Falsities? The lefties are dreaming again. And you know T. Boone Pickens isn't losing any sleep over his million dollar bet, either.

there you go again,as ronnie would say. He who asserts must prove. Not disprove...Kerry for better or worse chose not to argue...go ahead at badmouth. The lies your guy has told, now in data base, have cost the GOP the next two elections!

David, the Swift Vets stated the facts, and Kerry didn't have any facts to back up his case because there were none. He had something to prove with his assertions, and he could not.

And believe me, if Obama or Clinton get in the White House, it'll be a disaster that's not been seen since Jimmy Carter. It pretty much guarantees a Republican in the White House for 8, if not 12 years after that.

But the Democrats have to win the White House first.

Thank you so much for pointing this out! I too was outraged when I read that outright lie but I didn't think it would do any good to bother throwing pearls before the swine in the comments section at Wired. Cheers!

The Form 180. If the Swifties (his fellow officers in Viet Nam) were lying about him) Kerry could have proved it with just the stroke of a pen. To this day, he has refused to sign the form. Case closed.

Yes, that stuck out like an antler on a jackalope.

I looked to see if that item was from the wire services, as it smelled like AP work, but it seems to have been a bit of home-grown propaganda.

Our liberal totalitarians will never admit that "Swiftboating" means, in the hackneyed phrase, "speaking truth to power," or at any rate speaking truth to Kerry.

How did the verb "swiftboating" come into use?

If it were based on actual events, it would refer to a situation in which a politician makes claims about the past and is publicly fisked by the people who share that past. But since that sort of thing really hasn't happened to anyone else but Kerry, it must follow that "swiftboating" is based on some unprovable innuendo regarding the SwiftVets rather than provable observed history. I will have to research.

All I know is that my father, a Swift Vet, knew the score on Kerry from way back in the day. Dad was dying of cancer when he struggled into the voting booth to pull the lever against Kerry. Dad meant it when he said, "Over my dead body will that sonofabitch become president..."

I had the exact same reaction as Kate (Comment 4). The Swift Boat vets said that Kerry got an early out for minimal or questionable injuries -- true. They said he then participated in those ridiculous agitprop hearing where he slandered every Vietnam veteran with a bunch of bogus charges -- true. They pointed out that his "seared, seared" trip to Cambodia never actually, you know, happened -- true.

Finally, the POWs brought it all home by pointing out how Kerry's speech was used by the NVA torturers. All Kerry needed to refute that was to have _one_ POW out of the hundreds of returnees back him up.

It didn't happen. Even the "Peace Committee" -- the handful of Garwood-type traitors who flipped while in prison, and who escaped trial for political reasons -- and the early-release collaborators didn't flock to Kerry's support. Or if they did, Kerry's media surrogates didn't write about it.

The celebrated lawsuit against Carlton Sherwood by Kerry surrogates petered out after the election -- after it had done its job, keeping the anti-Kerry film Stolen Honor off the air. The cronies couldn't stand up to discovery, so when the suit got that far, they folded their tent. But nobody ever sued the authors of Unfit to Command, despite many threats from Kerry and various Kerry footmen and coatholders.

But it's an article of faith in the press, most of whom have never met a serving soldier, that the Swifties were discredited and Kerry -- who to this day has not released his records to the public -- proven true. When the exact opposite is the case.

Kerry "swift boated" himself:

http://freedomagenda.com/iraq/wmd_quotes.html

What a goof.

Swiftboat, v. - to tell the truth about a Democrat.

Posted by dean on 1/24/2008 at 9:09 pm

"And believe me, if Obama or Clinton get in the White House, it'll be a disaster that's not been seen since Jimmy Carter. It pretty much guarantees a Republican in the White House for 8, if not 12 years after that."

In your dreams. A Democrat victory in 2008 guarantees Democrat wins forever. The Democrats will enact a whole raft of laws and changes to stack the decks in their favor. Millions of recent immigrants (legal and illegal) will be naturalized en masse, with government-funded activist groups instructing them how to vote. The laws disfranchising convicted felons will be struck down. The 2010 Census will be 'adjusted' for supposed undercounts of the urban poor, blacks, hispanics, etc, insuring that more electoral votes go to 'blue states' and more black/hispanic representatives are elected. The "fairness law" for media will be revived to shut down conservative talk radio. Bloggers will be subjected to "campaign finance" laws. Laws against vote fraud will be eviscerated. Businesses, big and small, will be punished if they donate to Republicans or fail to donate to Democrats. Labor unions will funnel billions to the Democrats. (Expect unionization by "card-check" to be enacted quickly.) Conservative activists and NGOs will be hit with IRS audits and FBI investigations.

After all that, U.S. elections will be like Mexican elections in the heyday of the PRI.

Ah, I'm still waiting for Mr. Kerry's military records to be released, as he promised. And wasn't his honorable discharge issued after President Carter's amnesty in January 1977; or is that an urban legend that his records could dispel. He was still in the reserves in February 1972 when he talked to the North Vietnamese delegation in Paris in August 1971 per FBI records and testified to Congress in April 1971. That would have been enough for me, had I the power, to have given him a bad conduct discharge in 1972. Lying to Congress and talking to the enemy is not something the UCMJ would find acceptable. I imagine at best that his original DD214 is coded with a negative entry.

What must be fought at every turn is the tendency for "SwiftBoating" to become an uncontrovertial slang for lying. McCain has much to answer for here. Obviously his defense of Kerry without any factual support is troubling but can be chalked up to ignorance and excessive zeal in protecting the reps of VNVs generally but if McCain hadn't attacked the Swifties Kerry would have imploded much the sooner and bigger. Hannity has a nasty habit of using SwiftBoat in this way as has Ruah on occassion. Maybe they are making air quotes but on radio that ain't so smooth. The Swifties and their supporters have nothing to be sheepish about. Kerry is a liar, a traitor, a coward and above all, a nut who believes his own fantasies. As Hillary! has said, "Facts are stubborn." Or as Reagan said better, "Facts are stubborn things..."

Of course, what really sunk Kerry was something the Swift Said that everyone agrees was true (and in fact is a matter of public record): his lies about our troops in 1972, when he said they were all murdering thugs behaving like Ghenghis Khan, and that the Vietnamese were better off under the Commies than our awful, brutal soldiers.

It took INCREDIBLE gall to campaign as a "war hero" after that, especially since (as, again, everyone agrees) he took 3 Purple Hearts for minor injuries and used them to get sent home early. Hard to blame those he left behind and then slandered for being angry with him.

It's also odd that "Swiftboating" is the malediction associated with falsity, as opposed to "Dan Rathering." After all, Rather's attack was clearly based on crudely forged documents, while the 255 Swift Vets forced Kerry to retract several claims, such as the Christmas in Cambodia story.

But the left still controls the MSM, so their delusions get spun into fact, as in the Wired story.

Oh, really? Can THIS be a fake?!?!?!

Amr, you beat me to it. If you want charges that have truly been discredited, see the Bush TANG reports hawked by Dan Rather.

During the hysteria of WWII 150,000 Japanese were deprived of their homes and livelihoods. I believe a few dozen Hollywood types lost their jobs during the McCarthy era. The internment of the Japanese was the work of liberal Democrats (with the willing consent of Republicans). Anti-communism was the work of Republicans (with the sullen consent of Democrats). The commonly used word for political hysteria is McCarthyism, but by any measure the greater crime was that of the Japanese internment. There is no shorthand word in the language for that crime. I do not think that Kerry got libelled, but it looks like "swiftboating" will become the usual term for political libel.

If you want to really know what went on with the Swifties,

read To Set The Record Straight by one of the SBVT insiders. This book just came out and details the Vietnam veteran movement that arose against Kerry. It debunks the media myths and tells a chilling story of how far the media and the Kerry machine went to suppress the truth. I was involved in the vet effort and everything in the book I had knowledge of is presented accurately.

You can find a review here.

with the sullen consent of Democrats

Sweet Jesus, but you've got a talent for understatement.

The Democrats only consented as far as it was profitable for their careers. Otherwise, they fucking loved Communism. From FDR, who referred to Stalin affectionately as "Uncle Joe" and ignored all evidence of Communist infiltration of our government, flatly blocking all efforts to end it, to today's Democrat Party controlled by socialists, the Democrat's have a long history of loving that totalitarian nonsense.

Fuck them, right in the heart.

Don't forget about Alger Hiss. He was a darling of the liberal establishment, earned in part by his role as a chief architect of the UN. The espionage case against him might not have had legs without the tireless efforts of a Congressindividual named Richard Milhous Nixon. Hiss eventually got nailed when investigators proved that the Pumpkin Papers were typed on his wife's Woodstock typewriter. Nixon was hated before Watergate; this is one of the big reasons why.

swiftboating - doing the job that the media won't do in exposing a Democrat for the liar he/she is. usually done 20 or more years after the media has failed to hold a Democrat accountable for his past actions or words.