Interesting to consider lies of the past....

Dec 21, 2012
Kerry's Nomination And The Return Of Swift Boats
By Charles P. Pierce

Photo Illustration by

DonkeyHotey via Flickr/Special to The Politics Blog

It appears quite clear now that John Kerry is going to be the next Secretary Of State, and the whole business is already crazy-making. Reporting the news this morning, CNN mentioned that Kerry had been the subject of attacks on his military record in 2004, when he was the Democratic candidate for president in 2004. There was no mention of the fact that all those attacks were completely spurious, having had no basis in fact. If this is going to be the pattern of the coverage of Kerry's nomination going forward, we're all in for another ride on the Swift Boats, god help us.

Kerry is a good, safe choice for the job. He has made an entire Senate career out of taking on foreign-policy issues that nobody else — except Gary Hart — ever wanted to touch. He led the way in normalizing diplomatic relations with Vietnam at a time in which H. Ross Perot was still running around the country talking about thousands of American POW's in camps in Laos, and while the country was filling the theaters watching Sly Stallone as John Rambo, doing as good a job of revising that sad episode in American history as can be expected from an actor who sat out the war as the chaperone at a girls' school in Switzerland. He took on the rat's nest at the Bank Of Commerce And Credit International, when BCCI was laundering money for whoever came through the door, and when BCCI also had bought enough politicians in Washington that Kerry and his investigators were pretty much out there alone. Here's a bit on that from a profile I did back in 2004.

In the Senate, throughout the 1980s, Kerry made his mark spelunking down the darkest caverns of what had become a reinvigorated secret government. He chased the illicit aid to the contra rebels in Nicaragua and the byzantine operations of a bank called BCCI, a sort of international ATM for black ops. And he did so alone, as far outside in the clubby world of the Senate as he ever had been in Massachusetts. "This was a bad case of bubonic plague," says Jack Blum, Kerry's investigator through those years. One prominent Democratic senator tried to sabotage Kerry's investigations, and the Republicans, riding Ronald Reagan's popularity, went after him as harshly as the Nixon people ever did. In fact, it is a kind of unprecedented historical parlay that John Kerry's name appears both on Nixon's White House tapes and in the notebooks of Oliver North. For Kerry, the investigations were pure reform politics, but they also were leavened with a respect for what happens when people are tricked away from their investment in their government. "It's antithetical to everything we are," he explains. "A government with secrets is accountable; a secret government is not. And when that happens, the American people are cheated of what is rightly theirs."

This is a man who knows where the bodies have been buried for the past 30 years and, yes, he voted for the Iraq war, which was a terrible mistake that he fumbled trying to explain, but if you're casting about for a Democratic Secretary Of State from his generation of Democratic politicians, Kerry is the natural choice, even if you find the way he came to be nominated, through the slandering of Susan Rice, distasteful, as I do.

(And, yes, this likely means the return of Senator McDreamy to the national political stage, although he trashed his own brand pretty thoroughly up here in the Commonwealth -- God save it! -- and Teddy Kennedy, Jr. is an intriguing possibility, as is stepmother, Vicki. I still think Scott Brown should wait a few years and run for governor myself, and, not that it would matter to me, but if he hasn't shredded Eric Fehrnstrom's phone number into a thousand pieces and chucked the pieces into Cape Cod Bay, I don't like his chances this time around, either.)

But the key is the Swift Boats. If some senator brings it up — or, worse, if some of the old poolroom liars are trotted in front of the Senate committee sitting on Kerry's nomination — and if the courtier press doesn't emphasize at every moment that everything that was said about John Kerry and Vietnam in the 2004 presidential campaign was a lie and an embarrassment to American politics and the American media, then we have on our hands yet another case of journalistic malpractice, and we have had enough of those, thank you. Those people should be ignored. The "controversy" should be relegated to the guy with the pompadour on the Ancient Aliens TV show. Here's the nut graf — and I do mean "nut" -- from the CNN.com report.

The Vietnam experience came back to haunt Kerry during the 2004 presidential election. A Republican-funded group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth aired campaign ads accusing him of lying to receive two of his five combat decorations and criticizing his anti-war activism. The incumbent Bush won the Electoral College vote 292 to 252 and racked up 3 million more votes than Kerry nationwide.

It must have had some truth because, look, it worked! We still have such terrible problems.

Read more: John Kerry Secretary of State Nomination - Kerry's Nomination And The Return Of The Swift Boats - Esquire http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/john-kerry-secretary-of-state-nomination-122112#ixzz2FpG9ShTB