Just Plain Evil

The Swift Boats are setting sail again!

You may recall that during the 2004 election, a GOP front group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth made a lot of hay out of trashing Democratic Presidential candidate John Kerry's Vietnam War record, saying that he didn't really deserve his decorations. President Bush (who was schmoozed into the Texas National Guard and promptly went AWOL) and Vice President Cheney (who defended his five Vietnam-era deferments by saying "I had more important things to do") remained noticeably silent as their minions smeared Kerry eight ways to Sunday. Indeed, the attacks and Kerry's weak response to them were a significant factor in his election loss.

Now it's happening all over again.

In November, Rep. John Murtha, a decorated Marine Corps veteran who fought in Vietnam, came out against the Iraq War, saying we had accomplished all we could over there and it was time to bring the troops home. Nor surprisingly, he was promptly attacked by war supporters as someone who, in the uproar-causing words of Rep. Jean Schmidt, would "cut and run." Murtha's long history of supporting the military combined with his weekly visits to military hospitals to visit wounded troops made him a difficult target for the swift-boating treatment that Kerry received.

Now they're trying.

The Cybercast News Service posted an article last week claiming that Murtha did not deserve the two Purple Hearts he won back in 1967 while fighting in Vietnam. CNS is a hard-right website run by David Thibault, an acolyte of Brent Bozell, the self-proclaimed "media critic" who says the media is filled with liberals, unreformed Communists, gays, lesbians, al Qaeda sympathizers, and so on.

There is, of course, no serious reason to doubt that Murtha earned his decorations honestly and honorably. Demonstrating admirable restraint, Murtha said that "questions about my record are clearly an attempt to distract attention from the real issue" and that "my record is clear."

Thibault, to his (very small) credit, doesn't even try to pretend that his smear is unrelated to Murtha's antiwar statements. "The congressman has really put himself in the forefront of the antiwar movement," he told the Washington Post. "He has been placed by the Democratic Party and antiwar activists as a spokesman against the war above reproach." In other words, if Murtha had just kept his opinions to himself, echoed whatever is the latest mantra for staying in Iraq, and not raised a peep, nothing would have been said.

Once again, we see how the Republicans, who claim to venerate military service above all else, won't hesitate to slur any veteran who fails to toe the line. Max Cleland, who dared to dissent from the Bush Administration's war plans, lost his Senate seat in 2002 thanks to GOP ads smearing him as an ideological comrade of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. John McCain, the fiercely independent Republican senator who was a POW in Vietnam for five years, was attacked by his own party during the 2000 primaries. Not only was he called a possibly traitorous nutcase, but he was the target of a truly despicable whispering campaign saying there was something wrong with him because he and his wife adopted their daughter from Bangladesh.

It seems that some veterans are more worthy of praise than others. If you shut up and salute at the right times, you are held up as a paragon of military virtue. If you dare express any dissenting opinion, you are smeared as a fake hero, a fifth columnist, an enemy within. Insisting that veterans are required to hold certain political beliefs while attacking anyone who thinks differently is wrong, and smearing veterans who don't fall into line is just plain evil.