Help! Need to refute RW's letter regarding Kerry's service

[Poiuyt]

I just got an email from a Viet Nam vet who claimed that "Kerry was a spineless coward who wussed-out and ran-away leaving one of his squadron's swiftboats in 'Nam when it was disabled and the crew had to fight their way out with no support (of course he put himself in for a medal after that fiasco)."

Was this part of the Swiftboat Vets allegations? Is there any site that refutes these allegations point by point?

Wasn't there some story about Poppy Bush bailing out of his airplane leaving his crewmates to die?

My friend finished by saying, "At least Bush admits his mistakes." I think I can handle that one.

[NYCGirl]

1. Snopes it!

http://www.snopes.com/politics/kerry/service.asp

[A_Possum]

2. Copying Blue-Jay's DU post here

I believe he/she meant for us to use this at will:

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Swiftboat vets, good and the bad: The WHOLE TRUTH! (long)



Trust me this is worth the read, and great for returning freep emails on the subject.
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Here are the 10 crewmates who served with Kerry in Vietnam. All but Steve Gardner support John Kerry and stood with him as he made his speech to the DNC. (except Tom Belodeau who is deceased .

I'll let them speak for themselves, including Steve Gardner. The following are sourced quotes.

PCF-94

Starting in late January 1969, this crew completed 18 missions over an intense and dangerous 48 days, almost all of them in the dense jungles of the Mekong Delta. The most intense action came during an extraordinary eight days of more than 10 firefights, remembered by Kerry's crew as the "days of hell."

David Alston - Rev. Alston is from Columbia, SC and served in Vietnam in the Navy as a Gunners Mate on PCF-94 with Senator Kerry.

"David Alston was the gunner atop Kerry's pilot house. Kerry, he told an audience here, was a compassionate commander. `We were in a lot of firefights,' Alston said. `You learn a lot about people. After a firefight, John would come up to me and he would put his hand on me and he'd say, 'David, are you all right?' `I didn't know then that I had a man of God on my boat,' Kerry said. `That's probably why I'm here today'." Orlando Sentinel, 1/31/04

`Down in the Mekong Delta, we lived together, we fought together, we bled together and we survived together,' said Alston. `Whether we were Democratic or Republican was not the issue,' he said. `The issues at that time were trust, courage, judgment and character.' Alston attached those attributes to Kerry and introduced his friend with no further ceremony." Providence Journal-Bulletin, 3/23/03

(Alston is the crewmate who gave a speech at the DNC last week. www.johnkerry.com/pressroom/speeches/ )


Del Sandusky -Mr. Sandusky is from Dunedin, FL and served in Vietnam in the Navy as the senior enlisted man on PCF-94 with Senator Kerry.

"Kerry commanded a Navy `Swift Boat' that patrolled the Mekong delta. His crew recalls Kerry as brainy and extremely aggressive, `a good leader and a bit of a hard-charger,' says Del Sandusky from Elgin, Ill." Washington Post, 6/2/02

"Del Sandusky, 58, of Elgin, Ill., and Clearwater, Fla., served under Kerry on a patrol boat in 1969. When another boat hit a mine, Kerry ordered the dead and injured brought on board and the sinking boat towed, six or seven miles, to the Gulf of Tonkin. Because Americans had died on the boat, Kerry, out of loyalty, wouldn't leave it behind for the enemy. `All the boat crew men volunteered to help in anyway we can,' with Kerry's political campaigns, Sandusky said. `Whatever he wants, we'll help him with. Because we believe in him.' " AP, 12/6/02

Fred Short - Mr. Short is from North Little Rock, AR and served in Vietnam in the Navy as a Gunners Mate on PCF-94 with Senator Kerry.

"In 1969, I was Sen. Kerry's gun mate atop of the Swift boat in Vietnam. And I just wanted to let everyone know that, contrary to all the rumors that you might hear from the other side, Sen. Kerry's blood is red, not blue. I know, I've seen it.

"If it weren't for Sen. John Kerry, on the 28th of February 1969, the day he won the Silver Star . . . you and I would not be having this conversation. My name would be on a long, black wall in Washington, D.C. I saw this man save my life." La Ganga, Maria L. "Crewmates Attest to Kerry's Mettle as Wartime Commander." Los Angeles Times. 29 July 2004 (p. A13). Zoroya, Greg. "Vietnam Crewmates Steady at Kerry's Side." USA Today. 29 July 2004 (p. A4).

Gene Thorson - Mr. Thorson is from Ames, Iowa and served in Vietnam in the Navy as a Engineman on PCF-94 with Senator Kerry.

In support of this grassroots deployment, 73,000 Iowa veteran households received a mailing in December from Kerry's Vietnam swift boat crewmate Gene Thorsen, of Ames, IA, rallying them to "stand up for John Kerry the same way he stands up for veterans."

He said he knew back then that the skipper of his boat, John Kerry, was bound for high places. Almost 30 years later, Thorson got a call from Kerry asking for political help. Now, he often gives up his weekends to travel with other veterans and campaign with Kerry on his run for president. Matt Neznanski, Staff Writer July 19, 2004 - Ames Tribune

"He took care of all of us. He really did," Thorson said. Des Moines Register

Tom Belodeau is deceased, he served on PCF-94 with Kerry

Kerry was helped by the fact that Belodeau stood beside him and said he had been misquoted."This man was not lying on the ground. This man was more than capable of destroying that boat and everybody on it. Senator Kerry did not give him that opportunity," Belodeau said. He also said that he was not sure whether or not he had hit the attacker. May 06, 2004 National Review Online

Mike Medeiros - Mr. Medeiros is from San Leandros, California and served in Vietnam in the Navy on PCF-94 with Senator Kerry.

"He made good decisions, I believe proper decisions," said Mike Medeiros of San Leandro, Calif., who served for four months on Kerry's swift boat in Vietnam. "And the fact that we all returned alive is a good indication that they were the right decisions."Medeiros was reunited with Kerry in 1996, when Republicans were attacking his military record in a heated Senate race. Kerry's crew mates came to set the record straight at the Charlestown Navy Yard, the same place they stood shoulder-to-shoulder on the eve of his nomination acceptance. ABCNEWS.com July 28, 2004 From AP
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PFC-44 - Kerry captained this ship from November 1968 to January 1969. This command saw considerably less action.

Jim Wasser - Mr. Wasser is from St. Anne, IL and served in Vietnam in the Navy as a Radarman on PCF-44 with Senator Kerry.

Mr. Kerry took command of P.C.F.-44 with a veteran crew headed by Mr. Wasser, a radarman second class. "Always, when there's a new guy on the boat, you check him out," Mr. Wasser said. "It only took me a few days. We knew that we had somebody special that cared for us. We bonded."

Combative and politically conservative, Mr. Wasser, from Kankakee, Ill., had a pair of American flags tattooed on his shoulder and still loathes Jane Fonda. NYTimes Febuary 24 2004

What I saw back then was a guy with genuine caring and leadership ability who was aggressive when he had to be. What I see now is a guy who's not afraid to tackle tough issues. And he knows what the consequences are of putting people's kids in harm's way." Braun, Stephen. "Kerry's War Tour Serves as Theme, Target." Los Angeles Times. 29 July 2004 (p. A13). Brinkley, Douglas. Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. ISBN 0-06-056523-3. Klein, Joe. "The Long War of John Kerry." The New Yorker. 2 December 2002. Kranish, Michael. "John F. Kerry: Candidate in the Making -- Part 2: Heroism, and Growing Concern About War." The Boston Globe. 16 June 2003.

Drew Whitlow - Mr. Whitlow is from Huntsville, AR and served in Vietnam in the Navy as a Boatswain Mate on PCF-44 with Senator Kerry.

"I figured with the abilities he had, he was going to go high, but I didn't have any idea about him running for president," said Whitlow, 57, wearing a cap decorated with Kerry campaign pins.

Whitlow said he recalled Kerry as a humble seaman when he joined Whitlow's crew as a lieutenant junior grade in 1968.

Kerry told crewmates, "I know you guys don't need me but I sure need you," said Whitlow, who served as a boatswain mate.

"He accepted us for who we were," Whitlow said. "The decisions that he made saved our lives.

"He never shot from the hip when it came to decisions," Whitlow said. "He'd always confront the problems head on."

Whitlow, a Kerry campaign coordinator for veterans in western and southern Arkansas, began campaigning for Kerry in September 2003. In January, Whitlow traveled with Kerry to Iowa and New Hampshire. The Times Record Fort Smith, Arkansas Thursday, July 29, 2004

Bill Zaladonis - Mr. Zaladonis is from Sanford, FL and served in Vietnam in the Navy on PCF-44 with Senator Kerry.

"I never saw John back down from anything," crewmember Bill Zaladonis says April 13, 2004 USA Today

Steve Hatch - Mr. Hatch served in Vietnam in the Navy on PCF-44 with Senator Kerry.

Stephen W. Hatch of Altoona, Pa., with four tattoos, who says he supports Mr. Kerry though he wants no part of politics. NYTimes Febuary 24 2004

"He wouldn't let you go randomly down the river shooting up everything in sight," says Stephen Hatch, who served on the first of Kerry's two boats. April 13, 2004 USA Today

Stephen M. Gardner - Served in Vietnam in the Navy on PCF-44 with Senator John Kerry

"Kerry was chickenshiat," he insists. "Whenever a firefight started he always pulled up stakes and got the hell out of Dodge."

"I was driving down the road, and I hit that button and Rush was talking about Kerry and his campaign and how something just didn't feel right to him," Gardner recalled, his voice full of conviction. "Something about what John Kerry did or was doing, just really didn't set right with him. And you know I served with this guy, and the bottom line to it is; harsh as this may sound or as good as it sounds to any Democrat, out there, John Kerry is another `Slick Willy.' He's another Bill Clinton and that's exactly what he is. And I'm telling you right now, that if John Kerry gets to be president of these United States, it'll be a sorry day in this world for us. We can't stand another Democrat like that in there again. We'll get our asses in such a sling this time; we won't be able to get out of it. And the bottom line to it is, I don't care how much John Kerry's changed after he moved off my boat, his initial patterns of behavior when I met him and served under him was somebody who ran from the enemy, rather than engaged it. If I'd had Rush's 800 number, or known how to reach him, I would have called in."

"I've told a few of my friends that he was an asshole," Gardner says. "But I'm not looking to make news."

"Kerry sat some of them down and convinced them to buy into his side of what happened over there,"

"When you're as persuasive as Kerry it's not hard to make a guy change something that he saw." Time Magazine Online

(A recent interview with Gardner is at the Time link. The interview explains why he haven't been heard of until recently. All of the Gardner quotes are here and more. The author of the Time article states that he believes Gardner's motives are political, and after reading what he had to say I'm inclined to agree.)

Jim Rassmann - Jim Rassmann was not a crewmate but I think belongs here. - Mr. Rassmann is from Florence, OR and served in Vietnam as a Special Forces Officer in the Army.

He clung to the net as bullets whizzed past. `Next thing I knew, John came out in the middle of all this,' Rassmann says. `I couldn't believe it. He was going to get killed. He ran to the edge, reached over with his good arm and pulled me over the lip.' Rassmann later recommended Kerry for the Silver Star, and was upset when the Army instead awarded Kerry a lesser Bronze Star with a `V' for valor." Los Angeles Times, 3/13/04

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Headline (Monterey County Herald): Kerry foes get private investigator
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And now for the not-so swift, swiftboat gang:

The leader of this group, John O'Neill didn't meet Kerry until 1971. From their OWN website:

""our group includes men who served(emphasis added) beside Kerry in combat as well as his commanders."

The only man here who served beside Kerry in combat is Steve Gardner (mentioned above).

Registered as a "527" organization with the Internal Revenue Service, the "Swift Boat Veterans" group can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money for campaign activities, but is prohibited from working directly with the Bush campaign or the Republican Party.

This group has $158,000.

$100,000 from Bob Perry from Texas. Bob Perry donated $2,983,500 in fiscal year 2002 in Texas, 96,4% to republicans. As far as I can tell he did not serve in the military, he is not mentioned on the website.

$25,000 from Harlan Crow, also from Texas. Harlan Crow donated $323,200 in fiscal year 2002 in Texas, 86% to republicans. As far as I can tell he did not serve in the military, he is not mentioned on the website. He is a Trustee of the Bush Library.

$25,000 from John O'Neill. O'Neill is the leader of this group.
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Kerry's evaluations from his commanders:

Lieutenant Commander George Elliott:

In a combat environment often requiring independent, decisive action LTJG Kerry was unsurpassed. He constantly reviewed tactics and lessons learned in river operations and applied his experience at every opportunity. On one occasion while in tactical command of a three boat operation his units were taken under fire from ambush. LTJG Kerry rapidly assessed the situation and ordered his units to turn directly into the ambush. This decision resulted in routing the attackers with several enemy KIA.

LTJG Kerry emerges as the acknowledged leader in his peer group. His bearing and appearance are above reproach. He has of his own volition learned the Vietnamese language and is instrumental in the successful Vietnamese training program.

During the period of this report LTJG Kerry has been awarded the Silver Star medal, the Bronze Star medal, the Purple Heart medal (2nd and 3rd awards).

Lt. Commander Grant Hibbard:

Hibbard's evaluation was brief and incomplete because Hibbard oversaw Kerry's service for only about two weeks. Kerry's duty under Hibbard included "counter infiltration operations against Viet Cong forces. Engaged in combat operations." Hibbard marked a few performance categories, noting that Kerry's initiative, cooperation, and bearing ranked among the top few(emphasis added). But unlike other evaluators who wrote about specific actions by Kerry, Hibbard did not do so, providing this explanation: "The short period LTJG Kerry was attached to Coast Division 14 prevents further evaluation."

Captain Adrian Lonsdale:

In the November 4, 1996, issue of South Coast Today, wrote: "Adrian Lonsdale remembers a young John F. Kerry as a naval officer who was a good debater, even back in his days in Vietnam. "'He and I and others used to have long discussions at the officers club,' said Mr. Lonsdale of Mattapoisett, a former Coast Guard officer who commanded a division in which the Massachusetts senator was attached back in 1969. 'They were very spirited discussions about the war and the politics back home.' "'He was opposed to the war but it didn't make any difference in his performance,' said the former owner and still instructor at Northeast Maritime Institute in New Bedford. 'He was a very good officer.' "Capt. Lonsdale was among a group of former Vietnam veterans the Massachusetts Democrat brought to the Charlestown navy yard recently to rebut a Boston Globe column that raised questions about Sen. Kerry's Vietnam service, particularly the Silver Star he won. "Mr. Lonsdale was in charge of a two-division flotilla opereating out of Phu Quoc, a big island near the Cambodian border. One division was made up of Swift boats, fast 50-foot offshore boats, while the other was composed of 82-foot Coast Guard patrol boats."

Captain Allen W. Slifer:

October 19, 1967, evaluation from Captain Allen W. Slifer: "A top notch officer in every measurable trait. Intelligent, mature, and rich in educational background and experience, ENS Kerry is one of the finest young officers I have ever met and without question one of the most promising."

Admiral Walter F. Schlech - March 2, 1970 evaluation from Admiral Walter F. Schlech:

"... one of the finest young officers with whom I have served in a long naval career."

Captain E.W. Harper, Jr - September 3, 1968, evaluation from Captain E.W. Harper, Jr.:

"LTJG KERRY is an intelligent and competent young naval officer who has performed his duties in an excellent to outstanding manner."

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(Back to Blue-Jay here):

Do not let these Republican shitheads get away with this slander. Only ONE of the O'Neill's Swiftboat Vets was ever on the same boat as Senator Kerry. The rest are hand-picked political operatives that NEVER served with him. Sure, they may have served NEAR him, but that doesn't mean a goddamn thing! I live NEAR my nextdoor neighbor, and I have NO IDEA if he's a good worker, a good father, a good man, or a good thief.

Why? Because I don't work with him directly, nor do I live with him.

If someone paid me $5000.00 to say that he was a sonofabitch, I'd consider it.

Get the word out, people! Send this to any & ALL fence-sitters, and Republicans that you know. The men who know Kerry's service best, are those who served closest to him.

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Sorry for the length of this.

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DU thread

[Feanorcurufinwe]

3. Kerry and Vietnam

Just some general background.

In an intense three months of combat following that Christmas Eve battle, Kerry often would go beyond his Navy orders and beach his boat, in one case chasing and killing a teenage Viet Cong enemy who wore only a loin cloth and carried a rocket launcher. Kerry's aggressiveness in combat caused a commanding officer to wonder whether he should be given a medal or court-martialed. Kerry would watch in despair as a crewmate killed a boy who may or may not have been an innocent civilian. He would angrily challenge a military policy that risked the death of noncombatants. And he would try to escape the fate of five of his closest friends, all killed in combat.

<snip>

In any case, Kerry said he was appalled that the Navy's ''free fire zone'' policy put civilians at such high risk. So, on Jan. 22, 1969, Kerry and several dozen fellow skippers and officers traveled to Saigon to complain about the policy in an extraordinary meeting with Zumwalt and the overall commander of the war, General Creighton W. Abrams Jr. ''We were fighting the (free fire) policy very, very hard, to the point that many of the members were refusing to carry out orders on some of their missions, to the point where crews were starting to mutiny, (to) say, `I would not go back in the rivers again,''' Kerry recalled during a 1971 television appearance on the Dick Cavett Show.

But Kerry went back in the rivers. Indeed, it was after this meeting that he began his most deadly round of combat. Within days of the Saigon meeting, he joined a five-man crew on swift boat No. 94 on a series of missions in which he won the Silver Star, the Bronze Star, and two of his three Purple Hearts. Starting in late January 1969, this crew completed 18 missions over an intense and dangerous 48 days, almost all of them in the dense jungles of the Mekong Delta.
http://www.boston.com/globe/nation/packages/kerry/061603.shtml



The following excerpts are drawn from Douglas Brinkley's Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War.

<snip>

Then, Kerry wrote, he looked over at the young woman they had detained, "who was squatting in the rear of the PBR." She was defiant. She sat very calmly, watching the movements of the men who had just blown four of her countrymen to bits. She glared at me. I wondered about her boyfriend who was fighting us somewhere else. The PBR crew said that the men in the sampan got what they had coming to them but I felt a certain sense of guilt, shame, sorrow, remorse - something inexplicable about the way they were shot and about the predicament of the girl. I wanted to touch her and tell her that it was going to be all right but I didn't really know that it would be. Besides, she wouldn't have accepted my gesture with anything but scorn. I looked away and did nothing at all which was really all I could do. I hated all of us for the situation which stripped people of their self respect.

<snip>

"I know that most of my friends felt absolutely absurd going up a river holding a loaded weapon that was supposed to be used against someone who had never really done anything to you and on whose land you were now trespassing," Kerry wrote. "I had always felt that to kill, hate was necessary and I certainly didn't hate these people." In truth, he added, scanning the shore for suspicious movements to shoot at made him "feel like the biggest ass in the world." Kerry had explored similar feelings in a letter to his parents in December of 1968. Describing the sight of American soldiers and their Vietnamese girlfriends strolling down the streets of the U.S. rest-and-recreation-center city of Vung Tau one sunny afternoon, he reflected on the crucial difference between occupiers and liberators of war-torn places. "I asked myself what it would be like to be occupied by foreign troops�to have to bend to the desires of a people who could not be sensitive to the things that really counted in one's country," Kerry wrote in that letter. He had been considering Germany's occupation of France during World War II, he added, when "a thought came to me that I didn't like - I felt more like the German than the doughboy who came over to make the world safe for democracy and who rightfully had a star in his eye."

Less than three months later experience had brought him to another melancholy observation. He wrote in his war notes, It was when one of your men got hit or you got hit yourself that you felt most absurd�that was when everything had to have a meaning in order for it all to be worthwhile and inevitably Vietnam just didn't have any meaning. It didn't meet the test. When a good friend was hit and perhaps about to die, you'd ask if it was worth just his life alone - let alone all the others or your own.

"But the ease with which a man could be brought to kill another man, this always amazed me," he went on. Even more troubling to him was the imprimatur the U.S. military accorded this coldheartedness. To illustrate his point, he referred to the messages that would come in from the brass at Cam Ranh, praising the Swifts' gunners whenever they had killed a few Vietcong, and ending "Good Hunting": "Good Hunting? Good Christ� you'd think we were going out after deer or something�but here we were being patted on the back and receiving hopes that the next time we went out on a patrol we would find some more people to kill. How cheap life became."
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200312/brinkley

Official Naval Records
After-Action Combat Reports
Annotated Version of 1971 Senate testimony



The tone was sneering. But the secretly recorded dialogue illustrates just how seriously Kerry was viewed by the Nixon White House. Some of these conversations have not been previously publicized, and Kerry said he had never heard them until they were provided by a reporter.

Day after day, according to the tapes and memos, Nixon aides worried that Kerry was a unique, charismatic leader who could undermine support for the war. Other veteran protesters were easier targets, with their long hair, their use of a Viet Cong flag, and in some cases, their calls for overthrowing the US government. Kerry, by contrast, was a neat, well-spoken, highly decorated veteran who seemed to be a clone of former President John F. Kennedy, right down to the military service on a patrol boat.

The White House feared him like no other protester.

<snip>

During private conversations with other group leaders, Kerry suggested that a veterans rally be held on the Mall in Washington, an effort Kerry hoped would refute Nixon's charge that the protesters were mostly college "bums."

"It was my sense that it wasn't going to be heard unless we went to a place where the issue was joined," Kerry said. "It was my idea to come to Washington. It was my idea to do the march. I floated that idea at the Detroit meeting. We all decided to make it happen. I became the unofficial coordinator-organizer."

Some members of the antiwar group viewed Kerry as an opportunist. He hadn't testified during the Winter Soldier hearings, hadn't organized the group, yet now he was seeking to become the coordinator and spokesman. But plenty of veterans also realized Kerry - erudite and clean-cut - was the ideal foil for those who viewed the group as hippie traitors or even communists.

So Kerry became the face of the organization, and a media sensation.
http://www.boston.com/globe/nation/packages/kerry/061703.shtml


Kerry on the Dick Cavett show.






But Kerry's time as a combatant, and his equally well-known role as a leader of the veterans who returned from Vietnam and opposed the war, account for only part of his personal odyssey involving the war and its aftermath that symbolically culminated in Clinton's visit to Hanoi. More than any other member of Congress, it was Kerry, with his ally Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who cleared the way for normal diplomatic relations between the United States and Vietnam, beginning the process of healing the deep wounds of war. They did so largely out of the limelight, in the tedious and grinding work of a special Senate committee that was appointed to investigate the fates of Americans still missing from the war and the rumors that some of them were alive and being held captive in Southeast Asia. When the committee completed its work, Kerry, the chairman, had produced a unanimous, 585-page report that declared: "There is, at this time, no compelling evidence that proves that any American remains alive in captivity in Southeast Asia."

McCain was the lightning rod for critics of the committee's more than yearlong search for the truth, but it was Kerry who held the enterprise together. A lawyer by training, he used his skills to mediate vast differences of opinion on an emotional topic within the committee and with many of those who appeared before it. According to those who watched the process, he was invariably calm, evenhanded and, above all, persistent.

<snip>

The committee's report did not eliminate the explosive POW/MIA issue, but it did much to defuse it and lift the cloud that had been hanging over the country since the fall of Saigon in 1973. A little more than a year after the report was issued in 1993, Clinton ended the U.S. trade embargo against Vietnam; the next year, the United States established formal diplomatic relations with the Vietnamese. Both steps were preceded by passage of Senate resolutions, co-sponsored by Kerry and McCain, urging the actions.

Kerry was only one of many who eased the country down the long road to reconciliation with a once-bitter enemy, but other participants in the process describe his role as "pivotal" and that of "the catalyst." "John, on behalf of this nation, brought us back to Vietnam with our heads held high," said former senator Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.), who lost part of a leg and was awarded the Medal of Honor as a Navy Seal in Vietnam. "I think only John could have done it."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A50479-2004Jan2?language=printer






Veterans see Kerry as powerful symbol

Scorned, spat upon and ignored when they returned home from battle, Vietnam veterans are finding vindication and a voice in Sen. John Kerry three decades later, several veterans said yesterday.

“It’s a renaissance for us,” said Rick Hassett, 53, of Dorchester, Mass., who is in New Hampshire campaigning for the Democratic Presidential hopeful.

Hassett hopped a bus from Boston with about 20 other veterans to mobilize support for the Massachusetts senator among veterans before the Iowa caucuses. When the tired, gritty crew pulled into Des Moines 30 hours later, a crowd met them with cheers and applause.

It was a far cry from the jeers and derision that greeted the Bronze Star-decorated veteran when he came home from Vietnam in early 1972.

“It was wonderful. I was vindicated,” he said, his voice cracking slightly with emotion. “That was the welcome home I never got.”
http://www.johnkerry.com/pressroom/news/news_2004_0124d.html

[pbg]

4. Shorter answer

These folks are not just calling John Kerry a liar, they're calling all those men up on stage with him--you know, the ones who served on his boat with him--liars.

They're calling John McCain a liar.

And there is no--I repeat--no documentary evidence for any of their allegations. ALL the documents point the other way.

[quaoar]

5. To paraphrase Bill Maher

On his show tonight:

If John Kerry was using his medals as roach clips to smoke dope with Ho Chi Minh, it was still better than whatever Bush was doing in Alabama.

[NMDemDist2]

6. new factcheck.org debunks it

http://www.factcheck.org/article.aspx?docid=231

[NMDemDist2]

7. check out Kerry's Rapid Response

http://www.johnkerry.com/rapidresponse/080504_truth.html

[Zynx]

8. When they just decide to flat out lie like that, it can be difficult to de

bunk because they totally makeup stuff to begin with.

As for "At least Bush admits his mistakes.", that is so pathetic I'm not sure I can keep my mouth shut. My response to that comes not in words, but instead in a guttural sound like GAAAAAAGGGHHHHHHH!!!!!