[Vision2020] Mud-wrestling, AKA Election 2004

[Joan Opyr]

Hi all,

In response to Matt Drudge (thanks, Tim) and also for what it's worth, there 
was a piece in Salon.com addressing some of up and coming smears tactics 
that John Kerry will face.  Here's the link:

http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2004/02/10/kerry_smear/index.html

For those of you who don't have access to Salon Premium (they charge me $30 
a year for mine, though I think it's well worth it), I reprint the text 
below.  Yes, I know that Joe Conason is a Democrat and an active partisan, 
but he makes no secret of his agenda.  Neither do I.  The information can be 
found in other sources, however, and I think it's valuable.

Ted Sampley, the "smearer" in question in the article below, also 
successfully tarred Republican John McCain when the Senator (and former POW) 
ran against Bush for the GOP nomination in 2000.  What we're going to be 
looking in the months ahead is a really nasty campaign of distortion, lies, 
and manipulation -- one in which a decorated veteran who won his bronze star 
patrolling the Mekong Delta is already being hammered by chicken hawks on 
the Right as if he were Jane Fonda's twin brother from downtown Hanoi.

Joan Opyr/Auntie Establishment


The Vietnam smear -- from McCain to Kerry

As Bush's military record comes under harsh scrutiny, the same smear 
campaign used against John McCain in 2000 is being rolled out against John 
Kerry.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Joe Conason

Feb. 10, 2004  |  Many months before the dormant controversy over George W. 
Bush's military career resurfaced, conservatives and Republicans were raking 
over yellowed clippings as they sought to revive dim memories of the Vietnam 
War. Their target was not the errant National Guard Lt. Bush, of course, but 
the decorated Navy Lt. John F. Kerry.

Last year, when Kerry was considered the front-runner for the Democratic 
presidential nomination, he began to take flak from the far right over his 
antiwar activism and his war record. Those attacks slowed when his candidacy 
stalled and temporarily sank.

But now, as he claims primary victories and climbs past Bush in the polls, 
Kerry is again the prime target of conservative invective that depicts his 
peace activism as unpatriotic, anti-military, and somehow hostile to his 
brothers in arms. With scrutiny focused on Bush's alleged failure to fulfill 
his Guard obligations, the destruction of Kerry's character has reached 
red-alert urgency on the right. And a key purveyor of this anti-Kerry 
propaganda is a former Green Beret named Ted Sampley, who has run a 
profitable business as a "POW/MIA advocate" from his home in North Carolina 
for most of the past two decades. Few remember that Sampley was critical to 
efforts to similarly smear Sen. John McCain, another war hero, when he ran 
for president against George W. Bush in 2000. Now Sampley has started an 
organization pointedly calling itself "Vietnam Veterans Against Kerry," 
which proclaims its determination to ruin Kerry's campaign.

Republicans are understandably rattled by Kerry's political appeal to 
Vietnam-era veterans -- and, by extension, to veterans of more recent 
conflicts as well. From the beginning, the Massachusetts senator has been 
accompanied by a contingent of vets; but their presence was dramatized last 
month in Iowa by the sudden appearance of James Rassmann, a veteran who 
described how Kerry had pulled him out of a river, while machine-gun fire 
raked their boat, and saved his life. That was why he had traveled from 
Oregon to join the campaign, Rassmann explained -- even though he is a 
registered Republican.

The Democratic vet offensive inspired a pair of contradictory responding 
salvos from the Republicans. Versions of both have appeared recently on the 
Wall Street Journal editorial pages. In a brief essay published on Feb. 7, 
World War II hero Bob Dole warned that "we do not need to divide America 
over who served and how," and pointed out that Kerry himself had issued a 
similar plea in 1992 regarding the issue of Bill Clinton's Vietnam draft 
history. Dole forgot to note that his fellow Republicans, ignoring Kerry's 
plea, incessantly excoriated Clinton as a draft dodger and worse.
Only two weeks earlier, the Journal editors had published a harsh attack on 
Kerry's war record titled "Conduct Unbecoming: Kerry Doesn't Deserve Vietnam 
Vets' Support." Written by a former Special Forces lieutenant, the essay 
complains that Kerry's antiwar activism was "financed by Jane Fonda," whose 
1972 solidarity visit to Hanoi made her a permanent symbol of betrayal to 
many Vietnam vets. "Many veterans believe these protests led to more 
American deaths," wrote the author, Stephen Sherman, "and to the enslavement 
of the people on whose behalf the protests were ostensibly being 
undertaken." Significantly, he also berates Kerry for suppressing a 
"revealing inquiry" into the POW/MIA issue, another matter of deep 
sensitivity for vets, as co-chairman of a Senate investigating committee. 
Even for the Journal, that was a remarkably irresponsible accusation.

But for the Republicans, cutting off Kerry's potential base among veterans 
is as vital as deflecting questions about Bush's military record. From 
obscure Web sites to Rush Limbaugh to the Weekly Standard, the right-wing 
media are eagerly popularizing the same attacks featured in Sherman's essay. 
The Web site for Ted Sampley's Vietnam Veterans Against Kerry offers a 
pungent example of the right's rhetorical style: The Viet Cong's National 
Liberation Front flag is the background to a shot of a young, fatigue-clad 
Kerry. That picture is pure computer magic -- in other words, a fake.
According to author Susan Katz Keating, who has written extensively on 
Vietnam veterans and the POW/MIA movement for the Washington Times and 
Soldier of Fortune magazine, deception is what Sampley does for a living. 
Her book "Prisoners of Hope: Exploiting the POW-MIA Myth in America," 
published in 1994 by Random House, exposes how Sampley and his allies abused 
the hopes of grieving families for fun and profit. Their best-known victim, 
until now, was Sen. John McCain. He first drew Sampley's poisonous attention 
when, along with Kerry, he debunked the idea that Americans were still being 
held by Vietnam, and endorsed the restoration of diplomatic relations with 
the Communist government.

Keating describes in detail how, in 1992, Sampley commenced a "scurrilous" 
crusade to punish McCain:

"Sampley ... accused McCain of being a weak-minded coward who had escaped 
death by collaborating with the enemy. Sampley claimed that McCain had first 
been compromised by the Vietnamese, then recruited by the Soviets.

"To those who know McCain and are familiar with his behavior in captivity, 
the charge is ludicrous. McCain resisted his captors to such a degree that 
he was isolated in a special prison for troublemakers. He repeatedly refused 
special favors, including early release, and emerged as a spiritual and 
religious leader for other prisoners. Nonetheless, Sampley was persistent 
enough in his claims that the press in McCain's home state of Arizona picked 
up on the KGB story."

In 1992, Sampley wrote a long article that portrayed McCain as a "Manchurian 
candidate," who had betrayed America to the North Vietnamese and then 
enlisted as a secret Communist agent. But it wasn't until seven years later 
that the celebrated Navy pilot and ex-POW found out how much damage such 
smears could inflict. After McCain declared his presidential candidacy in 
1999, Sampley revived the "Manchurian candidate" smear as a convenient 
weapon for the Senator's political enemies. Some of them, including the 
prominent conservative Paul Weyrich and Richard Mellon Scaife's Newsmax Web 
site, didn't hesitate to pick up the slimy stuff generated by Sampley. The 
fringe assault on McCain, amplified by the likes of Weyrich and talk radio, 
caused grave injury to his campaign during the pivotal South Carolina 
primary.

Insinuations of treason are being revived for deployment against Kerry, who 
happens to be a close friend of McCain (Kerry defended McCain against 
Sampley, denouncing him as a "stupid ass" in print). The simplest way to tar 
Kerry as an antiwar extremist -- and indict him for unpatriotic betrayal in 
the eyes of many vets -- is to pair him with "Hanoi Jane" Fonda. On Monday, 
Rush Limbaugh published a photograph of Fonda at what appears to be an 
antiwar rally, under the headline "John Kerry With Hanoi Jane in September, 
1970." And indeed, a blurry face about two rows behind her does resemble the 
young Kerry.

But Limbaugh, like so many who attack Kerry for working with Fonda against 
the war, distorts reality. Fonda didn't travel to Hanoi until August 1972. 
Obviously that was two years after the September 1970 rally and, more 
important, a year after she joined demonstrations led by Kerry and his 
fellow vets in Vietnam Veterans Against the War. By the time Fonda visited 
Hanoi, Kerry was running for Congress in Boston. There's no evidence that he 
worked with Fonda after her notorious trip. (If Monday's rant indicates 
Limbaugh's state of mind, he is absolutely unhinged by the prospect of 
renewed debate over Vietnam. Might his hysteria have anything to do with his 
own embarrassing escape from the draft?)

Searching for proof of Kerry's alleged anti-American radicalism has 
frustrated his more intelligent adversaries. The current issue of the Weekly 
Standard carries a windy account of this ongoing quest by David Skinner, who 
dug up a copy of the New Soldier, a 1971 antiwar volume that carried Kerry's 
byline. Skinner offers a long, dull account of his effort to find a copy of 
this minor, somewhat moldy period piece -- and when he does, the results are 
anticlimactic. "Anti-Kerry oppo researchers will be disappointed to learn 
that Kerry wrote very little of the book," he reveals at long last. "It 
reprints his [1971] Senate testimony and includes a brief afterword from 
him." Skinner can't manage to work up much righteous anger. At the end, he 
complains that in the midst of the movement's turmoil, Kerry "was able to 
have his cake and eat it, too, becoming the establishment, patriotic face of 
a radical, anti-patriotic movement."

Please allow me to translate: The Weekly Standard found nothing because 
there was nothing to find. But that won't stop the desperate, screaming 
smears, escalating in volume as Kerry stumps toward his party's nomination.

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