Synthetoric!TM

Have you caught yourself thinking that all the discussion of this Swift Boat crap is beginning to bleed together? Having trouble making out the words behind the echoing reverberations of outrage and scandal? Well, for one time only, I'm going to make it all clearer for you. I have distilled this week's columns by Ann Coulter, Bill Bennett, Thomas Sowell, Patrick Buchanan, Christopher Hitchens, Bob Novak, and David Brooks into a single handy column!

Restoring "Swift" to the Controversy

I'm launching a major investigation into whether the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth organization is being secretly financed by the Kerry campaign.* If Kerry doesn't like people disputing his own version of his own gallantry, then it was highly incautious of him to have made it the centerpiece of his appeal.*

For starters, 254 swiftboat veterans say Kerry is a fraud; 14 say he's a hero. Partisan considerations aside, which would be more difficult to do: Get 14 liars to keep a secret, or get 254 liars to do so?* John Kerry actually claims to have shot a fleeing Viet Cong soldier from the riverbank, something that I personally would have kept very quiet about.* Kerry nicked himself with a M-79 [grenade launcher].* But it is the contention of O'Neill and Gardner that Kerry bears responsibility for the boy's death.*

While Democrats argue that Republicans and President Bush are "smearing" Senator Kerry we ask two questions: a) What has President Bush said that he should apologize for? and b) What have Republicans said that comes anywhere close to the following:*

• When John O'Neill, author of "Unfit for Command," went on "Hardball," Matthews accused O'Neill of being a Republican operative and demanded that O'Neill detail for "Hardball's" six remaining viewers his voting history for the past 20 years in mind-numbing detail.*
  
• In a March 22, 2004 interview with Britain's The Independent, former President Jimmy Carter savaged President Bush and Prime Minister Blair. The war to liberate Iraq was, according to Mr. Carter, based on "lies and misinterpretations from London to Washington."*
  
• Senator Kerry has argued for a more "nuanced" approach to foreign policy and a more "sensitive" way of fighting international terrorism.*
  
• Kerry supporters said no critics of the Democratic presidential nominee ever were aboard a boat with him in combat.*
  
• When Bush went ahead and outlined a plan along those lines, Kerry blasted the president, saying it was reckless to embrace the idea he had endorsed two weeks before.*
  
• Surely the contempt the swiftboat veterans have for Kerry is in part due to his slandering them as war criminals before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.*
  
• They have also implicitly subverted one of the most important principles of the republic, which is civilian control over military decisions. And more than that, they have done something eye-rubbingly unprincipled, doing what Reagan and Kissinger could not do: rehabilitating the notion of the Vietnam horror as "a noble cause." *

I have no idea whether John Kerry is or is not telling the unvarnished truth about his service in Vietnam.* We will probably never know exactly what happened that night.* All this is odd for a person who is such a child of the 1960's. "Authenticity" was such a big concept then. Nobody would accuse the current John Kerry of that.* There are of course gray areas. But not all areas are gray. And not all 24 hours of the day are twilight.*

There are several methods of evaluating the claims of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, 254 of whom have signed a letter saying John Kerry is not fit to be commander in chief.* Kerry should be asked whether he wrote a report saying five VC were killed and two captured, when Steve Gardner, the man who fired the guns, says one man was blown overboard, one child was killed, and only a baby and its terrified mother were taken into custody.* In what sense, in other words, does his participation in a shameful war qualify him to be president of the United States?* A President of the United States should know all sides of an issue. But he cannot be on all sides of an issue. He cannot keep flip-flopping like John Kerry.* Why don't we just give both sides some swiftboats, a few machine guns and lots of ammo, put them on a river somewhere, and let them settle this whole thing like gentlemen once and for all?*




Ann Coulter
Bill Bennett
Thomas Sowell
Patrick Buchanan
Christopher Hitchens
Bob Novak
David Brooks