HuffPost: Max Blumenthal connects dots between PT9/11 & SBVT

[beachmom]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/max-blumenthal/the-swift-boat-connection_b_29314.html

But ABC and Nowrasteh have yet to answer for the admission by Lt Col. Robert "Buzz" Patterson that significant portions of his anti-Clinton attack books were incorporated into Nowrasteh's script.

Who is Patterson? He is a former military aide to President Bill Clinton who exploited his brief, low-level experience in the White House to ingratiate himself with the far-right. In 2003, Patterson wrote "Dereliction of Duty: The Eyewitness Account of How Bill Clinton Endangered America's Long-Term National Security," a polemic rife with distortions about Clinton's record in combating terrorism. A year later, he pumped out "Reckless Disregard: How Liberal Democrats Undercut Our Military, Endanger Our Soldiers, and Jeopardize Our Security," a book that claimed without basis that terrorists wanted the Democrats to win the 2004 presidential election. Both books were produced by the right-wing publishing house, Regnery.

During the 2004 election, Patterson's second book became a centerpiece of the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth's campaign to undermine Sen. John Kerry's military record in Vietnam. The book dubiously asserted that after Kerry charged a Vietcong position, he returned from the battle "armed with a Super 8 video camera he had purchased at the post exchange at Cam Ranh Bay, and reenacted the skirmish on film."

snip

On September 1, while Nowrasteh reeled from criticism of The Path to 9/11, he called Patterson at home to tell him that he used his book, "Dereliction of Duty" as a source for the film that was about to air. Later that day, Nowrasteh hosted Patterson at his home for a private screening of The Path to 9/11. Patterson told WorldNetDaily a week after meeting with Nowrasteh that he received a personal phone call from ABC senior vice president Quinn Taylor.

[ProSense]

1. Excellent job Max!

Enter the world of wingnuts and they are all connected; same as the PNAC crowd. In fact, investigations can turn up the links between these groups, the RNC and elected Republicans.

[karynnj]

2. Wow! These people are professional smearer

The idea that Kerry went back into Viet Cong controlled areas to re-enact their battle is absolutely crazy. I doubt his crew would have gone - or if they did, risking their lives for the vanity this would take, I doubt they would have had one good word to say about him - rather than the love they have for him. Also, who would play the VC? It would seem Kerry would need lots of people - someone to film, his crew in the vote and maybe South Vietnamese to play Viet Cong.

What it shows is that anyone who would believe it, had read nothing about how genuinely dangerous those canals were and how the US was not securing the area after battles.

[beachmom]

3. The evil of it was using half truths

Kerry I thought did return there so that he could remember the place -- there is a few seconds of footage in Going Upriver where they show the hole where the VC were hiding. But #1 he already owned the 8 MM camera and #2 it was NOT a reenactment. Let me go and check the Daily Howler -- the BG are the ones who came up with the lie first -- sad indeed.

[beachmom]

4. Here's the Daily Howler link -- f***ing Globe

http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh021003.shtml

Then, the NYT’s Bill Keller wrote a column trashing Kerry as “the ersatz J.F.K., who fancies himself a global strategist because 30 years ago he faced down a Vietcong ambush” (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 8/13/02). Kerry’s a plenty strange dude, Keller said. “ith all due respect for his exploit,” the scribe asked, “how utterly weird is it that he then took out his handy 8-millimeter camera and re-enacted his heroism on film?” But oops! In a later column, Keller acknowledged that he had misstated the content of Kerry’s “home movies” from Vietnam (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 9/9/02). “he senator’s movies are not self-aggrandizing. Mr. Kerry is hardly in the film,” Keller said. Where had Keller obtained his bogus info? Where else? He had relied on the “usually dependable” Boston Globe, the misinformed Times pundit said.

And here:

http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh090902.shtml

Did John Kerry, while in Vietnam, “take out his handy 8-millimeter camera and re-enact his heroism on film?” Keller took his claim from a lengthy profile by Charles Sennott in the 10/6/96 Boston Globe. After describing a dangerous raid in the Mekong Delta, Sennott got to the heart of the matter:

SENNOTT: And Kerry just happens to have captured it all on film.
“I’ll show you where they shot from. See? That’s the hole covered up with reeds,” says Kerry, showing the films on a recent evening, his hand tightening on the remote control as he clicks the images down to slow motion.

“This is just something that I improvised…The point was not to just take an ambush, but to go directly at them,” adds Kerry, pointing to where he brought the boat ashore, and explaining how he returned later with a Super 8 millimeter hand-held movie camera to record highlights of the mission. “That’s me right there. One of my crew was filming all this.”

The films have the grainy quality of home movies. In their blend of the posed and the unexpected, they reveal something indelible about the man who shot them—the tall, thin, handsome Naval officer seen striding through the reeds in flak jacket and helmet, holding aloft the captured B-40 rocket. The young man so unconscious of risk in the heat of battle, yet so focused on his future ambitions that he would reenact the moment for film. It is as if he had cast himself in the sequel to the experience of his hero, John F. Kennedy, on the PT-109.

According to Sennott, Kerry was “so focused on his future ambitions that he would reenact the moment for film.” According to Keller, “Kerry is hardly in the film, and never strikes so much as a heroic pose.”
Whose account is correct? You’ll never know. Nor will you be told why any of this nonsense matters. But so it goes when your pundit corps assembles the scripts for your White House elections. More on these topics to follow.




Who needs a right wing conspiracy when the Globe was so kind enough to provide the basis for the smears? I'm sure Tay Tay can add a few quips on this, but damn, I wish our local papers would go after Allen with half the zeal the Globe went after Kerry. They don't even print the FACTUAL picture of Allen standing next to the CCC racists back in '96, yet the Globe just makes s*** up. Okay, I'm mad at the moment -- with "friends like these" . . . .

[TayTay]

5. Damn, Keller carries a grudge.

All that stuff goes back to David Warsh and his Boston Globe economics columns in late 1996 in which Warsh misinterpreted Tommy Bellideau's comments to infer that Keryr's Vietnam experience was not what he said it was.

Geez, never date someone who then marries Bill Keller, that's for sure.

[whometense]

6. Does Keller have a touch of that

endemic Boston disease, KerryEnvy???

[TayTay]

8. There wa a lot of that going around, wasn't there?

That was a fun discussion this weekend. Honestly, if Sean Kelly had done what this other Boston guy did, there would already be statues around of 'em around town.

[karynnj]

11. I think so

There's a long article in this week's NEW YORK magazine on Keller and the NYT. It does mention that his wife dated the Senator and Gilmore of Pink Floyd - but does not disscuss this at all. However, it has a highlighted comment that is interesting:

"Keller's wife says he's got a bigger ego than he lets on. She calls him an "Alpha Male in disquise". Given that someone else is very very obviously an alpha male without trying (and who could not disquise it if he tried), this would likely be the case.

The article is interesting and does deal with his not challanging Miller and his holding the NSA article.
http://nymag.com/news/media/20334/

[beachmom]

7. You're telling me the personal interfered with the professional?

How pathetic!!! Call me green and innocent, but as a member of the "public" that is unacceptable. So the relationship didn't work out -- what the hell does THAT have to do with Kerry's heroics in the Vietnam War? We need grown ups in our press corps.

(I STILL want to know (btw) what is UP with Joe Klein and Andrew Sullivan at Time magazine -- find me a time when Kerry perceivingly "slighted" them, and we will solve the riddle of them lying about Kerry "never speaking out" against the crimes at Abu Ghraib and that focus group garbage.)

[TayTay]

9. Joe Klein is a centrist

And he is playing both sides against each other. He wants there to be a reason for the Kerry loss. So he claims it was not taking strong stands. However, at the same time, he thinks KErry has jumped the tracks because of his strong stands on Alito and Iraq and so forth.

Klein wants to be right. He wants to be the far-seeing seer who can dictate what is right for the Dems and their candidates and what isn't. He doens't want KErry to re-run becuase that would be old news and so forth. So, he spins.

[beachmom]

13. What about that glowing New Yorker article about Kerry in 01/04?

Joe Klein wrote that, and it was great. I'm not saying it was snark free, but it definitely left a favorable impression. It still hurts that he could write something so good, and then become so hateful.

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/content/?040126fr_archive02

Klein even debunked that awful BG smear:

It has been widely, and inaccurately, reported that Kerry filmed this and other actions with an 8-mm. movie camera. The films were in fact mostly travelogues and clowning-around shots on the boat. More than a few other vets recorded their adventures in Vietnam. “We did it for our families,” Kerry told me. “We wanted to have a record of where we’d been. We wanted them to know what it had been like if we got killed.”

And then there was this:

Indeed, Kerry was soon about as popular in Washington’s political community as he’d been in Massachusetts. “He was a very driven, very relentless guy, and that could be off-putting to his colleagues,” Timothy E. Wirth, who was a senator from Colorado at the time and later became Kerry’s friend, recalls. “He was an outsider. In fact, you never saw him around much, with good reason—he was up in Boston with his girls. My sense is that Julia wasn’t always reliable during those years, and John took a lot of responsibility for raising the kids. He would rush up there for every school play and soccer match. You had the sense that he was a very lonely guy. He was being hacked to death by the Globe, and others, and he never had anyone to share it with.”

And this:

The notion that John Kerry married Teresa Heinz for political reasons—specifically, to use her money to run for President—is put to rest within nanoseconds of meeting her: this is a flagrantly impolitic human being. The marriage is bursting with strong emotions and ill-concealed conflicts, and much too complicated for the facile armchair psychologizing that goes on during a Presidential campaign. It is not the sort of relationship that an ambitious politician, in his right mind, would want; it is likely to be a distraction for the press corps, an easy way to obscure the campaign’s “message.” One can only conclude, it must be love.



This article was the basis for my decision to become a lifetime Kerry supporter. How could it have changed so quickly? I guess the electoral loss is the answer, but such a big change from Klein is still puzzling to me.

[TayTay]

14. Klein is a centrist

He thought Kerry was more moderate and supported him on that. The break comes over Iraq and Kerry's decision to strongly argue for a withdrawal. Kelin thinks that, and the ALito stand and so forth, are a slow motion suicide and harmful to the Dems as a whole. (I think he is wrong, but that is his opinion.)

I like the paragraph on THK. 'tis true, I think. Well, that plus it obviously works and that's what matters.

[beachmom]

15. Okay, I guess I get it. But lying is still reprehensible!

That's fine to disagree but to make up stuff to bolster your case is just plain wrong.

[TayTay]

16. This is my favorite thing Klein ever wrote.

The visual image I get is just, ahm, delicious.

Joe Klein
From Time 8/2/04

... Politics doesn't seem to come naturally to Kerry either. His mother's civic propriety and his father's diplomatic propriety are a crushingly noble legacy. They haunt his every move. My guess is that Kerry's near death process works like this: He starts a campaign trying to do the right thing, but successful politics requires all sorts of creative roguery. His sense of civic propriety limits his ability to act ruthlessly (firing his campaign manager, for example) or flamboyantly (giving an entertaining, personal, red-meat stump speech). Kerry's sense of policy propriety renders his attempts at political expediency--the promises and compromises necessary to woo constituencies--tortured and unconvincing. He writhes about, descends into rhetorical abstractions, spends too much time thinking about what he is doing wrong and comes across as distanced, distracted, aloof. A perfect phony. And then Kerry's primordial sense of survival on the battlefield, honed and burnished in Vietnam, kicks in, and he does what he must to win: he acts like a real politician. From a distance, the process seems like a comic-book-hero transformation. Kerry enters the phone booth sipping French wine and emerges with a knife in his teeth, ready for battle.

BTW, we are in the post-phone booth phase for a while. LOL!

[beachmom]

17. Yeah -- Superman 24/7 he is! n/t

[ProSense]

10. He is trying to come to terms with his

Mission Accomplished quote:

(JOE) KLEIN: Well, that was probably the coolest presidential image since Bill Pullman played the jet fighter pilot in the movie Independence Day. That was the first thing that came to mind for me. And it just shows you how high a mountain these Democrats are going to have to climb. You compare that image, which everybody across the world saw, with this debate last night where you have nine people on a stage and it doesn't air until 11:30 at night, up against Saturday Night Live, and you see what a major, major struggle the Democrats are going to have to try and beat a popular incumbent president.

http://mediamatters.org/items/200604270005

[TayTay]

12. Oh no, remember, it was supposed to be a cakewalk

to take down Bush. Isn't that the rap on Kerry, he couldn't defeat Bush when Bush was soooooo vulnerable? :sarcasm: