Telling the truth shouldn’t deserve a thank you, but you’re welcome.

You’ll need to pick up that torch of truth though — Illinois Review finally decided they’d rather stew in their own broth of half-truths, innuendo and over-the-top malarkey.

LaComb banned me after almost a year of allowing honest, if heated, debate. Spineless and pathetic.

I wouldn’t be surprised if their next step is spending a few days to scrub off all my posts just out of spite.

Jill “Apparently She Likes Porn” Stanek and John “Wouldn’t Know the Truth if it Bit Him in the Arse” Ruskin already have a head start since they’re so delete-happy.

Two things, first the Media Matters site simply is a good place to find the placeholders for the stories–in these cases everything was reported in newspapers and fairly well covered.

The last point, we don’t disagree that much–I can see how the average voter got that belief and Kerry was a crappy candidate for exactly this reason. It’s the same the truth will win out crap that the Dukakis campaign should have taught him to know better about.

As far as some of the records you allude to, that’s why the Swift Vets wanted to see ALL the records. It is their belief that Kerry hyped some of the after action reports. All Kerry had to do is release them and if he was right, he could have destroyed the story.

I never said Kerry or the doctor give out the purple hearts. the doctor who treated him said kerry asked him to recommend him for a purple heart.

Your point about the madrassa is not true. That little story barely made it out in the media and never penetrated much.

I can’t personally vouch for any of the Swift Boat veterans’ stories, or Kerry’s for that matter. I can comment on the media mischaracterizing their contentions as being largely discredited. It’s just not true. And, again, I’ll make a point that apparently you don’t dispute. The true power of the Swift Boat Veterans was their genuine belief that Kerry betrayed them after the war. That’s what had an emotional impact on American voters. And the image of Kerry inventing atrocities in front of Congress in order to launch his political career.

The stuff about the medals was probably hard for people to sort out and I’m sure independent minded people gave Kerry the benefit of the doubt on those points.

But look at it objectively. These guys were challenging Kerry’s honor and the centerpiece moment in his life. Kerry just shrugged his shoulders, refused to release records and refused to answer questions about it. You can’t blame a voter for believing the Swift vets might be right.

One paragraph later, Hurt errs more explicitly, writing that it was the award of his third Purple Heart on March 13, 1969, “that let Mr. Kerry request a transfer out of Vietnam and into a desk job eight months before his tour expired.” Again, as we noted yesterday, Navy regulations at the time specified that any trooper wounded three times be reassigned outside of Vietnam (soldiers, including Kerry, did get to request specific new assignments). Such a reassignment could be stopped only by a soldier’s request.

Dan, soldiers don’t ask to be considered for the Purple Heart and doctors don’t award them.

===I may have be off on some spellings. They all dispute much of the official account. that’s why the records were so important.

You are completely confusing the lies Dan–the issue in the Rasmussen save was whether Kerry fled and whether there was fire at the time he pulled Rasmussen out. Even though Thurlow claimed it didn’t happen like that, the documentary evidence from Thurlow’s citation states it exactly as Rasmussen, Kerry, Sandusky, and Langoffer. One guy recanted saying he didn’t understand the affidavit. The records were released on this incident and they support Kerry.

===O’Neill is a Democrat.
Dan, do you check anything the SBV claimed?

”
“Media Matters for America has extensively documented O’Neill’s long-standing Republican ties. (As a guest on Scarborough Country, MSNBC senior political analyst Lawrence O’Donnell Jr. noted that both O’Neill and Buchanan have ties to the GOP that date back to Chuck Colson and the Nixon administration: “I’m wondering if you [Buchanan] met him in 1971 when he [O'Neill] was in the Oval Office with Richard Nixon planning his first criticism of John Kerry. There is a great picture that MSNBC News has that I’ve been looking at with Chuck Colson, President Nixon and John O’Neill planning his debate then with John Kerry. And there is another pair of shoes in the frame, Pat [Buchanan]. I can’t tell if they are your shoes or not. I don’t know.” “They might have been. They might have been,” Buchanan replied.) FactCheck.org noted that $100,000 of the $158,750 the group had raised as of June came from prominent Texas Republican and Bush-Cheney ‘04 campaign contributor Bob Perry. As for O’Neill’s claim that members of the group “didn’t campaign for anybody,” The Boston Globe reported on August 7 that Elliott appeared with Kerry during his 1996 Senate reelection campaign “and defended Kerry, saying he deserved the Silver Star.”"”

===If he truly was smeared it would have been easy to smash it to pieces. The fact that he didn’t stands as a powerful statement to me.

It is a powerful statement to the fact that if you tell a lie enough, everyone starts to believe it. The documentary evidence and the people closest to each of these incidents agree with Kerry. O’Neil is a serial liar and Thurlow contradicts his own records. The ‘doctor’ in the ad didn’t even treat Kerry.

This is the entire point of the post. If you tell it enough, people will believe it. Go over and look at Ruskin’s most recent post on Illinois Review saying Obama went to a madrassa. It’s factually incorrect, but within a few months it’ll be conventional belief in conservative circles.

Dan, who signed affidavits that actually saw what was going on? Gardner is the only one who served directly with Kerry who contradicts any of the story. And he wasn’t present for any of the incidents which are in dispute. So how does signing affidavits do any good in discrediting Kerry?

The paper record backs Kerry’s story. The closest eyewitnesses and the guy he plucked out of the water back Kerry’s version.

The notion that the medical records are a big deal only occurs if you find any merit in the claims of people who are contradicted by eyewitness accounts and Navy records–which happen to be largely consistent with each other.

Give me something specific I’m supposed to believe based on the documentary evidence or actual eyewitness accounts that might make me ‘find quite a bit of truth’. I’ve read and listened to accounts of these stories more than I care to remember, but I never found O’Neill credible since he never was able to produce documentary evidence or eyewitnesses that were there and contradict Kerry and everyone else there.

Why didn’t he do it before? Kerry is an idiot, but that’s not an excuse for people to keep lying about his record in Vietnam.

=====Much of the Swift vets’ complaints centered on Kerry’s comments after he came back to the US. The most powerful ad featured Kerry’s own testimony before Congress. How is that unfair for those men to say they felt betrayed by Kerry. They said it at the time!

As Charles Madigan said, nothing, however, the SBV went further and claimed he was lying about his record and to date the records and the vast majority of first person accounts are consistent with Kerry’s statements.

I think a one of the more clever tactics the right uses is called search engine optimization. That’s where certain words and word combinations are selected in headlines or brief posts to lure people to certain content. For example, if someone Googles “Obama” and “Islam,” what happens? The “Barbaro” one was just too easy/obvious.

Advertisers and marketers invented it, along with some help from search engines themselves. As far as infrastructure for the right’s ability to distribute their memes, it’s brilliant.

They do this to drive web searchers to their sites so that they get the chance to foist these lies on enough unsuspecting visitors to carry a meme/theme, whatever you want to call these lies, in a coordinated, strategic communications program.

As for the complicit and dreadful news “reporting,” everyone here should visit beachwoodreporter.com daily.

NW Burbs: Thanks for working the IL Review beat for so long, and for doing it so well.