Veterans, Medals, and Smear Campaigns

Swift Boat Veterans for Truth has a web of connections to the Bush family, to high-profile Texas political figures, and to Our Employee’s chief political aide, Karl Rove. This NYTimes graph starts connecting the dots. According to the NYTimes, Bush said today that “political advertisements run by a broad swath of independent groups (the 527’s) should be stopped, including a television advertisement attacking Senator John Kerry’s war record. But the White House quickly moved to insist that Mr. Bush had not meant in any way to single out the advertisement run by veterans opposed to Mr. Kerry.” Of course he wouldn’t. It is, he believes, helping his campaign. Atrios notes that “Bush’s denunciation of 527s is hypocritical and self-contradictory.” And he provides examples of the 527’s connected to the Bush campaign.

Swift Boat Veterans for Truth has advanced its cause in a book, in a television advertisement, and on cable news and talk radio shows, all in an attempt to discredit Mr. Kerry’s war record. In many cases, material offered as proof by these veterans is undercut by official Navy records and their own prior statements.

Bush would like to see all these 527 ads exactly the same and the mainstream media seems prepared to go along with him on that (not surprising, considering media is owned by corporations). How many media outlets have equated the “shadowy” MoveOn ads with the “shadowy” Swift Boat ads, even though these things are in no way the same… the difference there is that MoveOn ads tell the truth, while the Swift Board ads are now being shown to be lies.

Meanwhile, Bob Dole opens mouth and inserts foot with this: Kerry had won three Purple Hearts “and never bled that I know of.” What did he want, vials of blood, photographs of wounds, what? The sad thing in this is that while he and the right wing continue to attack Kerry’s war service with nothing more than innuendo and whisper campaigns, by extension they attack every veteran who served and earned medals during wartime. I don’t want to sit here questioning whether a man or woman veteran really earned their medals, the fact of the matter is that no one gets a purple heart unless there is corroborating evidence from others who were there. Imagine if supporters of Bill Clinton had tried in 1996 to besmirch the military record of his opponent, Bob Dole, whose purple heart was earned because he botched throwing a hand grenade (according to his own account of it). The fact of the matter is, Clinton and the Democrats would have never stooped so low.

Why didn’t Dole question Reagan’s false claims of wartime service? Why doesn’t Dole question Bush’s military record? Anyone who serves in the National Guard for five or more years is entitled to wear the Texas Faithful Service Medal, which is awarded to members of the Texas National Guard who have “completed five years of honorable service during which the person has shown fidelity to duty, efficient service, and great loyalty to the state.” You don’t have to do anything to get that but just show up consistently for your National Guard duties. The Daily Kos has an interesting entry about these medals, and documentary and photographic evidence showing that Bush never got that medal.

Gee, that seems a bit fishy… (*note that I’m not asking questions about any medals he actually got.)

Update via UPI –

“Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., who also served in the military, Monday pointed to recent comments by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who faced his own smear campaign when fighting Bush for the Republican nomination in 2000.

“John McCain’s reaction I think was the best evidence of that when he simply said, you know, that looks a lot like what they did to me,” Reed said.

“This seems to me not something just coincidental.”

Campaign spokesman Chad Clanton told reporters there is “a whole string of facts pointing this direction and it’s looking more and more like the Bush administration is behind this smear.”

Clanton pointed to several issues being raised by Kerry’s campaign in recent days, including the fact that Bush veteran committee adviser Kenneth Cordier’s appears in the Swift Boat advertisement. Two other factors directly pointing to coordination, he said, were the fact that Bush campaigners in Florida were caught handing out SBVT literature and trying to get people to go to rallies, as well as the fact that two-thirds of the group’s funding comes from top GOP Texas fundraiser Bob Perry.

However, Bush Monday disavowed the ads being aired by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

“I think Senator Kerry served admirably, and he ought to be — he ought to be proud of his record,” he told reporters in Crawford, Texas.”