minh City. See pictures on WinterSoldier.com and SwiftVets.com. Joe Ponder is a widely quoted disabled vet from Coastal Division 11 who saw no war crimes but knows that Kerry dishonored our unit. Exhibit 13. Shelton White, a badly wounded Coastal Division 11 veteran, likewise saw no war crimes and remembers Kerry's betrayal. Exhibit 12.
Conclusion
As set forth at length, there is not only a reasonable factual basis for the statements in the ad; they are virtually conclusively established by the documentation.
Thank you for your kind consideration. Please do not hesitate to call me if you have any questions.
Very truly yours,
Original signed by John E. O'Neill
The Swifties Fire Back
The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth have hired their own lawyers in response to the Kerry/Edwards campaign's threat of ruinous lawsuits for anyone who allows the independent 527 to purchase ad time at their media outlet. For some reason, the Democrats seem to have a problem with the actual practice of free speech, even after having their party chairman, Terry McAuliffe, call George Bush a deserter and John Kerry question the quality of his National Guard service. When the shoe moves to the other foot, suddenly the Democrats switch from "Bring It On" to "We'll Sue You Into Silence," quite a difference in tone.
Does America need a President this pusillanimous? At least now we understand the reason Kerry selected John Edwards as his vice-president. I suppose that we can expect trial attorneys to attack anyone who dares criticize John Kerry during a Kerry administration, only those trial attorneys will work for the legal offices of the FBI and US Attorneys General.
At any rate, the Swifties intend to stand their ground, showing a bit more character than anyone at the Kerry/Edwards campaign. I've been forwarded a copy of their legal team's response to Kerry's extortionate threats that they have sent to media outlets in which they've made their ad buys. I'm posting the letter below, placing most of it in the extended entry. I think it aptly demonstrates the specificity of the recollections of more than 200 men who have nothing to gain and everything to lose by coming forward -- except for setting the record straight.
They've made a convert out of me.
UPDATE, 8/8: Big thanks to Instapundit and Power Line for their links this morning. Not so incidentally, it was Rocket Man who pointed out to me the Nixon inconsistency of Kerry's Christmas in Cambodia fantasy.
UPDATE II: Also, welcome to readers from Lucianne and The Corner!
Dear Station Manager:
The purpose of this letter is to present some of the factual support for the advertisement "Any Questions?" produced and used by Swift Boat Veterans For Truth ("Swiftvets"), an organization properly registered under Internal Revenue Code § 527, and which has filed all required reports. Swiftvets is an organization led by Rear Admiral Roy Hoffmann, USN (retired), Commander of all Swift boats in Vietnam during the period of John Kerry's four-month abbreviated tour in Swift boats between late November 1968 and mid-March 1969. A list of the 254 members may be found on www.swiftvets.com. A large majority of those who served with John Kerry in Swift boats in Vietnam and whose location is known have joined the organization. Thus, for example, sixteen of the twenty-three surviving officers who served in Coastal Division 11 with Kerry (the place where Kerry spent most of his time) have joined the organization, together with most of Kerry's Vietnam commanders and 254 sailors from Coastal Squadron One, ranging from Vice-Admirals to Seamen.
The purpose of Swiftvets is to present the truth about John Kerry's post-Vietnam charges of war crimes and John Kerry's own Vietnam record. Swiftvets is uniquely positioned to do so since it includes most of the locatable sailors and officers who served with John Kerry in Vietnam.
John Kerry has made his Vietnam record the central focus of his presidential candidacy, depicting purported Vietnam events in nearly $100 million in advertising. Copies of ads such as "Lifetime" and "No Man Left Behind" may be found on Kerry's website. Kerry's authorized campaign biography, Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War, by Douglas Brinkley (New York: HarperCollins, 2004) ("Tour"), centers on his short Vietnam tour and contains Kerry's account of these events. Additional accounts by Kerry of his Vietnam experience may be found on his website.
The Advertisement
A true and correct transcript of the advertisement entitled "Any Questions?" is attached as Exhibit 1. Affidavits are attached (as Exhibits 2 through 14) from each participant in the advertisement, except from John Edwards, the Democratic Vice Presidential nominee, whose often-repeated invitation to learn about John Kerry by speaking to the men who served with him begins the advertisement. The filmed comment of Senator Edwards has been made so many times as to be general knowledge.
As described in the attached affidavits, Al French (Exhibit 2), Bob Elder (Exhibit 3), Jack Chenoweth (Exhibit 7), Larry Thurlow (Exhibit 10), and Bob Hildreth (Exhibit 14) were all officers in charge of Swift boats in Vietnam in Coastal Division 11 with John Kerry. Coastal Division 11 was a small naval unit with about one hundred sailors and fifteen or sixteen boats which operated in groups of two to six boats. Each of these boat officers operated directly with John Kerry on numerous occasions. Van Odell (Exhibit 6) is a retired Navy enlisted man who also served in Coastal Division 11 on the Chenoweth boat, a few yards from John Kerry during Kerry's March 13, 1969 Bronze Star action.
Captain George Elliott, USN (retired), (Exhibit 4) was John Kerry's direct commander in Coastal Division 11, while Captain Adrian Lonsdale, USCG (retired), (Exhibit 9) was Kerry's administrative commander. Rear Admiral Roy Hoffmann, USN (retired), (Exhibit 8) commanded all Swift boats (including Kerry's) in Vietnam. Each of these commanders interacted on numerous occasions with Kerry and, for example, are discussed for many pages in Kerry's own authorized book, Tour.
Dr. Louis Letson (Exhibit 5) was the doctor in Cam Rahn Bay who treated Kerry's first Purple Heart "wound," while Commander Grant Hibbard (Exhibit 11) was John Kerry's commander at Coastal Division 14 where Kerry claimed to have suffered the wound. Finally, Joe Ponder (Exhibit 13) and Shelton White (Exhibit 12) are veterans of Coastal Division 11 who were badly wounded near the Song Bo De River where Kerry served most of his short tour.
The Kerry campaign has utilized a revolving group of eight veterans from Coastal Division 11 (none of whom served with Kerry as much as two months). In stark contrast to this small stable of supporters, the veterans on "Any Questions?" have intimate knowledge of John Kerry or (in the case of Ponder and White) of the falsehood and injury of his false war crimes charges. Although many more of the over 250 signers of the Swiftvets' letter served directly with John Kerry, it would be hard to locate people with more detailed and first-hand knowledge of John Kerry's short Vietnam stay than those in the advertisement. They are well-suited to respond with first-hand knowledge to Edward's invitation. Their sworn affidavits are attached (in order of appearance in the advertisement) as Exhibits 2 through 14.
Kerry's obtaining of three Purple Hearts permitted him to leave Vietnam some 243 days short of the normal one-year tour. See Exhibit 20, Thrice Wounded Reassignment. Whether or not he fraudulently obtained these awards (the Purple Heart being among the most sacred of all awards) is critical to his true Vietnam story.
A. March 13, 1969: "No Man Left Behind" Incident
Attached as Exhibit 15 is Kerry's account of "no man left behind" where, in Tour of Duty, Kerry repeats his now-familiar story of returning, wounded by an underwater mine, to recover a Special Forces soldier, Jim Rassman, in a hail of fire pulling Rassman from the water with his bleeding arm. Tour, at 313-17. The story of Kerry's return to save Rassman, under fire and wounded from the mine, has been told in many millions of dollars of Kerry advertising. See Kerry website; see also, e.g., Kerry's full-page advertisement in The New York Times, which is attached as Exhibit 16.
Kerry's after-action report for that day is featured on his website. See Exhibit 17. KJW identifies the report as Kerry's. Likewise, Kerry reported his shrapnel wounds to the Navy in an injury report:
"LTJG Kerry suffered shrapnel wounds in his left buttocks and contusions on his right forearm when a mine detonated close aboard PCF-94."
Exhibit 18. Exhibit 17 likewise identifies Kerry's "injuries" as contusion right forearm (minor) (i.e., a small bruise) and a shrapnel wound left buttocks.
The regulations for the Purple Heart are attached as Exhibit 19 and, of course, exclude accidental injury and self-inflicted wounds (except non-negligent wounds in the heat of battle). Although Kerry's "minor" bruise could never entitle him to a Purple Heart, Kerry's reported shrapnel wound to his "buttocks" (although minor according to the treating physician) from an enemy mine would have entitled him to such an award (had he not been lying about its origin). Receiving the third Purple Heart, within three days Kerry had requested reassignment from Vietnam on the basis of three Purple Hearts -- some 243 days early. See Exhibit 20.
(i) The Purple Heart Lie
Kerry's third Purple Heart was his ticket home. It also was much of the basis of his Bronze Star, repeating "his bleeding arm" and shrapnel wound from the mine story. The problem is that his operating report was a total lie since Kerry's shrapnel wound "in the buttocks" came not from a mine at all as he falsely reported, but at his own hand. Larry Thurlow, an officer on shore with Kerry that day, recounts that Kerry's shrapnel wound came not from any mine, but from a self-inflicted wound when Kerry (with no enemy to be seen) threw a concussion grenade into a rice pile and stayed too close. See Exhibit 10, ¶ 3. This "brown rice" incident with rice/shrapnel lodged in Kerry from his own grenade is also recounted by James Rassman, a Kerry supporter and "the no man left behind" on page 105 of John F. Kerry: The Complete Biography By The Boston Globe Reporters Who Know Him Best, by Michael Kranish, Brian C. Mooney, and Nina J. Easton (New York: Public Affairs, 2004) (the "Kranish book"). See Exhibit 21.
Most surprisingly, John Kerry himself (while falsely reporting to the Navy and public that he suffered a shrapnel wound from a mine explosion so as to get a third Purple Heart and go home) reflected in his own journal that his buttocks' wound came, not from any mine but, rather, from a grenade tossed into a rice cache by himself or friendly troops (in the absence of any enemy fire). "I got a piece of small grenade in my ass from one of the rice bin explosions." Exhibit 15, Tour, at 313; see also Exhibit 15, Tour, at 317. "Kerry . . . also had the bits of shrapnel and rice extracted from his backside." See also the sworn statement of participants that there was no hostile fire (Exhibits 6, 7, and 10). It also should be noted that the rice extracted from Kerry's backside could hardly be the result of an underwater mine, as Kerry claimed in his operating report.
The conclusion is inescapable: that Kerry lied by reporting to the Navy that he had been wounded by shrapnel in his backside from an enemy mine when in reality he negligently wounded himself and then lied about the wound in order to secure a third Purple Heart and a quick trip home.
(ii) The Bronze Star Lie
As recounted in the attached affidavits of three on-scene participants (and verified by many others present) Kerry's operating report, Bronze Star story, and subsequent "no man left behind" story are a total hoax on the Navy and the nation. As recounted in the affidavits of Van Odell (Exhibit 6), Jack Chenoweth (Exhibit 7), and Larry Thurlow (Exhibit 10) (and verified by every other officer present and many others), a mine went off under PCF 3 -- some yards from Kerry's boat. The force of the explosion disabled PCF 3 and knocked several sailors, dazed, into the water. All boats, except one, closed to rescue the sailors and defend the disabled boat. That boat -- Kerry's boat -- fled the scene. After a short period, it was evident to all on the scene that there was no additional hostile fire. Thurlow began the daring rescue of disabled PCF 3, while Chenoweth began to pluck dazed survivors of PCF 3 from the water. Midway through the process, after it was apparent that there was no hostile fire, Kerry finally returned, picking up Rassman who was only a few yards from Chenoweth's boat which was also going to pick Rassman up. Each of the affiants (and many other Swiftees on the scene that day) are certain that Kerry has wholly lied about the incident. Consider this: How could the disabled PCF abandon the scene of the mine? Why did Kerry have to "return" to the scene?
Kerry's account of this action, which was used to secure the Bronze Star and a third Purple Heart, is an extraordinary example of fraud. Kerry describes "boats rcd heavy A/W and S/A from both banks. Fire continued for about 5000 meters." Exhibit 17. In other words, the boats went through a double gauntlet at about 50 yards distance that was 3.2 miles long (comparable to Seminary Ridge at Gettysburg on two sides), and yet none of the other boats within feet of Kerry's boat heard a shot or suffered an injury after the PCF 3 mine explosion, except for John Kerry's buttocks rice wound of earlier origin.
Clearly, Van Odell is right when he says, "John Kerry lied to get his Bronze Star . . . I know. I was there. I saw what happened." As Jack Chenoweth swore, "his account of what happened and what actually happened are the difference between night and day." Most poignantly, Larry Thurlow, whose brave actions saved the PCF 3 boat that day after Kerry fled, has the right to say, "When the chips were down, you could not count on John Kerry."
B. December 2, 1968 Purple Heart
On February 28, 1969, John Kerry received his first Purple Heart for an incident three months earlier, on or about December 2, 1968. Kerry's account of the incident is contained in Tour of Duty, pages 147 and 148 (Exhibit 23). Kerry claims to have been with two crewmen, Zaldonis and Runyon. See Exhibit 23. Neither Kerry, Zaldonis, nor Runyon claim to have seen any hostile fire. See Exhibit 24 (Kranish book, pp. 72-73). A Purple Heart cannot be given for a self-inflicted wound under the attached regulations.
Unmentioned in Kerry's Tour Of Duty version are the actual surrounding facts. Kerry, Lieutenant William Schachte, USN, and an enlisted man were on the whaler. Seeing movement from an unknown source, the sailors opened fire on the movement. There was no hostile fire. When Kerry's rifle jammed, he picked up an M-79 grenade launcher and fired a grenade at a nearby object. This sprayed the boat with shrapnel from Kerry's own grenade, a tiny piece of which embedded in Kerry's arm.
Kerry managed to keep the tiny fragment embedded until he saw Dr. Louis Letson. Dr. Letson's affidavit is attached as Exhibit 5. When Letson inquired why Kerry was there, Kerry said that he had been wounded by hostile fire. The accompanying crewmen indicated that Kerry was the new "JFK" and that he had actually wounded himself with an M-79. Letson removed the tiny fragment with tweezers and placed a band aid over the tiny scratch. The tiny fragment removed by Letson appeared to be an M-79 fragment, as described by the personnel accompanying Kerry.
The next morning Kerry showed up at Division Commander Grant Hibbard's office. Hibbard had already spoken to Schachte and conducted an investigation. Hibbard's affidavit is attached as Exhibit 11. Hibbard's investigation revealed that Kerry's "rose thorn" scratch had been self-inflicted in the absence of hostile fire. Hibbard, therefore, booted Kerry out of his office and denied the Purple Heart.
Some three months later, cf. Exhibit 22, after all personnel actually familiar with the events of December 2, 1969 had left Vietnam, Kerry somehow managed to obtain a Purple Heart for the December 2, 1968 event from an officer with no connection to Coastal Division 14 or knowledge of the December 2, 1968 event or of Commander Hibbard's prior turn down of the Purple Heart request. All normal documentation supporting a Purple Heart is missing. There is absolutely no casualty report (i.e., spot report) or hostile fire report or after-action report in the Navy's files to support this "Purple Heart" because there was no casualty, hostile fire, or action on which to report. The sole document relied upon by Kerry is a record showing the band aid and tweezers treatment by Dr. Letson recorded by deceased corpsman, Jess Carreon.
There are no witnesses who claim to have seen hostile fire -- necessary for a Purple Heart (even a rose thorn Purple Heart) -- that day. At least three witnesses, Dr. Letson (who spoke to the participants and removed the M-79 fragment), Lt. Bill Schachte (on the boat), and Cmdr. Grant Hibbard (whose investigation revealed Kerry's application for a Purple Heart to be fraudulent), are able to testify directly or based upon contemporaneous investigation that Kerry's first Purple Heart was a fraud. Thus, Lewis Letson's statement that "I know John Kerry is lying about a first Purple Heart" is conclusively established by the evidence. Like the third Purple Heart, Kerry's first Purple Heart was essential to his quick trip home.
C. Christmas In Cambodia
If there is a consistent[1] repeated story by John Kerry about his Vietnam experience, it is his story about how he and his boat spent Christmas Eve and Christmas of 1968 illegally present in Cambodia and, listening to President Nixon's contrary assurances, developed "a deep mistrust of U.S. government pronouncements." See Exhibit 24, Kranish book, p. 84. The point of his story was that his government and his commanders were lying about Kerry's presence in Cambodia on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. During a critical debate on the floor of the United States Senate on March 27, 1986, Senator John Kerry said:
Mr. President, I remember Christmas of 1968 sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia. I remember what it was like to be shot at by Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge and Cambodians, and have the President of the United States telling the American people that I was not there; the troops were not in Cambodia.
I have that memory which is seared -- seared -- in me . . . .
Exhibit 25, Congressional Record - Senate of March 27, 1986, page 3594.
By way of further example, Kerry wrote an article for the Boston Herald on October 14, 1979:
"I remember spending Christmas Eve of 1968 five miles across the Cambodian border being shot at by our South Vietnamese allies who were drunk and celebrating Christmas. The absurdity of almost killed by our own allies in a country in which President Nixon claimed there were no American troops was very real."
See Exhibit 26.
The Christmas in Cambodia story of John Kerry was repeated as recently as July 7, 2004 by Michael Kranish, a principal biographer of Kerry from The Boston Globe. On the Hannity & Colmes television show, Kranish indicated that Kerry's Christmas in Cambodia was a critical turning point in Kerry's life.
The story is a total preposterous fabrication by Kerry. Exhibit 8 is an affidavit by the Commander of the Swift boats in Vietnam, Admiral Roy Hoffmann, stating that Kerry's claim to be in Cambodia for Christmas Eve and Christmas of 1968 is a total lie. If necessary, similar affidavits are available from the entire chain of command. In reality, Kerry was at Sa Dec -- easily locatable on any map more than fifty miles from Cambodia. Kerry himself inadvertently admits that he was in Sa Dec for Christmas Eve and Christmas and not in Cambodia, as he had stated for so many years on the Senate Floor, in the newspapers, and elsewhere. Exhibit 27, Tour, pp. 213-219. Sa Dec is hardly "close" to the Cambodian border. In reality, far from being ordered secretly to Cambodia, Kerry spent a pleasant night at Sa Dec with "visions of sugar plums" dancing in his head. Exhibit 27, p. 219. At Sa Dec where the Swift boat patrol area ended, there were many miles of other boats (PBR's) leading to the Cambodian border. There were also gunboats on the border to prevent any crossing. If Kerry tried to get through, he would have been arrested. Obviously, Kerry has hardly been honest about his service in Vietnam.
D. War Crimes
Returning to the United States, Kerry made speeches charging that U.S. forces in Vietnam were "like the army of Genghis Khan," that "crimes were committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of all levels of command," and that our officers in Coastal Division were like Lieutenant Calley. Kerry met on least two occasions with the North Vietnamese in Paris and is, in fact, honored as a hero in the war museum in Ho Chi Minh City. See pictures on WinterSoldier.com and SwiftVets.com. Joe Ponder is a widely quoted disabled vet from Coastal Division 11 who saw no war crimes but knows that Kerry dishonored our unit. Exhibit 13. Shelton White, a badly wounded Coastal Division 11 veteran, likewise saw no war crimes and remembers Kerry's betrayal. Exhibit 12.
Conclusion
As set forth at length, there is not only a reasonable factual basis for the statements in the ad; they are virtually conclusively established by the documentation.
Thank you for your kind consideration. Please do not hesitate to call me if you have any questions.
Very truly yours,
Original signed by John E. O'Neill
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