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Bobulinski and the Swift Vets — 17 Comments

  1. Kerry should have been Courts Martialed. He deliberately put his command at risk. The stuff about getting 3 Purple Hearts is more you know what.
    I will say that I am a Navy vet (I was lucky that I was on a ship in the Med – when you sign on the dotted line you go where they tell you), my Brother a Navy Chief that did serve in Vietnam, and my Father a Navy Chief that was at Pearl Harbor and other “interesting” places from 1941 onward.

  2. They serve “the father of lies”. They knowingly declare truth to be a lie and lies, to be truth. They betray their very raison d’être.

    May they reap the reward they so richly deserve in the
    life to come.

    To reject the certainty of a just accountability in the afterlife is to posit that reality consists solely of what you can get away with… along with positing that leadership and public celebrity carries with it no obligation to those who have elevated them.

  3. While ignoring the Swift Vets; the MSM created fake news about W’s service record. The funny part is how they described the 147th FIG at Ellington as a country club for rich kids. My father flew in that unit and was a WSO for the F-101s that replaced W’s F-102s. I wouldn’t call my grandmother, who raised my dad on her own working at Montgomery Ward, rich. My father got the slot after 2 tours in Vietnam in B-52s. The MSM could have interviewed a lot of other veterans that served with W, but they only talked to the one that lied for them.

  4. I was an officer in the navy, like Kerry, I’m pretty sure I could count on any of the officers I served with to vouch for me. The fact that nobody that served alongside Kerry vouched for him – speaks volumes.

  5. The Wikipedia article Neo linked is one of the most biased pieces I’ve ever read from there, and that’s saying a lot. Plenty of assertions, and not a shred of actual refutation of the Vets.

    In 2004, I was still kind of an ignorant LIV, only following politics in a haphazard manner while getting the last of our five kids through high school, even though I did try to keep better informed after 9/11 shook everything up in 2001.

    I had just begun to read blogs, and was blown out of the water with the expose of Dan Rather’s lies about GW Bush and the alleged National Guard memo.

    At nearly the same time, John Kerry blew up any remaining shred of Democrat credibility with his nauseating pretense of patriotic service, although I don’t recall now exactly what order the two events came in.
    This Wiki post just places them both in the same two-month period (and is relatively neutral, unlike the other one).
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_United_States_presidential_election

    I listened to the Swift Boat Vets and believed their message, especially (as I remember it) the observation that they could have come forward earlier in Kerry’s political career and had not (I don’t recall the reason; I wish they had), but could not allow such a brazen liar to become president.

    When the Democrats and mainstream media immediately, and suspiciously in concert, put the reverse-Orwell spin on the neologism “swift boating” as Neo describes, they definitively revealed the depth and breadth of the rot in our press and political institutions.

    So I got hooked on watching the circus via Powerline and other blogs, through the Obama years, and now with Biden.

    They lie. All the time. About everything.

  6. I’ll offer John Kerry’s military service, such as it was, was satisfactory when you look at the whole spectrum of experience in his cohort. Three problems: (1) his service was not as impressive as his decorations would suggest. (I’ve seen contentions from veterans that the social psychology of the military in those circumstances tended to generate a debasement in the currency of decorations); (2) as has been pointed out by veterans, it’s a reasonable inference he gamed the system in order to be pulled out of action early; and (3) his entire public career was built on having been a VietNam veteran, and as late as 2004 he was using former boatmates as campaign props.

    If his time in the Navy had been a line on a campaign brochure, none of this would be a problem. However, Kerry made himself a public figure with the ‘Winter Soldier Investigation’ and various exhibits of himself while active in VietNam Veterans Against the War. It’s a reasonable wager that he was able to defeat James Shannon in the 1984 Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate nomination on the selling point of his VietNam service. Democratic Senators are seldom voted out of office in Massachusetts; it’s only happened twice in the last century, and it was the same politician on both occasions; that man was a dissenter within the Democratic Party, which Kerry is not. Democratic candidates seldom lose statewide contests in Massachusetts; Republicans elected statewide in Massachusetts are typically voted out of office after one term. That primary election in 1984 made his career, and he won it by the slimmest of margins while most Democratic pols were backing his opponents.

    You have other politicians whose military service was a frequent subject of public discussion, among them Bob Dole and John McCain. John McCain was career Navy and the son and grandson of admirals. The Navy was his life for 44 years. He also lived through the ugliest of ordeals in 1968-73. In Bob Dole’s case, he was disabled by his service, and the physical and occupational therapy program necessary for him to return to work wasn’t completed until 1949. Even so, his wife attended his law school classes to take notes for him because he had insufficient mobility in that arm. Hendrik Hertzberg, a most unfriendly journalist by disposition, met Dole in 1988. In his account of the meeting, he said the first thing that hits you about Dole is that his body is so asymmetrical and he has a personality that matches it. Dole did not have to talk about his military service; journalists were motivated to write about it by looking at him. John McCain’s impairments are subtler, but noticeable: he could not raise his arms above the horizontal position, use a keyboard, or tie a tie. Dole among the two has been dismissive of aspects of his service. (“I wasn’t a hero, just a kid who got shot”).

    While we’re at it, the Bushes, father and son, never made much of their time in the military. Papa Bush had an interesting time of it and answered questions about it, but that was about it. For his son, it was a line on a campaign brochure.

    Note the SwiftBoats were a group of veterans organized by a trial lawyer in Texas who had been a public critic of Kerry’s ca. 1971. Reporters weren’t trashing his service. Reporters were muted in raking Da Nang Dick Blumenthal over the coals. The real fire has been reserved for George W Bush, Dan Quayle, and Pat Robertson. (Sidney Blumenthal was audacious enough to make an effort at trashing the elder George Bush’s service).

  7. I was a Midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy during Kerry’s antics in 1971 (the “winter soldier” hearing and throwing medals/ribbons over the Capitol fence). I was appalled then and I’m appalled now. As you can imagine, the Vietnam War was a topic of considerable interest at the service academies in the early 1970s and everyone wanted to bend over backwards to cut Kerry some slack. But the more the facts came out, the more appalled we became. And this is years before John “Do you know who I am?” Kerry ran for political office. But I remember him well. The country dodged a bullet in 2004–many thanks, Ohio!

  8. I started to watch Tucker’s interview with Bobulinski, but gave up quickly. I applaud what Tucker is trying to do to keep all this in front of the public. But, as the past 6 years have taught me, nothing ever happens to anyone on the left no matter how egregious the crime. My time was better spent watching Fuller House reruns, than hearing what I know is probably true, and not allowing myself to get my blood pressure up over a broken system that I can’t do anything about.

  9. Note the SwiftBoats were a group of veterans organized by a trial lawyer in Texas who had been a public critic of Kerry’s ca. 1971.

    As I recall, that “trial lawyer” from Texas was another Vietnam vet who has spent years exposing fake veterans.

  10. “They lie. All the time. About everything.”

    Sums it up.

    Must be added (though it’s probably unnecessary) that as part of its war on the US and its citizens, the Democratic party and its loyal minions have also embarked on a massive offensive against LANGUAGE.

    It is infuriating, exasperating and demoralizing…but readers of Orwell should not be surprised.

    (See also the following post on Hunter Biden…)

  11. @ Art Deco > “If his time in the Navy had been a line on a campaign brochure, none of this would be a problem. However, Kerry made himself a public figure with the ‘Winter Soldier Investigation’ and various exhibits of himself while active in VietNam Veterans Against the War.”

    Agreed – the comparison between Kerry’s grandstanding and the reticence of other (mostly older) politicians was egregious and aggravating.

    I actually don’t remember much about Kerry’s “winter soldier” stunts in 1971, as that was my first year in college, with no tv, and not much talk about the politics (other than a general awareness of the zeitgeist, and my gratitude that Nixon ended the war before my younger brother reached draft age). Of course, all of the guys I knew were NOT in Vietnam by definition, although I worked with several veterans later in graduate school (all of them fine men and good TAs).

    However, I knew enough to know that Kerry’s “Ready to Serve” play-acting in 2004 was a gross distortion of his career, and his character.
    And who can forget his dismissal of the soldiers then stuck in Iraq, because they were too stupid for anything else?

    https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.snopes.com%2Ftachyon%2Fimages%2Fphotos%2Fpolitics%2Fgraphics%2Fkerrysign_small.jpg%3Fresize%3D480%2C229&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=f043ee06b6878e03fce2211e4e231a2dfe7917deeaba5508149c4348eaa5d92e&ipo=images

    GWB has been a disappointment to me in recent years, but he still deserves thanks for keeping John Kerry out of the Oval Office.

  12. As I recall, that “trial lawyer” from Texas was another Vietnam vet who has spent years exposing fake veterans.

    Absolutely. He’d been posted to the Mekong Delta just after Kerry had been pulled out. William Dyer (“Beldar”) had dealt with him professionally in Texas and offered an assessment of him in that capacity. As an attorney, Dyer said he’s pretty much tops.

    I meant to point out that the Swift Boat Veterans were not an astroturf group. These were interested parties due to events in their past, not due to any political connections. John O’Neill did go on a speaking tour after his return from VietNam, but otherwise had been preoccupied with professional and family life. As a top trial lawyer, he had connections to a great many people, so the Sulzberger Birdcage Liner tried a six-degrees-of-separation ad hom attack on him.

  13. Beldar Blog was one of my early favorites when I started reading the internet for news. I was very disappointed when he quit posting.

    https://www.beldar.org/about.html
    “I’m a lawyer, but I am not your lawyer, okay?”

    https://blog.chron.com/techblog/2006/10/beldar-i-may-get-back-in/

    Apparently he did! I hadn’t kept up because I didn’t expect it to happen.
    However, the most recent post is from November 20, 2020.
    Sad.
    https://beldar.blogs.com/

    I went cruising through his “back issues” and found a lot of really bad predictions (Hillary Clinton would never run again; Joe Biden would never be president), although to be fair that was the way to bet back in 2012. Beldar does NOT like Donald Trump for various reasons; I didn’t see any post about the 2016 results.

    Since the Kerry candidacy came up in the discussions recently, I will link just this one post.
    https://www.beldar.org/beldarblog/2004/10/eighth_and_nint.html

    Mike Krempasky at Redstate.org has a scoop — the scripts for the about-to-be-released eighth and ninth SwiftVets ads.

    The first of these two new ads apparently will feature ninety Swiftees and ex-POWs gathered en masse to demonstrate their conviction that Sen. Kerry is unfit to be commander in chief. The second includes ex-POW and Congressional Medal of Honor winner Bud Day, one of America’s most highly decorated pilots. Mike reports that these spots will appear, among other places, on “Monday Night Football,” and will be previewed tonight by Brit Hume on Fox.
    Sen. Kerry will doubtless continue to try to brush these ads off as the work of right-wing cranks, and some folks will doubtless continue to buy into that defense. But ninety highly decorated veterans, men who look like your father or grandfather or husband or brother — enough men to field ten baseball teams; seven and a half dozen heroes — all standing tall and defiant and very disapproving. I’d love to see Sen. Kerry try to stare them down in person.

    Update (Wed Oct 13 @ 11:10pm): All of the SwiftVets’ ads, including the new ones, can be viewed here. Watch them both. Look at their clothes — ranging from bankers’ conservative suits to laborers’ Sunday best. Look at their faces — and think about how glad you’d be to see any of them, as a young man, sharing your foxhole.

    Look at Bud Day, in his flight jacket and his Medal of Honor, and listen to him deliver, in measured, deadly serious tones, this simple, devastating question:

    “How can you expect our sons and daughters to follow you, when you condemned their fathers and grandfathers?”

    I’d pay a lot of money for a video of John Kerry’s face as he watched these ads for the first time.

  14. Beldar didn’t think much of Obama, either.

    It is a sobering thought that so many people believed Jimmy Carter was a terrible president, and the Democrats have gone down-hill since then, whether their candidates were ever elected or not.

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