A reminder about the definition of “Swift-Boating”
(hat tip to commenter txvet2)
A reminder to conservatives: “Swift-Boating” does not equal smearing.
Swift-Boating means exposing hard truths about corrupt Democrats.
By using “Swift-Boating” in the context of the John McCain/NYT story, you are doing a grave disservice to the Swift Boat Veterans who courageously told the untold truths about John Kerry that the mainstream media wanted buried.
This is a no-no–made all the more surprising by the fact that the conservative quoted in the article spearheaded communications for the Swift Boat Vets:
Greg Mueller, a veteran Republican strategist, said conservatives would side with McCain against the paper they love to hate.
“The New York Times is trying to swift-boat McCain,” Mueller said. “This is the first real salvo of the general election. Certainly, the Times cannot complain about a negative general election campaign since they fired the first shot.
“It was a poor and revealing attempt by The New York Times to try and smear McCain at a time when he is starting to define Obama as a inexperienced liberal, so The New York Time takes up for Obama’s defense. If anything, this helps energize conservatives to come to McCain’s aide in beating back attacks by The New York Times and other liberal MSM outlets.”
I hope this was a misquote.
***
Make sure you order a copy of To Set The Record Straight. Send one to your local newspaper editor–or to the next commentator or political operative whom you spot distorting the Swift Boat Veterans’ legacy.
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Trackbacks
- “Swift-Boating” Does not equal smearing…it equals telling the unpopular truth. | Pierre Legrand's Pink Flamingo Bar
- Michelle Malkin » Doing right by the Swift Boat Veterans
- The Meaning of Swift-Boating « That’s Elbert With An “E”
- Rant, Monkey, Rant! » Take back the term: “swift-boating” [Updated]
- Swift-Boating Obama « Jon Taplin’s Blog
- Election 2008: Pick a race card, any race card [Karl]
- Never Yet Melted » Preemption Underway by Obama Camp
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Categories: Dan Rather, Rathergate, Swift Boat Vets
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I believe the term they seek is “railroading.”
My nose plugs are failing me.
I thought “Swiftboating” meant having credible, rock-solid Americans tell the truth about a candidate. I would be honored to be Swiftboated.
…or their minions
The New York Times and it’s editors need to be Swift Boated.
Excellent point Michelle.
Here, I’ll fix it for them:
The verb they are looking for is “Bork”; the shameless smearing of a Republican by liberals.
“The New York Times is trying to bork McCain,”
#4 Swift Boated and waterboarded.
The director of communications for the Swift Boat campaign can’t tell the difference between tarring the reputation of a decorated veteran who volunteered to serve his country and a cheap political smear? Go figure. Could it be that he never saw the difference in the first place?
Maybe he was misquoted. I know that never happens , but maybe just this once. Or was this quote from a videotaped interview?
Coinkydinky, one of Zsa Zsa Huffinton’s unpaid lunatics is fullminating about the meaning of swift boating.
“Democrats remain obsessed with stopping ’swiftboating’ and ending the smears”, he huffs. =) I’m so sure…
Talk about alternative universes.
ACHefty …
Staying with the nautical theme the term “Scuttling” comes to mind …
#7 jsr.
I agree with you. To “swift-boat” someone is to tell the cold, hard truth about someone who is trying to pretend they’re something they’re not.
To “Bork” someone is to attack them in the most shameless, low-down, dirty way possible.
NYT attempted to “Bork” McCain.
To point out McCain’s lack of conservative credentials would, then, be to “Swift-Boat” him.
Perhaps we can look to this “strategist” to answer how McCain became the Republican candidate in the first place?
I read “To Set The Record Straight” some weeks back, and loved reliving the history. Highly recommended.
Yep, McCain can only be “swiftboated” by the right, not the left. He can only be “Borked ” by the left, not the right. Whew! New English can be very confusing.
A reminder to conservatives? Not this conservative.
I will never forget the day Jon Cary was outed or the Americans who outed him, GOD Bless them!
That speech he gave before Congress in his uniform is forever burned in my memory. Jon Cary is at home in Mass.
Keep wishin’ and hopin’. This conservative is NOT moved! LOL.
Incidentally, where are Kerry’s records that he promised to release?
Oh, lest we forget, McCain condemned the Swift Boat veterans. He called the ads of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth “dishonest and dishonorable.”
Thus proving that McCain needs a good Borking. I know, I know, but it sounds so much worse than swiftboating.
They were. They were the lowest form of campaign politics. I hope the nation doesn’t indulge those kind of nasty attacks again.
Reality is what it is. Christmas in Cambodia? Give me a break!
I appreciated the Swiftees and have never heard of them being rebutted. I do recall a threat to sue them by Kerry but for some reason that never materialized. Don’t you wonder why Fco?
I will agree that we do not need nasty attacks if you agree we do not need anybody like Jon Cary acting like he is some kind of war hero.
Real swiftboating is done by veterans, including former POWs and Congressional Medal of Honor recipients based on their direct first-hand knowledge.
I don’t agree with the man’s politics. But any man who volunteers to fight for his country, then goes on to earn a silver star, bronze star and 3 purple hearts is a hero in my book.
Maybe they lose all respect once their policies contradict ours. Or you gleefully give the benefit of the doubt to a politically motivated group looking to bring down the opposition’s candidate during an election year. Your choice. I’m sure it’s reasonable to believe Kerry was a coward in between the times the army acknowledges he saved his fellow soldiers lives.
Personally, I don’t see any difference between the swiftboaters and the “betray us” ad architects. They are both the sort of people who are unable to intelligently address issues and resort to the worst form of mudslinging to hurt their opponents.
You can expect the quality of our leadership to go down as long as attacks like this are acceptable and influential.
Soap – notice how thick the trolls have been the past couple of days?
Fco – for your information, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were and are not a political organization. They only wanted to get their side of the story out after almost 40 years of silence. FYI, I have friends whose names are on the Wall who might not be there if it wasn’t for the lies told by John Kerry and Hanoi Jane.
Only a liberal would think that telling the truth was a nasty attack.
“I don’t agree with the man’s politics. But any man who volunteers to fight for his country, then goes on to earn a silver star, bronze star and 3 purple hearts is a hero in my book.”
The issue is that he axaggerated and misrepresented the incidents to get those medals, including 1 Purple Heart for a self inflicted wound by very minor shrapnel of his own fire against an unarmed civilian fishingboat and no presence of armed enemy combatants.
Kerry was treated for the wound at a medical facility in Cam Ranh Bay. The doctor who treated Kerry, Louis Letson, is today a retired general practitioner in Alabama. Letson says he remembers his brief encounter with Kerry 35 years ago because “some of his crewmen related that Lt. Kerry had told them that he would be the next JFK from Massachusetts.” Letson says that last year, as the Democratic campaign began to heat up, he told friends that he remembered treating one of the candidates many years ago. In response to their questions, Letson says, he wrote down his recollections of the time. (Letson says he has had no contacts with anyone from the Bush campaign or the Republican party.) What follows is Letson’s memory, as he wrote it.
“I have a very clear memory of an incident which occurred while I was the Medical Officer at Naval Support Facility, Cam Ranh Bay.
John Kerry was a (jg), the OinC or skipper of a Swift boat, newly arrived in Vietnam. On the night of December 2, he was on patrol north of Cam Ranh, up near Nha Trang area. The next day he came to sick bay, the medical facility, for treatment of a wound that had occurred that night.
The story he told was different from what his crewmen had to say about that night. According to Kerry, they had been engaged in a fire fight, receiving small arms fire from on shore. He said that his injury resulted from this enemy action.
Some of his crew confided that they did not receive any fire from shore, but that Kerry had fired a mortar round at close range to some rocks on shore. The crewman thought that the injury was caused by a fragment ricocheting from that mortar round when it struck the rocks.
That seemed to fit the injury which I treated.
What I saw was a small piece of metal sticking very superficially in the skin of Kerry’s arm. The metal fragment measured about 1 cm. in length and was about 2 or 3 mm in diameter. It certainly did not look like a round from a rifle.
I simply removed the piece of metal by lifting it out of the skin with forceps. I doubt that it penetrated more than 3 or 4 mm. It did not require probing to find it, did not require any anesthesia to remove it, and did not require any sutures to close the wound.
The wound was covered with a bandaid.
Not [sic] other injuries were reported and I do not recall that there was any reported damage to the boat.”
MM-HMM. They just waited for his presidential run to get the urge to speak the truth. Don’t kid yourself, they had one goal in mind, to hurt his presidential aspirations.
I don’t know who’s lying. I will say that if I have to believe one man’s military decorations vs. what ANYONE from the opposition says during an election year, it’s an easy choice for me.
I’m sorry about your friends. If Kerry lied or his activism led to their tragedy, then that’s at least a valid issue to bring up.
PS: If the troll comment was in reference to me, then this forum needs more dissent.
Besides, Kerry gave congressional testimony about his normal daily military duties- and the way he told it was as something to be ashamed of and he threw his dishonorably earned medals over the White House fence as a personal protest.
How can he now invoke the same period of military service of committing those acts as something to be proud of today?
You cant give him credit for being antimilitary in a dishonorable war, but then give him credit for being loyal and heroic in an honorable- when it is the same time period and the same war. He is playing the same brief service to get antimilitary and unAmerican credit with liberals, and then turning around to get promilitary and patriotic credit for the same acts that he committed and took credit/blame for.
He milked full credit at the time when troops were being spit upon and called babykillers by being antimilitary. I cant understand giving him credit for the opposite now in addition to the adoration, attention, money, and power that he gained for his former position, just because he is invoking whatever side of the issue is most popular.
If he witnessed, stood by, or personally committed warcrimes on a daily basis- as he testified to Congress then how can he get honorable credit for it now?
Real heros don’t claim more medals than they deserve. They usually have fewer. Take my sister’s fiance. He was stationed at the Khobar Towers when it was blown up. He dragged his roommate from the building who had been by the window. His roommate was full of glass shards. My sister’s fiance lost his hearing totally at first and had a hearing deficit which was permanent. He was offered the purple heart, but refused. He said too many suffered grave injuries and died in the attack to claim a medal for hearing loss. Now that’s a hero!
Fco, I suggest you get a copy of the book Michelle mentions at the top – and another one, which might pique your interest is called “Unfit for Command”. It was not that Kerry was running for POTUS that enraged them so much as that he was not and is not fit to be the Commander-in-Chief of the United States Armed Forces.
The Swifties never bothered to come out before, since after they came back from Vietnam, they just went on with their lives, and became useful, productive citizens. It was when John Kerry brought up his Vietnam service that they came forth with the TRUTH.
John Kerry has never, to this day, refuted any of the charges made against him. He can’t – they were nothing more than the truth. If he had tried to take the Swifties to court, the truth would have come out and hurt him even more. I was called a baby-killer, and I never set foot in Vietnam. I served elsewhere.
Before you go denigrating the Swifties, at least take the time to read the book. Then you will have a place to argue from.
Well, yes, because he made his Vietnam service and a cornerstone of his campaign, thereby making it fair game for examination.
cpodug beat me to it, Fco. The “Swift-Boaters” came along at exactly the time we needed them. They didn’t pipe up before because Kerry wasn’t close to running the whole country.
When he got close, they simply decided they couldn’t sit on the sidelines any more.
As for the Troll comment, we get quite a bit of dissent around here. Some are Trolls, and some, on occasion, bring up valid points. Hang around for a while and you’ll see what I mean.
Fco, Don’t you see the difference in telling sea tales in a bar and using them to become POTUS?
FCO,
Did you read the book or do you just WANT to believe Jon Cary is some kinda superman who saved his buddies?
Sure the ads were timed during Cary’s Presidential campaign. Why not expose a fraud during that time. Jon Cary must have known he would get exposed at that time.
Another good point made earlier was Cary promised to release his records but has not. Anybody who is proud of their service record would have no problems doing so. Smells of a man who has something to hide and hide he does – in Mass. where people will elect someone like him and keep Kennedy in office.
News has it that a helicopter with John Kerry on it when down in Afganistan…no injuries reported. I wonder if Kerry will petition the military, or even the President for some type of medal? I can’t wait to hear his harrowing story of bravery in the conquered lands of Ghengis Khan.
Seriously though, I’m glad everyone is alright.
…it should have read “went down”…sorry!
#39 – the facts are probably that by saying a helicopter ‘went down’ in Afghanistan [with John Kerry on it], they really meant it just landed safely. Kerry still would appreciate a medal though, and he’ll manufacture a really good tale to support it.
Speaking of swift-boating, whatever happened to that democrat, Jefferson, who had all that bribe money? I guess that was buried; never to be seen again. A fine example of Pelosi’s pledge for a noncorrupt government, I guess.
Fco
It’s amazing that you give such credit to Kerry for those listed medals, and yet you give no credit to:
Retired Captain James H. Warner — a Marine who was held in North Vietnam for five years, five months — is a recipient of the Legion of Merit, two Bronze Stars, two Purple Hearts, 11 Air Medals and the Navy Commendation Medal
Retired Colonel Leo K. Thorsness — a Vietnam Air Force veteran and recipient of the Medal of Honor, Silver Star, six Distinguished Flying Crosses, 10 Air Medals, two Purple Hearts and the Good Conduct Medal — spent five years and 19 days as a POW.
Retired Air Force veteran Captain Kevin McManus — who received the Silver Star, Legion of Merit, Bronze Star, Distinguished flying Cross, Air Medal and Purple Heart — spent five years and eight months in the prison camps.
Retired Lt. Ralph E. Gaither, U.S. Air Force veteran and author of With God in a POW Camp, spent more than seven years as a POW.
Retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Robinson Risner, who fought in World War II, Korea and Vietnam, won two Air Force Crosses, Distinguished Service Medal, two Silver Stars, three Distinguished Flying Crosses, the Bronze Star and eight Air Medals. Risner remembers how the anti-American demonstrators gladdened his captors’ hearts during his seven years, four months as a POW in Vietnam:
Texas Representative Sam Johnson has also explained how the Vietnamese used Kerry’s words against prisoners like himself in Vietnam.
It isnt his military service or his medals that you respect, but his unAmerican and antimilitary attacks in addtion to his liberal political positions.
Otherwise his military decorations that you claim to respect are completely dwarfed by those that were attacked by him during and post Vietnam era. Amazing that you give no value to the service and the word of former POWs and Congressional Medal of Honor recipients that contradict him.
I care about language and I hate to see a term like swiftboating misused, but I’m afraid it’s had a permanent change of meaning. Language changes, but what’s unfortunate about this case is that if the term is used to mean a baseless attack, people come to believe that the original was also a baseless attack. As someone upthread pointed out, Kerry has never refuted the claims in the book. Borking would be a much better term.
BTW, I think you could use either term without the partisan baggage. You could certainly bork a liberal or swiftboat a conservative.
Also, I might point out that there is nothing in the military more sacred than the “chain of command” that goes from the lowest recruit to the President of the United States.
Consider this, then – EVERY ONE OF KERRY’S SUPERIORS IN VIETNAM REFUTED HIS CLAIMS!
Kerry threatened to sue the SBVFT and said that he would release his records to prove his story. So far, the hasnt released the records and does not want facts to come out in a court case though. Why doesnt he realse facts and welcome his day in court to prove himself?
John Kerry, Ted Kennedy, Ray Nagin, Gerry Studds, Gary Condit, William Jefferson, Marion Barry, the Clintons…. democrats dont care about corruption and openly support and re-elect murderers, thieves, drug addicts, child molesters, and bribe takers.
It isnt about their quality or their guilt/innocence but just their polical affiliation that excuses all for Dems- regardless of evidence, witness testimony, and even DNA evidence.
If swiftboating is telling the truth against Democrats, here is a great example:
http://www.vietnamveteransagainstjohnmccain.com/
I don’t give credit to Kerry, I give credit to the army who awarded him the medals. Again, this comes down to what you give preference to, the army, or election year campaing revelations.
You don’t know me. All I want is some fairness and decency in an election. These sorts of treasure hunts into people’s pasts are driving good people away from public office. On both sides.
Uh, Fco, Kerry was in the Navy.
Right. Sorry.
You’re right about one thing, Fco. I, too, want fairness and decency in an election. Starting with the candidates not lying! Especially not about something as important as serving our country.
So which military veteran are you guys supporting for President in this election?
Reclaim the language!
The Swifties told the truth!
Whenever you feel the urge to buy into the Liberal word coinage of SwiftBoating, use this instead:
Smeared=WinterSoldiered
Smearing=WinterSoldiering
Backed up with one of Kerrys’ patented Purple Heart winning self inflicted finger-scratch “wounds”, no doubt.
He is also wrong about veteran’s opposition to Kerry and his shameful antics as being “recent”.
Winter Soldier Timeline
But ya can’t get ‘em all right….
ROFL
Who gives a carp about little details!
Gotta admit, though, soap, he sowed the wind, and reaped a mighty whirlwind!