Swiftboating those who question Benghazi
It’s a tried and true tactic, and Dana Milbank gets into the act here.
The topic this time? The Benghazi killings and coverup. The method? Emphasize the fringe arguments that are more easily mocked and/or repudiated, and ignore or gloss over the more basic and common questions and concerns. Then tar those offering the latter with the same brush as the former, and dismiss them all as silly, mendacious, and/or demented.
The technique reminds me of the way the Swift Vets’ concerns about John Kerry in 2004 were not only swept under the rug, but how the Vets themselves were attacked and reviled. So I thought it might be a good idea to revisit a post I wrote in 2008 on the subject of how the term “swiftboating” itself was a case of swiftboating—against the original Swift Vets—that was simply Orwellian.
It’s particularly ironic to read John Kerry’s words as quoted in that post, and think about what the Obama administration hath wrought since. Here’s the post (slightly shortened):
It isn’t often you get to watch a lie become entrenched truth.
Or maybe it is often, if you pay enough attention. Once it’s repeated enough, and by the right people, it becomes the revealed truth, and there’s almost no way to counter it effectively, as Winston Churchill knew.
Goebbels’ “truth” about the number of casualties at Dresden has been believed for so long it’s hard to shake no matter what new evidence comes to light. Jenin was a massacre perpetrated by the Israelis on the Palestinians, and Mohammed al Dura was killed by Israeli soldiers. Vietnam veterans are disproportionately depressed, poor, psychotic, drug-taking messes. All of these are untrue “truths” that have passed into the public domain.
Similarly, the term “swiftboating” quickly entered into mainstream usage as meaning “to unfairly attack in order to serve political ends.” John Kerry, the recipient of the original Swift Vets’ attack, uses the term this way, but he is certainly not the only one to invoke the word in righteous indignation…
As the Washington Post notes, “swiftboating” has become a synonym for “a political low blow.” And of course, in the eyes of the MSM, it tends to be the province of those nefarious Republicans.
Forget about whether the charges are actually true or not; that’s a minor quibble, hardly worthy of consideration. After all, “facts are the enemy of truth,” don’t you know?
So that means that the NY Times can attack likely Republican Presidential nominee John McCain with “facts” that barely rise to the level of good gossip, and Dan Rather can use forged documents to smear George Bush on the eve of the 2004 election, and the rest of the MSM and the Democrats somehow can’t find it in their hearts to use the term “swiftboating” for their fellow Dems, especially when it’s Republicans being attacked.
This is the case even if—as happened recently with the Times—the actions of these MSM icons are condemned even by their own side (if you can find an example of someone on the left/liberal end of things using the term “swiftboating” to describe the Times or Rather, please send me a link; I haven’t been able to find one). It seems to be reserved for anyone who might attack a Democrat.
I closely followed the Swift Vets’ story in 2004. I read their book, and found it compelling. I waited for the evidence in it—presented in very lawyerly fashion, since some of them are lawyers—to be countered.
But I never saw any of it effectively debunked other than a few unimportant details, although I looked and looked (I actually wanted the charges to be untrue, because at the time I thought John Kerry was going to be our next President, and the prospect would have been far less sobering if the book could have been invalidated).
And so I read almost everything that was written to counter it, and the counter-evidence was so flimsy I became convinced that it wasn’t countered because it couldn’t be countered. And early on in the controversy one of the main tools of the counterattack to the Swift Vets’ accusations was to smear the accusatory Vets themselves.
This, of course, was not considered “swiftboating;” the term hadn’t quite jelled yet. I watched as the legends about the Swift Vets grew: they were Republican operatives all; they were liars, despite being decorated heroes themselves. Kerry lost because he was just too nice a guy to fight back (Kerry himself is a big one for promulgating this particular theme).
John Kerry is now an Obama supporter. Here’s an email he wrote in January of 2008 on the subject; it’s full of Kerry’s characteristic “poor pitiful principled me who lost the election because of lies and because I wasn’t mean enough” routine. It deserves to be read in full, but here are some excerpts [emphases mine]:
I support Barack Obama because he doesn’t seek to perfect the politics of Swiftboating — he seeks to end it.
…As a veteran, it disgusts me that the Swift Boats we loved while we were in uniform on the Mekong Delta have been rendered, in Karl Rove’s twisted politics, an ugly verb meaning to lie [sic] about someone’s character just to win an election….we must stop the Swiftboating, stop the push-polling, stop the front groups, and stop the email chain smears….We must be determined never again to lose any election to a lie [sic].
Some of you may have heard about the disgusting lies about Barack Obama that are being circulated by email. These attacks smear Barack’s Christian faith and deep patriotism, and they distort his record of more than two decades of public service. They are nothing short of “Swiftboat” style anonymous [sic: the Swift Vets were anything but anonymous] attacks.
These are the same tactics the right [sic] has used again and again, and as we’ve learned, these attacks, no matter how bogus [sic], can spread and take root if they go unchecked.
I’m relieved to hear that there’s a new book dedicated to undoing the “swiftboating” of the Swift Vets—that is, the “swiftboating” directed, in Orwellian fashion, against them. The book is titled To Set the Record Straight, writeen by Scott Swett and Tim Ziegler. Here’s a review:
Time and again the book shows how major media either misrepresented the group’s claims, coordinated with the Kerry campaign, or went to extraordinary lengths (unsuccessfully) to discredit the group.
Back in 2004, I tried to get some of my Kerry-supporting friends to read Unfit for Command, just to see for themselves what all the fuss was about. To their credit, three of them did. Two of those people subsequently refused to vote for Kerry; and one voted for him anyway despite believing the charges in the book. But the vast majority of my friends simply refused to read it at all—they didn’t want to know what was actually in it; the MSM told them all they needed to know.
I’m glad someone has done this work to try to rehabilitate the Swift Vets themselves. But I’m not overly optimistic about its chances of reaching the very people who should be reading it. After all, “a mind is a difficult thing to change“—especially when it refuses to expose itself to information that might counter its entrenched beliefs.
I think I’ve mentioned before here that it was the reaction of the MSM to the Swift Boat vets that made me realize just how far gone most big-time journalists are. Instead of investigating the charges, as they would do with any remotely credible (or even incredible) scandal involving a Republican, they mounted a defense against them, and attacked the people making them. It was really a little shocking.
Indeed Mac.
I think it was despicable.
But we live in a communist country now, so nothing, and I mean nothing will surprise me concerning the actions of the current administration or it’s propaganda arm the MSM.
The Kerry candidacy was a wake-up call for me as well.
Kerry’s infamy in the veterans community was well established for decades before the 2004 presidential campaign. Even I knew as a young Army veteran about Kerry’s disgrace during the Vietnam War, and it wasn’t history I went looking for.
I was a volunteer for GEN Wes Clark during the Democratic primaries. When Kerry became the Dems presidential candidate in 2004, I thought, well, okay, they didn’t want a decorated soldier and combat veteran like my guy. They didn’t only go a different direction. They went the opposite direction – they fielded an anti-war candidate. Not my choice, but I could understand it.
But then the Dems – incredibly – started marketing Kerry as a Vietnam War hero. It was jaw-dropping. I could hardly believe the tone-deafness. I thought, could the Dems really be that ignorant or insensitive to Kerry’s reputation in the veterans community? If they wanted a genuine combat veteran, there was one for the choosing – I volunteered for him.
By marketing Kerry as a Vietnam War hero, the Dems practically taunted and dared Vietnam War veterans to speak up angrily.
Narrative was applied in politics before the 2004 campaign, of course, but that was the first time in my experience where The Narrative forcefully replaced truth. And I don’t mean obscure history, but truth that was established, open source, easily referenced, out in the open.
The Democrats rank and file *wanted* to believe The Narrative. They chose to believe, like a cult. Trying to explain Kerry’s long infamy in the veterans community to Democrats was like trying to explain the Iraq mission at that point. It was like speaking a language they couldn’t understand. At the end of it, they would simply reassert The Narrative.
Very insightful Neo, but also quite demoralizing.
A depressing end to a long, hard, frustrating day at work.
They never, ever quit, do they?
And it will never, ever end, will it?
Until they win.
Then what?, I wonder…
Loathsome John Kerry who—by the way, did’ja know—served in Vietnam 4-months 44-years ago. Put in for multiple purple hearts without missing a day of work. To this day has suppressed the full records of his time in the Navy. Who stated on the US Senate floor that the memory of one night on a swift boat in Cambodia was,”..seared…seared on my memory..” (NEVER, EVER was in Cambodia!)
“Reporting for Duty”, my sweet former anti-Vietnam activist shorts, John Boy.
http://www.cruz.senate.gov/record.cfm?id=345735
sorry, off topic, but are those your skis? Both of them? Cool.
The thing that seems to separate Kerry and the media who support him (and people like him) from most of us is simple honesty.
Honesty is the only virtue that can temper the desire to win at all costs, cause one to reexamine the blind pursuit of a cause, or end a long standing prejudice. Without it, any kind of distortion or lie or omission is possible.
We’ve come to expect politicians to be liars and cheats, but much of the public has yet to understand that modern day journalists are cut from the same cloth. The biggest lie of all, and the most tragic, is the majority of people have no idea how dishonest and absent of conscience modern journalists are. Lying is an art form they have perfected, and they are not only proud of it, they passionately believe it is their duty to the republic, lest we disagree with their better judgment.
southpaw….well-put!
I bought, and read, Unfit for Command, and it was absolutely damning.
None of the Manhattan liberals I know even peeked into the book. I was too chicken to suggest it; but from my other occasional attempts to wedge a bit of truth into the crinkles of their cerebrums, I know they would have plotzed.
Nominating Kerroid was like nominating Hanoi Jane Fonda as a War Hero (actually Worse, as he was guilty of TREASON by treating with the enemy when he was a naval officer). I can’t spit hard enough to get that foul taste out of my mouth.
But aren’t you all impressed by Kerry’s ability to deliver a speech in French while in France?
Eric,
Reminds me of Orwell’s memories of propaganda in the Spanish civil war; how the left would turn heroes into cowards and vice-versa depending on what the narrative called for.
They truly have no standards.
One of the most important books I read in the past few years was Ann Coulter’s “Demonic.” True, she’s a polemicist, but her book clarified for me just what Democratic politics has been my entire life. (I was once a low-information voter who went along with the MSM “hate Nixon,” “Reagan is stupid,” etc. etc. view of things.) Coulter opened my eyes to the outright lies that the Democrats use in their campaigns.
The other excellent book was “Liberal Fascism,” which summarized the growth of statism.
I mention these books only because maybe some people might possibly react to them the way I did, which is to reevaluate everything that I thought I knew re 20th-century American history.
As Southpaw @ 9:07 says above, most Americans still have not internalized the idea that Democrats are lying liars and the MSM are their operatives. As independent voters, we tea-party-types just have to live with the knowledge that most “liberals” have mental issues that can’t be surmounted because they depend on self-esteem, not factual analysis of anything. “Unfit for Command” was an eye-opener for me, as well.
I’m probably rambling a lot here. My point is that I now accept the fact that the MSM lies, the Democrats are “demonic,” the Republicans are weak, and that only an active movement against further statism can save us. I call the movement “tea party” but it’s really a movement to cut back parasitic government and treat the Constitution as basic law.
I now accept the fact that politicians are generally criminals who should be sent to jail for their crimes. Clarice Feldman had a wonderful piece on Hillary in American Thinker last Sunday. This woman should definitely be in jail, as should Obama, Kerry, and many others.
Neo,
I’m amazed you got any liberal friends to read Unfit for Command. Libs seem to always push the benefits of “education”, but in my experience most people don’t want to be educated. They’re happy to go along in life with their prejudices and can’t be bothered with the effort it would take to know the truth.
Did these friends suffer any cognitive dissonance from the experience? Did they take that as an experience not to be repeated?
Liberals do NOT want to learn anything new. They already know everything. They know that they are the “good-thinking” people, and that is all that they think that they ever need to know.
It took me years and years to accept this sad fact, starting around 2003 with the Iraq war and then the Kerry candidacy. It’s a sad joke.
they didn’t want to know what was actually in it; the MSM told them all they needed to know.
The weak point in these cult belief systems is that once you control the media organs at the top, using threats, kidnappings, or blackmail, the rest will follow along. Because they believed it before, they will believe it now, even if their masters have changed.
So the point of convincing those at the bottom don’t matter. Convincing the propagandists normally doesn’t matter either. But controlling the propaganda itself, doing just that will make the believers believe in whatever new stuff pops up.
Mac wrote:
“I think I’ve mentioned before here that it was the reaction of the MSM to the Swift Boat vets that made me realize just how far gone most big-time journalists are.”
Yeah, that was a neat trick they pulled, smearing the swift boat vets with a newly-minted term, “swiftboating”, which meant “a dishonest political low blow.” Except they skipped the step where you prove what was dishonest or low about the charges leveled by the swift boat vets.
IMHO, the MSM is now an order of magnitude worse than it was back then because of their absurd infatuation with His Royal Highness, King Barack. I expect the MSM, as the unofficial PR and propaganda arm of the White House (and Democrat party), to continue its all-out defense protecting His Majesty from any damage emanating from the Benghazi cluster-f***. They’ve already stonewalled for over a year now.
The MSM can easily be taken over by overloading them with disinformation, blackmailing their editors and controllers to produce certain propaganda as a team effort.
Like Go, once you obtain control of enough of their agents, the rest will follow, since following is what the Leftist cannonfodder are best at.
“CYNIC, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. Hence the custom among the Scythians of plucking out a cynic’s eyes to improve his vision.”
Ambrose Bierce, DD
To give a few examples of how the MSM are pressured, remember back to when the various ABC networks gave Saddam preferential treatment in return for access. They were much softer on Saddam before and after the Gulf War, then they were on George Bush, the father or son.
These are examples of where they caved already. And it didn’t take much.
Part of the reason they buddy up with Democrats in DC is because Democrats will actually cut your access off, unlike soft Republicans like Bush who believe in something called freedom of the press (whatever that is in a plutocracy).
But concerning the kidnapping and black ops angle, the Democrats of the Leftist propaganda arm have been notorious for covering up Islamic attacks and violence. Partially because the journalists cave when a jihadist threatens them.
So since this has already happened, all one has to do is feed the journalists false information and threaten them, using jihadists as the cover, and the Left will downplay or overplay things. If they do not, they risk having their homes guarded 24/7 by security guards and their children at risk, which they, being the Elite Propagandists they are, didn’t get into the business for. Money, wealth, fame, and self satisfaction is what they desire. Dying isn’t.
They taunt Christian fundamentalists and goad them, because they know Christians won’t kill them very hard, fast, or commonly. Islamics, however, they know to be dangerous.
While it would be against American principles to use intimidation on the press like Putin’s assassins use, it would be a certain gray area to use the Left’s allies, Islamic jihad, against the Left. Their weaknesses are very clear and apparent. Since the Left already caves to Islamic pressure and threats, it wouldn’t be too far afield to fabricate Islamic threats and back it up with real false flag operations. Kidnapping and release of a few journalists, using Islamic videos as cover, would back up any threats they might not take seriously.
As a side effect, even if the Leftist propaganda arm does not cave or goes back on their promise to honor black mail, the Islamics will get violent and angry at them. Which accomplishes another goal, even if the primary goal is a failure. Thus one wins in a strategic vise, where no matter what the enemy does, they lose. The art of war isn’t about giving one’s enemies the choice of winning or losing: they should only be able to choose losing due to dying or losing due to surrender.
Divide and conquer is not merely a tactic used by other people. All one has to do is to take up the weapon, at least for those that recognize they are in a war not of their own choosing.
I recall being dragged into a number of arguments with indignant leftists who were outraged at the supposed ‘pack of lies’ being spread about their great patriot who was then hopefully ‘reporting for duty’.
The Swift Boat Veterans pointed out that Kerry had a problem with the truth. “Untrue!” said his defenders.
“Ok. When exactly was Kerry in Cambodia?” I asked. “Which Christmas was it?”
“Homophobe !” one shouted. “Bush is an idiot” yelled another. “You repukes are all the same” replied yet another.
I have of course conflated a couple of conversations and added an Internet political discussion board exchange but everyone gets the point.
The recall-provoking mention of Kerry’s time served in country also reminds me of another aspect to all this. I hadn’t seen, or hadn’t noticed it mentioned initially, but in constructing a timeline for myself, a ‘Kerry in country’ figure like that given above by Neoconscum became apparent.
When I remarked on that, the replies I got clued me in on another fact of modern political life; progressives, or those I’ve met, seem to have an almost color-blind-like inability to grasp the significance of a simple timeline, in much the same way they seem to have trouble comprehending the concept of causality.
The Progressive Mind Time-Line Problem was also very evident in the Valerie Plame/Joe Wilson controversy. The objective sequence of events rebutted Wilson’s claims. When dated internal memoranda proved that Joe Wilson’s assertions regarding the development of his “jaunt” to Niger could not have been true, the result was an uncomprehending or indifferent shrug from Wilson’s defenders.
Those who wanted to hang Cheney for treason were similarly unperturbed when it turned out that Richard Armitage, a Colin Powell underling and infamous gossip, was the one who “outed” Plame’s name to Novak. Nonetheless, it was still somehow all Cheney’s doing.
This all also reminds me of another of those exchanges I’ve had with the “mail lady”; who was just in the office a little while ago. A few days past she was remarking on some event in the news (she’s an ardent liberal with a Canadian background) and she brought up “lynching” for some reason.
I said, “Not to minimize, but just out of curiosity how many lynchings do you think took place in the last century?”
“Oh, I don’t know”, she said, “it must have been millions!”
“Do you mean that literally? Millions?”
“Yes, it was millions!”
“How could that possibly be? How could the the African American population even survive with the lynching of millions of the men?” Do you know that the published figures are probably under 10,000?”
“What? Oh, well, lots were probably never reported and no records were kept. Gotta go …”
Thus ended yet another conversation with a self-identified progressive.
Most people refuse to change or recognize they have a problem until they hit rock bottom. Alcoholics, drug users, various other problem people.
So why do Leftists never change? Why should they, when they live in mansions and the ATF is sniffing all over your place to begin with?
Hammer the Left, for real, and you’ll change people’s minds. Not the other way around.
I followed the Swift Boat controversy myself, as a mil-blogger. I live in a military town, such as it is, and I didn’t know a Vietnam-era veteran who didn’t despise John Kerry for his Winter Soldier antics. And then to have him build his campaign on having been a stout patriot and war hero … that was just jaw-droppingly inept on the part of his campaign staff.
He made his career by blackening the name of his fellow veterans and perpetuating lies about what they had done in Vietnam. How he ever came to think that veterans wouldn’t remember being calumniated passes belief.
Look, military people still despise Hanoi Jane Fonda, and it’s been half a century and she’s barely made a movie in decades. But even the young recruits know about her – my daughter the two-hitch Marine knew about her, because she has entered into Marine recruit lore. The military culture has a long, long memory and it’s perpetuated over decades.
His salute upon accepting the nomination sucked nickels, too. I could practically hear the exploding heads of the Air Force DIs at Lackland AFB all the way to my house. I am only grateful that he was dubbed Secretary of State, and not of Defense. I can only suppose that some soberer heads prevailed when a Kerry nomination for that position was brought up.
The Latin word sic is used to indicate that a source has been quoted correctly and that an error in spelling/grammar is not to be blamed on the person reporting the quote.
While the email might contain falsities, no one would ever accuse you of misquoting the words/phrases that you called out. Deploying sic in this way is obnoxious at best and nasty at worst (not in your case, obviously).
Finally, I am of the school of thought which believes that noting the electronic source of the quote (an email) obviates the need to mark errors at all–manually transcribing an email into a blog post would be highly unusual. Occasionally one sees a blogger gleefully marking up poor writing in quoted comments or posts. That’s when it gets nasty, and it’s sickening to behold.
The Democrats betrayed the US troops, cut funding to our allies in Vietnam to spite Nixon and Republicans, and increased funding for their domestic projects and bribe funds using stolen military funding.
Now they come to the national stage and take pride in their victory and declare themselves War Heroes of the US-Vietnam conflict?
Certainly Democrats can claim to be war heroes for the Viet Cong… but come on, trying to say that they didn’t enjoy watching the Fall of Saigon, spitting and throwing feces at the returning troops, taunting them with their defeat, is something indeed.
Their atrocious arrogance and their war crime based atrocities are beyond the pale. Their humanity lessens in my eyes minute by minute.
This process that empowers criminals and outcasts in society can
work even better when institutionalized as policy by revolutionary
organization, armies, and governments. North Vietnam and its
Vietcong proxies represent one force that blatantly used atrocity
as a policy and was triumphant because of it. In 1959, 250 South
Vietnamese officials were assassinated by the Vietcong. The Vietcong
found that assassination was easy, it was cheap, and it worked.
A year later this toll of murder and horror went up to 1,400, and
it continued for twelve more years.
….A squad with a death order entered the house of a prominent
community leader and shot him, his wife, his married son, and
daughter-in-law, a male and female servant and their baby. The
family cat was strangled, the family dog was clubbed to death, and
the goldfish scooped out of the fishbowl and tossed onto the floor.
When the communists left, no life remained in the house – a
“family unit” had been eliminated.
–Jim Graves
“The Tangled Web”
The reason why the US will produce “better death squads than Vietnam or Iraq combined” is a lot of things really, but partially because normal humans will only tolerate so much inhumane crimes and crimes against humanity on the part of Americans representing America’s elite leadership class.
This use of terror is effective, at least in the short run. But in the long run it tends to engender effective vengeance and suppression. Humanity cannot long sustain such psychopaths and out of control insurgent murderers. Vietnam was cleansed of effective resistance, partially with the help of Democrats. But who will the Leftist alliance use to do their dirty work in the US with 150 million potential insurgents to fight against?
Do they really think their atrocities won’t come back and bite them.
Judging by Kerry, the answer is yes We Can.