Kerry Calls Swift Boat Liars Bluff, Will They Come Clean?

[kerrygoddess]

John Kerry’s newly released Form 180 records revealed yesterday that there were no deep, dark secrets hiding in Kerry’s previously unreleased military records as the Swift Boat Liars had claimed. The Boston Globe noted that these newly released records prove what the Kerry campaign ascertained all along, that all of Kerry’s records were made available in April 2004. It does appear that the conspiracy theories have been disproved, yet again.

Now we’ll watch the spin on the right and the left once again and see where this story leads us. Sadly, along with the right-wing blogs spinning this story yesterday, there were left-wing blogs blowing it out of proportion as well. Evidently some on the left enjoy helping the right-wing, as I mentioned here Tuesday. The Leftcoaster is claiming “vanity” as the answer to why Kerry did not previously release his Form 180 records, noting that the news generated from this story yesterday is the spin on Kerry’s grades at Yale as opposed to his military record.

And of course, the vitriol from the right-wing continues in wake of the release of Kerry’s records, including a call from one blog for the Boston Globe to release all the records on their website as a PDF and another who has written the Globe’s ombudsman asking for verification of what is in the records. What we have not seen from the right-wing or the Swift Boat Liars is any sort of acknowledgement that they were wrong. Not that we expected that we would.

The right-wing Disinformation Society is hard at work spinning more spew over this issue. Aside from the media’s attention yesterday on the “grades” story further examples of the right-wing spin can be found here (including a statement from Kerry nemesis John O’Neill), here, here, here and here. So tight is the Republican hold on the spin that the reality is, as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. said in his Vanity Fair article in May – The Disinformation Society, “No matter who the Democratic nominee was, this machinery had the capacity to discredit and destroy him.”

The Swift Boat Liars have never had anything solid on John Kerry, nor has the right-wing for that matter. In lieu of real dirt, the next best alternative of course is to sling synthetic mud. And when that does not stick, sling more synthetic mud. Now they are slipping and sliding in their own nasty mess, like a bunch of sorry mud wrestlers and they cannot come clean on this with out a whole mess of lye soap. Not even lye soap will wash away the fact that a few men saw fit to besmirch the military record of American war hero, a candidate for president, a seated senator of the United States. It is the Swift Boat Liars, who are covered in dirt here, not John Kerry.

As a Kerry spokesperson pointed out yesterday morning, off the record, now Kerry has “called the Swift Boat Liars' bluff and let's see if they will come clean about THEIR records.”

And, for that matter, when will Bush be releasing all of his records?

LINKS on LUTD - http://www.lightupthedarkness.org/blog/default.asp?view=plink&id=1035

[Mass]

1. They are already saying this is not the whole record

and that he should make the record available to them directly, and not to the Boston Globe.

They want his private records as well.

This shows how the claims some have had that signing the form would end the story was too optimistic.

[whometense]

2. I hate to sully this forum by asking,

but do you have a link for that? Or is it the usual axis of Drudge-NewsMax-Freeperville?

[Mass]

3. Sure

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-kerry8jun08,0,3048402.story?coll=la-home-nation

But a former Swift boat officer who led the Navy veterans' bitter public campaign against Kerry demanded more Tuesday, saying that the file was incomplete.

"We asked him to universally release his entire file, and what we've seen instead is a parceling out of incomplete records," said John O'Neill, a Houston lawyer who was a founder of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. The group last year mounted a well-bankrolled advertising campaign to undermine Kerry's wartime pedigree.

O'Neill expressed doubt that Kerry's latest document release included material from the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis. But David Wade, a Kerry spokesman, said that the request to Navy Personnel Command to release documents extended to all government record repositories.

In a phone interview from Houston, O'Neill said the Swift boat group was pressing for information about three unresolved controversies from the 2004 race: Kerry's disputed contention that his Swift boat had entered Cambodian waters about December 1968; wording discrepancies among several versions of Kerry's medal commendations; and a perceived lag between Kerry's discharge from the Navy in 1970 and a later departure date in 1978.

"If he made a true universal release of his records and not through selective journalists, maybe we could get to the records that would answer some of these questions," O'Neill said. "If there were orders, for example, that sent him to Cambodia, they should be in his file."

Navy archives are sometimes incomplete, and Kerry's latest document release contained no new information on any of those controversies. But it did include the missing first page of a two-page evaluation from 1969. That document indicated that Kerry would have been selected for "accelerated promotion" and described him as "one of the top few" in his officer group — the highest rank available.

[karynnj]

4. This shows that had they done this during the election,

All it would have done was draw more attention to this circus. His 3 unresolved questions show how disingenuous O'Neil is.

The US was knowingly breaking international law, I doubt they wrote orders and filed them for each sailor sent. Every history book records that we crossed the border. Kerry, at worst, erred on the date he went into Cambodia in a Senate speech made in the late 80s against covert action in Central America. Being off nearly 20 years later by a couple of months - which didn't impact the point he was making - when talking about events that likely became a blur in his mind even when they happened certainly wouldn't be the biggest mistake ever made in the Senate.

Where Kerry might have erred on a date, O'Neil LIED by saying that he (O"Neil) never went to Cambodia and you couldn't, although he was caught on Nixon's tapes telling Nixon about going to Cambodia.

It's too bad Kerry was given that 2nd page in the mountain of stuff he had, although it's obvious that wouldn't have made a difference because none of this was genuine. It does make there claim that all fitness reports sound good and if you knew how to read them he was bad.

[whometense]

5. And meanwhile,

who here is holding their breath waiting to see the Swift Liars' complete records? Not to mention the shrub's.

[kerrygoddess]

6. well the media won't call for that

It would help if some liberal blogs did!