Reply #13: I scanned it at Borders or Barnes & Nobles [View All]

[karynnj]

(unusually I just routinely covered it with a good book - though I stopped that when someone pointed out that doing that added work.

Your RW friend sounds like he is pretty intelligent. The book is simply charge after charge after charge and some contradict each other - and none seem even close to reality. Even when they were in the mainstream media, these guys were insane - Thur low (appox name) who was another LT in the situation where Kerry got his Bronze star for saving Rassman claimed there was no fire - yet his own medal referred to gunfire. He also claimed he decided that Kerry was just there for a political career and that his goal was to get 3 Purple hearts quickly.

The most interesting things to me about it have nothing to do with the lies per se. The structure of what they did is fascinating.

- the accounts from the people pulled in were, per the book, all submitted with affidavits saying the account was true.
- There are literally 100s of charges
- for people with nothing other than "they served in Vietnam with Kerry" the phrase was literally true both were in Vietnam. (they may never have been within 50 miles of each other.
- things were distorted. There is a photo of Kerry in the VN war museum - but McCain was in the picture too. (He was a 50 yr old Senator - but the picture is a fuzzy shot from a distance. Odd that the Vietnamese give him more credit than then the Democratic president in the early 1990s.)

The reason that is interesting is that if you look at early smear campaigns - a charge or a small number of charges were made and they were responded to. Here, it seems to me like a cluster bomb with hundreds of little charges - some almost meaningless others in effect would make him a war criminal. The media ignored Kerry's attempt to defeat them in an inclusive generic way - they were contrary to the official record. The problem is that even in defeating dozens of charges - a few media stories essentially said if there are this many charges, something has to be true.

The affidavits are interesting as I assume they would protect the 2 creeps behind this - as they coud say that all these people swore to these things.

However, the key thing is it would not have worked without a complicit media.