On swift boat captains & John Kerry

Much has been written and argued about lately about John Kerry and the so-called "Swift Boat Captains for Truth" organization.

A few notes on this group:

• Their leader is a certain John O'Neill, who served on Kerry's swift-boat AFTER John Kerry left Vietnam, who in the early 70s was recruited by Richard Nixon to be a counterpoint to John Kerry's role as the head of Veterans Against The War
• The co-author of the book in question, Jerome Corsi, has made some interesting, as he calls them, jokes, over the years over at Free Republic.
• None of the people in this group actually served on Kerry's swiftboat. When they say they served with him, they mean they were in Vietnam at the same time, or at best, served on near-by boats. All 11 members of Kerry's swiftboat have either endorsed Kerry and were on stage with him at his acceptance speech, or are deceased.
  
• Their claims that Kerry lied about spending a Christmas in Cambodia are arguable at best as Kevin Drum points out (edit: added a link to a dailykos diary that has transcrptions of diaries from this time which indicates that Kerry very likely was in fact in Cambodia when he claims he was)
  
• Pretty much all other claims have been refuted as well, or are impossible to verify one way or another. For good coverage on this, check out Eschaton.

The real reasons that this is happening is because they were ticked off that Kerry became an anti-war protester after his service ended in Vietnam, and because they are ideologically driven. O'Neill and Corsi clearly fall into the latter category (though they may also be in the former). These men are entitled to their opinions, and there is no reason to believe that they served their country in anything less than an honorable fashion... but all of the same is true of the man they are attempting to character assassinate. Given that the funding and the people behind this were also largely behind the attack on John McCain that Bush's surrogates launched during the South Carolina primaries in 2000 where they implied that McCain had fathered an illegitimate black child really casts a doubt in my mind over anything these people say. The fact that Bush's campaign won't condemn this group really says a lot about the Bush campaign. (though nothing that I didn't already know)

Though frankly, I think is largely a plus for Kerry. It shows Bush's campaign unwilling to speak out against such trash, and focuses on the simple fact that Kerry served with honor by having the media focus on it and debunk the charges. This is all much more effective at keeping these facts in the mind of the public than having Kerry repeat them ad naseum.

BTW: For those who didn't know, John Kerry's work as the leader of the Veterans based anti-war movement in the early 70s, lead him to be on Richard Nixon's enemies list. This is the same list with John Lennon. That alone would earn a vote from me. Also, if you want to see a political cartoon from 1971 featuring a very young anti-war protestor version of John Kerry, check out these vintage Doonsebury cartoons! (and for those who don't follow it, the early strips were based at a college called Walden, which is a fictional version of Yale, where Kerry, Bush and the creator of the strip all went to college)