Truth - Al Franken [30]
How had Commander George Elliott come to learn these “actual facts”? By talking to the Swift Boat Vets. Who weren’t there. Nevertheless, in July 2004, Elliott signed an affidavit affirming that their account of the facts was correct.
When a skeptical Boston Globe reporter named Michael Kranish asked the Swift Boat Vets to back up their claims, they produced—guess what?—Elliott’s affidavit. Which was based solely on what they’d told him.
But Kranish didn’t take the Swiftees’ word for it. Maybe because Elliott had told the Globe, as recently as June 2003, that Kerry’s Silver Star was “well deserved” and that he had “no regrets or second thoughts at all about that.”
When Kranish actually reached him, Elliott said, “It was a terrible mistake probably for me to sign the affidavit with those words. I’m the one in trouble here.” He also said, “I knew it was wrong.”
Mysteriously, that very night, the obviously very stable ex-commander reversed himself again. Kind of. He signed another affidavit, this one presumably not “wrong” and “a terrible mistake.” As the Boston Globe reported the next day, Elliott’s new affidavit reiterated that “had I known the facts, I would not have recommended Kerry for the Silver Star simply for pursuing and dispatching a single wounded Viet Cong,” although he graciously added, “I do not claim to have any personal knowledge” of what happened.
Elliott’s re-re-reversal, almost unprecedented in affidavit history, was quickly and unquestioningly picked up by the Drudge Report, from whence it exploded into the right-wing blogosphere, radiosphere, and asshole-on-TV-o-sphere (Fox News Channel’s The Sean Hannity Show).
So if Elliott wasn’t there, and the Swift Boat Vets weren’t there, who was there? I mean, obviously, Kerry was a medal-chasing glory hound whose account only a fool could take seriously. Then there was Mike Medeiros, who corroborated Kerry’s account. He didn’t think Kerry had merely capped a “fleeing, wounded enemy (with a loaded or empty launcher).” He told historian Douglas Brinkley that “the VC guy was a lethal threat. He still had the B-40 rocket launcher in his hands.”
But he also told the Washington Post that Kerry “was a great commander. I would have no trouble following him anywhere.” So how can you trust him?
And Belodeau, the machine gunner who wounded the “fleeing teenager in the loincloth,” was dead. Very convenient, don’t you think?
Then there was Fred Short. He was on the boat, too. “Kerry saved our lives,” he told Brinkley. “The guy was dangerous, and there were others waiting.” But how can you trust him? He obviously felt beholden to Kerry, because he believed Kerry had saved his life. You save a guy’s life, he’ll say anything for you!
Ditto for all the other guys on Kerry’s boat, all of whom sided with Kerry. Not trustworthy at all.
Of course, Kerry’s PCF-94 wasn’t the only Swift boat on the Dong Cung tributary of the Bay Hap River on February 28, 1969. PCF-43 was commanded by Lieutenant j.g. Donald Droz. But Droz died in battle on April 12 of that year. And PCF-23 was commanded by one William B. Rood—but he wasn’t talking.
Lacking a credible referee who could determine which side was right—the Bush-donor-funded Swift Boat Character Assassins, or the Kerry crewmates who were actually there—the media kept treating the smear campaign as a “he-said, she-said” story. Fox’s popular Bill O’Reilly exemplified the relativistic spirit of the age when he told Jim Rassman, the former Green Beret whom Kerry had saved from certain death in another much-lied-about incident that led to Kerry’s Bronze Star, “You see it one way, and you’re sincere, and you’re correct. They see it another way, but they may also be sincere and correct.”
For every story on the Fox News Channel, there were a hundred stories on right-wing talk radio.
The hackery reached an apex in one four-day period from August 17 to August 20, when every episode