Bobulinski and the Swift Vets
The MSM pretends that Tony Bobulinski doesn’t exist:
Tuesday night, Tucker Carlson interviewed erstwhile Hunter Biden business partner Tony Bobulinski again (the first interview took place just before the 2020 presidential election). The interview lasted a full hour, yielding information indicating an astonishingly compromised president and a dangerously corrupt FBI.
An Internet search for the interview shows that members of the news media who awarded themselves countless prizes for four years of breathless stories about the Russia hoax are — except for those at Fox News and the New York Post — utterly silent about the interview, just as they were regarding the first one.
Worked like a charm the first time, didn’t it? The modus operandi is to ignore, knowing that vast numbers of people don’t read or listen to any sources on the right. If that doesn’t work out, the next step is to “debunk” the charges by saying that the person is a liar or a Russian tool. The MSM wants to do anything but engage with the actual evidence and the actual arguments without distorting or lying about them.
Right now the Bobulinski story is in this ignoring stage, but that could change if the MSM finds it necessary to go to stage two:
Journalism is about covering important stories. With a pillow, until they stop moving.
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) May 9, 2013
So, why do I mention the Swift Vets in connection with this? Remember them? I do. During the 2004 campaign they came out with some damaging evidence about John Kerry’s service in Vietnam, and they were first ignored and then defamed. I was paying a lot of attention to them at the time, and I wrote several posts about them in 2008 during the Obama campaign, because the charge “swiftboating” had come into the vernacular as a word for lying about a candidate in order to defame him or her. It was used in an Orwellian manner:
As the Washington Post notes, “swiftboating” has become a synonym for “a political low blow.” And of course, in the eyes of the MSM, it tends to be the province of those nefarious Republicans.
Forget about whether the charges are actually true or not; that’s a minor quibble, hardly worthy of consideration. After all, “facts are the enemy of truth,” don’t you know?
So that means that the NY Times can attack likely Republican Presidential nominee John McCain with “facts” that barely rise to the level of good gossip, and Dan Rather can use forged documents to smear George Bush on the eve of the 2004 election, and the rest of the MSM and the Democrats somehow can’t find it in their hearts to use the term “swiftboating” for their fellow Dems, especially when it’s Republicans being attacked.
This is the case even if—as happened recently with the Times—the actions of these MSM icons are condemned even by their own side (if you can find an example of someone on the left/liberal end of things using the term “swiftboating” to describe the Times or Rather, please send me a link; I haven’t been able to find one). It seems to be reserved for anyone who might attack a Democrat.
I closely followed the Swift Vets’ story in 2004. I read their book, and found it compelling. I waited for the evidence in it—presented in very lawyerly fashion, since some of them are lawyers—to be countered.
But I never saw any of it effectively debunked other than a few unimportant details, although I looked and looked (I actually wanted the charges to be untrue, because at the time I thought John Kerry was going to be our next President, and the prospect would have been far less sobering if the book could have been invalidated).
And so I read almost everything that was written to counter it, and the counter-evidence was so flimsy I became convinced that it wasn’t countered because it couldn’t be countered. And early on in the controversy one of the main tools of the counterattack to the Swift Vets’ accusations was to smear the accusatory Vets themselves.
This, of course, was not considered “swiftboating;” the term hadn’t quite jelled yet. I watched as the legends about the Swift Vets grew: they were Republican operatives all; they were liars, despite being decorated heroes themselves. Kerry lost because he was just too nice a guy to fight back (Kerry himself is a big one for promulgating this particular theme).
At the time all of this had occurred – 2004 – I was naive enough to be surprised and shocked. After that, I realized it was standard operating procedure. But I remember the Swift Vets as one huge turning point in my perceptions about the MSM.
The term “swiftboathing” isn’t used much anymore or even at all, as far as I can tell. 2004 was nearly twenty years ago, after all, and a lot of young people probably have no idea about the term or what gave rise to it. But Wiki still gives it the Orwellian definition it came to have:
The term swiftboating (also swift-boating or swift boating) is a pejorative American neologism used to describe an unfair or untrue political attack. The term is derived from the name of the organization “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” (SBVT, later the Swift Vets and POWs for Truth) because of their widely publicized—and later discredited—campaign against 2004 U.S. presidential candidate John Kerry.
Since the political smear campaign that the group conducted against Kerry, the term has come into common use to refer to a harsh attack by a political opponent that is dishonest, personal, and unfair. The Swift Boat Veterans and media pundits objected to this use of the term to define a smear campaign.
Yes, they object – and so do I – because the use of the term against the Swift Vets is itself dishonest, personal, and unfair.
Kerry should have been Courts Martialed. He deliberately put his command at risk. The stuff about getting 3 Purple Hearts is more you know what.
I will say that I am a Navy vet (I was lucky that I was on a ship in the Med – when you sign on the dotted line you go where they tell you), my Brother a Navy Chief that did serve in Vietnam, and my Father a Navy Chief that was at Pearl Harbor and other “interesting” places from 1941 onward.
They serve “the father of lies”. They knowingly declare truth to be a lie and lies, to be truth. They betray their very raison d’être.
May they reap the reward they so richly deserve in the
life to come.
To reject the certainty of a just accountability in the afterlife is to posit that reality consists solely of what you can get away with… along with positing that leadership and public celebrity carries with it no obligation to those who have elevated them.
Look how much they left out
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Swiftboating#Discredited%3F
While ignoring the Swift Vets; the MSM created fake news about W’s service record. The funny part is how they described the 147th FIG at Ellington as a country club for rich kids. My father flew in that unit and was a WSO for the F-101s that replaced W’s F-102s. I wouldn’t call my grandmother, who raised my dad on her own working at Montgomery Ward, rich. My father got the slot after 2 tours in Vietnam in B-52s. The MSM could have interviewed a lot of other veterans that served with W, but they only talked to the one that lied for them.
https://rumble.com/v1mo6zy-tucker-carlson-tonight-10422-fox-news-october-4-2022.html
FYI They entire interview on Rumble.
I was an officer in the navy, like Kerry, I’m pretty sure I could count on any of the officers I served with to vouch for me. The fact that nobody that served alongside Kerry vouched for him – speaks volumes.
The Wikipedia article Neo linked is one of the most biased pieces I’ve ever read from there, and that’s saying a lot. Plenty of assertions, and not a shred of actual refutation of the Vets.
In 2004, I was still kind of an ignorant LIV, only following politics in a haphazard manner while getting the last of our five kids through high school, even though I did try to keep better informed after 9/11 shook everything up in 2001.
I had just begun to read blogs, and was blown out of the water with the expose of Dan Rather’s lies about GW Bush and the alleged National Guard memo.
At nearly the same time, John Kerry blew up any remaining shred of Democrat credibility with his nauseating pretense of patriotic service, although I don’t recall now exactly what order the two events came in.
This Wiki post just places them both in the same two-month period (and is relatively neutral, unlike the other one).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_United_States_presidential_election
I listened to the Swift Boat Vets and believed their message, especially (as I remember it) the observation that they could have come forward earlier in Kerry’s political career and had not (I don’t recall the reason; I wish they had), but could not allow such a brazen liar to become president.
When the Democrats and mainstream media immediately, and suspiciously in concert, put the reverse-Orwell spin on the neologism “swift boating” as Neo describes, they definitively revealed the depth and breadth of the rot in our press and political institutions.
So I got hooked on watching the circus via Powerline and other blogs, through the Obama years, and now with Biden.
They lie. All the time. About everything.
I’ll offer John Kerry’s military service, such as it was, was satisfactory when you look at the whole spectrum of experience in his cohort. Three problems: (1) his service was not as impressive as his decorations would suggest. (I’ve seen contentions from veterans that the social psychology of the military in those circumstances tended to generate a debasement in the currency of decorations); (2) as has been pointed out by veterans, it’s a reasonable inference he gamed the system in order to be pulled out of action early; and (3) his entire public career was built on having been a VietNam veteran, and as late as 2004 he was using former boatmates as campaign props.
If his time in the Navy had been a line on a campaign brochure, none of this would be a problem. However, Kerry made himself a public figure with the ‘Winter Soldier Investigation’ and various exhibits of himself while active in VietNam Veterans Against the War. It’s a reasonable wager that he was able to defeat James Shannon in the 1984 Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate nomination on the selling point of his VietNam service. Democratic Senators are seldom voted out of office in Massachusetts; it’s only happened twice in the last century, and it was the same politician on both occasions; that man was a dissenter within the Democratic Party, which Kerry is not. Democratic candidates seldom lose statewide contests in Massachusetts; Republicans elected statewide in Massachusetts are typically voted out of office after one term. That primary election in 1984 made his career, and he won it by the slimmest of margins while most Democratic pols were backing his opponents.
You have other politicians whose military service was a frequent subject of public discussion, among them Bob Dole and John McCain. John McCain was career Navy and the son and grandson of admirals. The Navy was his life for 44 years. He also lived through the ugliest of ordeals in 1968-73. In Bob Dole’s case, he was disabled by his service, and the physical and occupational therapy program necessary for him to return to work wasn’t completed until 1949. Even so, his wife attended his law school classes to take notes for him because he had insufficient mobility in that arm. Hendrik Hertzberg, a most unfriendly journalist by disposition, met Dole in 1988. In his account of the meeting, he said the first thing that hits you about Dole is that his body is so asymmetrical and he has a personality that matches it. Dole did not have to talk about his military service; journalists were motivated to write about it by looking at him. John McCain’s impairments are subtler, but noticeable: he could not raise his arms above the horizontal position, use a keyboard, or tie a tie. Dole among the two has been dismissive of aspects of his service. (“I wasn’t a hero, just a kid who got shot”).
While we’re at it, the Bushes, father and son, never made much of their time in the military. Papa Bush had an interesting time of it and answered questions about it, but that was about it. For his son, it was a line on a campaign brochure.
Note the SwiftBoats were a group of veterans organized by a trial lawyer in Texas who had been a public critic of Kerry’s ca. 1971. Reporters weren’t trashing his service. Reporters were muted in raking Da Nang Dick Blumenthal over the coals. The real fire has been reserved for George W Bush, Dan Quayle, and Pat Robertson. (Sidney Blumenthal was audacious enough to make an effort at trashing the elder George Bush’s service).
I was a Midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy during Kerry’s antics in 1971 (the “winter soldier” hearing and throwing medals/ribbons over the Capitol fence). I was appalled then and I’m appalled now. As you can imagine, the Vietnam War was a topic of considerable interest at the service academies in the early 1970s and everyone wanted to bend over backwards to cut Kerry some slack. But the more the facts came out, the more appalled we became. And this is years before John “Do you know who I am?” Kerry ran for political office. But I remember him well. The country dodged a bullet in 2004–many thanks, Ohio!
I started to watch Tucker’s interview with Bobulinski, but gave up quickly. I applaud what Tucker is trying to do to keep all this in front of the public. But, as the past 6 years have taught me, nothing ever happens to anyone on the left no matter how egregious the crime. My time was better spent watching Fuller House reruns, than hearing what I know is probably true, and not allowing myself to get my blood pressure up over a broken system that I can’t do anything about.
Note the SwiftBoats were a group of veterans organized by a trial lawyer in Texas who had been a public critic of Kerry’s ca. 1971.
As I recall, that “trial lawyer” from Texas was another Vietnam vet who has spent years exposing fake veterans.
“They lie. All the time. About everything.”
Sums it up.
Must be added (though it’s probably unnecessary) that as part of its war on the US and its citizens, the Democratic party and its loyal minions have also embarked on a massive offensive against LANGUAGE.
It is infuriating, exasperating and demoralizing…but readers of Orwell should not be surprised.
(See also the following post on Hunter Biden…)
Related:
Victor Davis Hanson asks a “most interesting” question:
“… An Epidemic Of Cognitive Impairment?”—
https://dailycaller.com/2022/10/07/hanson-an-epidemic-of-cognitive-impairment/
H/T Zerohedge.
@ Art Deco > “If his time in the Navy had been a line on a campaign brochure, none of this would be a problem. However, Kerry made himself a public figure with the ‘Winter Soldier Investigation’ and various exhibits of himself while active in VietNam Veterans Against the War.”
Agreed – the comparison between Kerry’s grandstanding and the reticence of other (mostly older) politicians was egregious and aggravating.
I actually don’t remember much about Kerry’s “winter soldier” stunts in 1971, as that was my first year in college, with no tv, and not much talk about the politics (other than a general awareness of the zeitgeist, and my gratitude that Nixon ended the war before my younger brother reached draft age). Of course, all of the guys I knew were NOT in Vietnam by definition, although I worked with several veterans later in graduate school (all of them fine men and good TAs).
However, I knew enough to know that Kerry’s “Ready to Serve” play-acting in 2004 was a gross distortion of his career, and his character.
And who can forget his dismissal of the soldiers then stuck in Iraq, because they were too stupid for anything else?
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.snopes.com%2Ftachyon%2Fimages%2Fphotos%2Fpolitics%2Fgraphics%2Fkerrysign_small.jpg%3Fresize%3D480%2C229&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=f043ee06b6878e03fce2211e4e231a2dfe7917deeaba5508149c4348eaa5d92e&ipo=images
GWB has been a disappointment to me in recent years, but he still deserves thanks for keeping John Kerry out of the Oval Office.
As I recall, that “trial lawyer” from Texas was another Vietnam vet who has spent years exposing fake veterans.
Absolutely. He’d been posted to the Mekong Delta just after Kerry had been pulled out. William Dyer (“Beldar”) had dealt with him professionally in Texas and offered an assessment of him in that capacity. As an attorney, Dyer said he’s pretty much tops.
I meant to point out that the Swift Boat Veterans were not an astroturf group. These were interested parties due to events in their past, not due to any political connections. John O’Neill did go on a speaking tour after his return from VietNam, but otherwise had been preoccupied with professional and family life. As a top trial lawyer, he had connections to a great many people, so the Sulzberger Birdcage Liner tried a six-degrees-of-separation ad hom attack on him.
Beldar Blog was one of my early favorites when I started reading the internet for news. I was very disappointed when he quit posting.
https://www.beldar.org/about.html
“I’m a lawyer, but I am not your lawyer, okay?”
https://blog.chron.com/techblog/2006/10/beldar-i-may-get-back-in/
Apparently he did! I hadn’t kept up because I didn’t expect it to happen.
However, the most recent post is from November 20, 2020.
Sad.
https://beldar.blogs.com/
I went cruising through his “back issues” and found a lot of really bad predictions (Hillary Clinton would never run again; Joe Biden would never be president), although to be fair that was the way to bet back in 2012. Beldar does NOT like Donald Trump for various reasons; I didn’t see any post about the 2016 results.
Since the Kerry candidacy came up in the discussions recently, I will link just this one post.
https://www.beldar.org/beldarblog/2004/10/eighth_and_nint.html
Beldar didn’t think much of Obama, either.
It is a sobering thought that so many people believed Jimmy Carter was a terrible president, and the Democrats have gone down-hill since then, whether their candidates were ever elected or not.