QandO

August 09, 2004

The Double Standard
Posted by McQ

Mark Steyn explains, for those on the left who don't get it, why John Kerry's war record is fair game and treating it otherwise is hypocritical:

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.

The LA Times tried to argue that Kerry's war record is unassailable. Whiners on the left have claimed those veterans who served with Kerry were lying Republican shills. But they never, ever acknowledge that it was Kerry who politicized his record. It was Kerry who made the decision to emphasize his 4 months of combat and deemphaize his antiwar activities and his Senate record.

They want to ignore Kerry's charge to judge him on his record. And it is his war record he's hightlighted. Like Steyn, I'd love to talk about what's happening today, but Kerry has decided he wants to talk about what he did back then.

Given that, Steyn asks the important question:

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?

Exactly ... why does Kerry get a pass to tell his version of events and those who remember a different version are derided as pawns, liars and, from some, traitors?

Steyn's answer?

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.

Look at those numbers, folks. 21 of 22 of his peers, men who served with Kerry, find him unfit to command.

And by the way, the argument that if they weren't in Kerry's boat they didn't serve with him is about as valid as saying a fighter pilot's wingman didn't serve with him because he wasn't in the same airplane. In other words, its a nonsense argument that any vet with the sense to pour piss out of a boot with instructions on the heel see's right through. However, the Democrats, with their wealth of operatives with military experience, don't seem to understand that.

Is all of this Vietnam nonsense a mistake? Styen certainly thinks so, and I have to agree:

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 Swift Boat Veterans for Truth are a tough barnacle to scrape off, despite all of the ad hominum attacks they're now weathering. If you read the attacks closely, they're very short of fact refutation and very long on questioning the ideology of these people. We see Jerome Corsi, who coauthored "Unfit for Command" with John O'Neill called a bigot, but we don't see the facts addressed.

So why all the Vietnam. Well, frankly, the Democrats, using the criteria of "electablility" over substance, picked a bad candidate. That's the short of it. They were left trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. His 4 month's in Vietnam was about as much silk as they could find in that sow's ear. Steyn examines the Democrat's problem with the Kerry candidacy:

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.

Thus Vietnam. Its all he has. If America were to really judge John Kerry's record, the real record, the one that makes a difference, his Senate record, they'd most likely reject him outright. But now, even his Vietnam record appears to be something other than he claims. The Democrats saw his Vietnam service as a way to neutralize Bush's advantage as a war time president.

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.

And now that boat ain't too swift. Steyn concludes with what I'm hearing from those I know and talk to in the veteran community:

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?

Agreed. But its important to note two things. If Kerry has the right to tell his version of events in Vietnam, it is not "politicizing" the issue if others who disagree and were there tell their side of the events. They didn't bring those events up .... candidate Kerry did. To claim otherwise is to champion a double standard.

Lastly .... once this runs its natural course, it is important that the real record of John Kerry be emphasized. That of his antiwar activity and his atrocious Senate record. It is those two records which will really sink his Swift boat.

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