The Truth About Swift Boats

Earlier this week, outspoken Sen. John McCain, who lost the 2000 Republican presidential nomination to George W. Bush, blasted the ad campaign run by the self-named Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, saying he is "sick and tired of reopening the wounds of the Vietnam War." Then McCain called the ads "dishonest" and urged Bush to condemn them. And chief Bush campaign lawyer Ben Ginsburg was forced to resign after it became public that he advised the Swift Boat group about their ads, despite Bush's denials that there was any link between his campaign and the smear attacks.

But the Bush connection goes far deeper. Funding for the Swifties came primarily from a pair of Texans, Bob Perry, a Karl Rove intimate of long standing, and Harlan Crow, a trustee of Bush 41's presidential library. The group's principal public relations honcho, Merrie Spaeth, was the spokeswoman in 2000 for a group that spent some $2 million on ads attacking McCain. Indeed, the Vietnam controversy is just a replay of the same tactics Bush employed against McCain in South Carolina in 2000, when he used shadow-group ads suggesting that McCain -- imprisoned for five years in the "Hanoi Hilton" -- was not a true war hero and had fathered an illegitimate black child. (Not true for McCain, but now we know that the late Strom Thurmond, that architect of segregation, had an out-of-wedlock child with a black woman he kept hidden for decades.)

What is it about Vietnam veterans that brings out the worst in George W. Bush and his supporters? Bush Camp Steering Familiar Path [Star-Ledger]. Vietnam for them is "the war without end." It doesn't end because unscrupulous political hatchet-men keep drudging up old memories. We should focus on today's wars and today's problems. Bush doesn't want to, however, because that would expose the dark underbelly of his campaign -- that America is still in Iraq, with no clear plan, to do the very liberal "nation building" Dubya swore he would never engage in as president.

Realizing that the tide has turned against him, Bush is trying to backpedal and change the subject, proposing yesterday that both campaigns join in challenging the so-called 527 groups, like the veterans and some Democratic and Republican groups, that use unregulated "soft" political contributions from wealthy donors and special interests to influence campaigns. But that is not the issue with the anti-Kerry veterans. The issue is Bush himself -- his refusal to condemn a patently false attack, his willingness to try to reap political rewards on the cheap, his utter lack of leadership (or shame) in brushing off the role played by his close political aides. And his disingenuous reopening of old scars from a war a long time ago in a jungle far, far away, one he worked real hard to avoid fighting in.

 Posted by glenn