Asymmetrical Information

I'll state my qualifications by announcing that I don't care who wins the Presidency. That said, I believe this issue is part of a larger issue that will completely destroy the Kerry campaign. The medals are just the start. Here's what Kerry said in 1971:

1. He committed war crimes during the Vietnam war.

2. War crimes were common acts of American GIs in Vietnam.

3. The U.S. high command knew about and endorsed war crimes as a tactical strategy.

Kerry will self-immolate during the general election as he tries to explain these statements. I've already laid my bets with several friends. Kerry will lose every state, save for Massachusetts.

Why can't the Democrats find a better candidate? The answer: the crazy anti-American, anti-religious, anti-family left controls the inner circle of the Democratic Party.

And on the horizon, Hillary vs. Rudy in '08. Hillary's power base in the radical left, particularly in the feminist, sex change, gay activist left will succeed in doing what Republicans could never do without her help... driving religious blacks from the Democratic Party. What will emerge from that debacle is yet to be seen.

Stephen wrote:

Here's what Kerry said in 1971: 1. He committed war crimes during the Vietnam war. 2. War crimes were common acts of American GIs in Vietnam. 3. The U.S. high command knew about and endorsed war crimes as a tactical strategy.

Thanks.

And, just to get the discussion back on topic. The Times is a joke. It is a joke because it is staffed by radical Manhattan leftists set on proving that middle class Americans are bigots.

So, the constant serving of feminism and gay activism.

The Times is relevant only to those who live in Manhattan, San Francisco, parts of LA and on college campuses.

They are all smarter than us, and we are all bigots. What a joke!

Thorley:

1. Kerry's testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 23, 1971

2. The Winter Soldier hearings.

The "Rag of Record" could not be convicted of neutrality in a kangaroo court, even if it offered no defense. The editorial content has begun on the first page for more than a decade, with no obvious indication of any shame, no less any effort to restore "order".

Stephen,

I disagree that this will sink Kerry. I think that, if anything, his felonious participation in the conspiracy to murder a number of US Senators would by more likely to sink him.

He spent 3 days discussing the pros and cons of committing the terrorist act of multiple murder. That was a felony. The fact that he voted against endorsing the terrorism in the end is not a defense to the crime. He had an obligation to report the crime to the authorities and did not.

But I don't think that this will produce a debacle either because the media simply will not report the story. Every major news organization sent teams of reporters out to find out if Bush missed a Guard meeting (despite a lack of any evidence that he had). We have official records and the recollection of a number of witnesses that establish Kerry's commission of the crime of conspiracy to commit murder (and an act of terrorism as well), but it will not interest the press the way Bush's Guard attendance did.

Which gets us right back to the partisan cheerleading of the NYTimes.

Weigh the stories -- purported failure to attend a Guard meeting OR conspiracy to commit terrorism in the form of murdering a number of senators in their US Senate offices. Tough call.

stan,

I don't disagree that the incident you cite is also going to help Kerry go up in flames.

He's got a lot to answer for, doesn't he?

And, I've got to disagree with Jane (aka Megan) who in another post said Vietnam was ancient history and irrelevant to this election.

Maybe it should be, but it's not. The reason: the path the the left took as a result of the Vietnam war was an intellectual and social disaster. The war and its aftermath could not really be judged until after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The problem for the left continues to be its failure to disown its Stalinist wing or to eradicate Marxism from its dialogue.

Kerry's current 'nuanced' description of his actions ...

My understanding is that Kerry cleared up the whole ribbons-which-are-sometimes-called-medals-vs.-actual-medals thing literally 20 years ago when he first ran for the Senate. I'm not aware that he's altered his explanation since that time.

Kerry's appearance on Good Morning America with Charlie Gibson was the most dreadful public performance by a presidential candidate since Ed Muskie bawled his eyes out in New Hampshire. Forget about the issue, which dates back thirty years, and look at how Kerry presents himself: mincing, arrogant, and evasive. Democrats must have a better candidate.

heck, I thought it was funny! Charlie Gibson looked like he hadn't had that much fun in months. When Rice was on, she was to the point and wouldn't let him get a word in edgewise. Kerry, on the other hand, was the interviewee he's probably dreamed about since journalism school!

Stephen,

"I'll state my qualifications by announcing that I don't care who wins the Presidency.

Sure you don't. You're just making some impartial comments on the election.

The Times has the appearance of neutrality? Wow...who knew?

1. Kerry's testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 23, 1971

2. The Winter Soldier hearings.

Actually Kerry simply stated what was said by others. He didn't say he himself took part in war crimes (except taking a very loose definition of 'all war is a crime'). There were quite a few impostors at the Winter Soldier hearings but that doesn't mean there was no substance to the original accusations.

But I don't think that this will produce a debacle either because the media simply will not report the story. Every major news organization sent teams of reporters out to find out if Bush missed a Guard meeting (despite a lack of any evidence that he had). We have official records and the recollection of a number of witnesses that establish Kerry's commission of the crime of conspiracy to commit murder (and an act of terrorism as well), but it will not interest the press the way Bush's Guard attendance did.

I wonder if you noticed that this was contradicted by your opening paragraph:

He spent 3 days discussing the pros and cons of committing the terrorist act of multiple murder. That was a felony. The fact that he voted against endorsing the terrorism in the end is not a defense to the crime. He had an obligation to report the crime to the authorities and did not.

1. It is not a crime to discuss murder. It is not even a crime to say murder is justified (radical anti-abortionites do it all the time). It becomes a crime of conspiracy only if a material act is done to bring about the base crime.

2. Likewise there is no legal obligation to report a crime. I'm no more obligated to report my neighbor who may want to kill Bill Clinton than I am to report my other neighbor who smokes pot every day.

3. No evidence has been put forth that Kerry ever advocated this. The available evidence indicates that Kerry advocated non-violent mainstream methods to protest the war and disagreed with those who advocated violence.

Maybe it should be, but it's not. The reason: the path the the left took as a result of the Vietnam war was an intellectual and social disaster. The war and its aftermath could not really be judged until after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union would not have fallen any sooner if there were an additional 50,000 names on the Wall in DC.

Forget about the issue, which dates back thirty years, and look at how Kerry presents himself: mincing, arrogant, and evasive. Democrats must have a better candidate

I like that first line there. Not only does shamus admit that this is a non-issue, he then goes on to say that we shouldn't even look at the non-issue. Talk about style over substance! Now we have sunk to arguing between style vs. substancless issues!

I've yet to meet anyone who is genuinely enthusiastic about John Kerry. One of my best friends in a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat who routinely calls Bush an idiot and worse; when I bring up Kerry, she just shakes her head sadly. "I think I'll have to sit this one out," she says.

Kerry will lose every state, save for Massachusetts.

How about: "Bush wins forty states, easily beats liberal from Massachusetts"? Hey, it's 1988 again! Break out the Rick Astley records! "Never gonna giiive you up, never gonna let you downnn...!!"

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/04/28/medals/index.html
*******************
Out of all the stories that have hounded Kerry on the campaign trail, the issue
of whether he threw away his ribbons or his medals is the most mendacious.
Last week the media demanded to view Kerry's military records. The reason for
the urgency was that Grant W. Hibbard, a lieutenant commander during Kerry's
swift boat days in Vietnam, asserted that Kerry's first Purple Heart was
undeserved. According to Hibbard, Kerry had a tiny scratch. The Boston Globe
quoted him as saying, "I've had thorns from a rose that were worse." Over 35
years after the fact, Hibbard, a Republican, was trying to belittle, embarrass
and malign Kerry.

But the release of Kerry's war record put an end to the flap. Stuck in the
middle of released documents was an evaluation of Kerry by Hibbard, filled out
two weeks after he supposedly told Kerry he didn't deserve a Purple Heart.
Nowhere in Hibbard's evaluation did he mention any problem with Kerry over
Kerry's winning a Purple Heart. In fact, Hibbard wrote that Kerry was one of
the best sailors he knew in three categories -- initiative, cooperation and
personal behavior. Why, if he thought Kerry was trying to finagle a Purple
Heart, did he give him such high marks for personal behavior? As Katherine Q.
Seelye reported in the New York Times once the document was released, Hibbard
went underground, unwilling to grant interviews, hiding from the press in his
retirement home in Florida. The story went away.

What we also learned from the release of his medical records is that Kerry
still has shrapnel in his body from Vietnam. It often causes him discomfort.
*************

So just like the intern who supposedly had an affair with Kerry, another Republican hatchet job quietly eats the dust. Makes you wonder if the new flap over medals provides just the distraction necessary for everyone not to notice the utter failure of the old charges to stick.

No, I don't care who is elected president. I am officially a registered Democrat. Why is it so hard to believe that a Democrat would be astonished at Kerry's inadequacy as a candidate? One must be a Bush operative to notice this?

When I said that the Vietnam war cannot be put to bed, I did not say that a full commitment by the U.S. to win in Vietnam would have hastened the end of the Soviet Union. I said that it was not possible to fully understand the implications of that war until well after the fall of the Soviet Union. I am a veteran of the anti-war movement. I was wrong. Being wrong on that issue probably says something very negative about whether I would be a good candidate for president. Ditto for Kerry.

In the past few years, I've reassessed my own views of the war and come to a conclusion that is quite at odds with what I thought when I was a young man. Here it is. The U.S. was morally right in its assessment of the stakes in Vietnam, both for the Vietnamese and for the world at large. The aftermath of the war in Cambodia and Vietnam pretty much proved that. The Stalinist state of Vietnam does, too. If the U.S. erred, it was in its belief that it had the ability to win, short of nuclear war.

The left is still operating on the assumption of some sort of existential guilt on the part of the U.S. in Vietnam. Horse manure. There is none. The hatred of the U.S., and the belief that the U.S. is an "imperial" power are dumb leftovers of that era.

And the infatuation with Marxism, and willingness to provide cover for Marxism on the left is an ugly leftover from the war. The fall of the Soviet Union made it all quite transparent. There is no difference between Nazi-ism and Marxism. They are one and the same. I will now receive a chorus of explanations about the differences. BS. What is needed on the left is a thorough de-Stalinization and de-Marxification. Until that happens, the left will continue to be the abode of idiots who don't understand that they are advocating a criminal ideology. Yes, an ideology can be criminal. See Nazi-ism. And Marxism. Marxism must be driven from the public arena, not by censorship, but by public disgust.

Fire away.

Stephen,

I think you've set up a few straw men here. Kerry has never backed away from his opposition to the Vietnam War. That does not mean, however, that he ever opposed the war on the grounds that the Communists were the good guys or even that Vietnam was better off with a victory by the North.

You yourself stated that the war was unwinnable short of the use of nuclear weapons. I assume that you do not think the US should have used nuclear weapons. What does that say about the 50K+ who gave their lives? No matter how evil communism was (and I believe it was), the young people of the 60's and 70's had every right to be enraged at a gov't that cared so little for the value of their lives.

I did not accuse Kerry of being a commie sympathizer, although others have.

What I did accuse him of is being a completely incompetent candidate for the presidency.

When I commented on the left's refusal to repudiate Marxism, I did so, not to condemn Kerry, but as a partial explanation of why the Democratic Party has nominated such a lousy candidate. The Party is dominated by that post-Vietnam consensus on the left that the U.S. is the cause of all that is wrong with the world.

The most radical members of the party predominate at the caucus and primary level. This is not news. The Republican Party went through a similar debacle in the early 60s.

Having lost landslide elections with Carter, Mondale and Dukakis, you would think that the Democratic Party would learn. Kerry's nomination proves that it has not. Kerry is the classic Massachusetts liberal. He is a disaster in the making.

And your evidence of this is his opposition to the Vietnam War 30+ years ago. If you were a little more telegenic back in those days the same might be said about you if you were nominated, your current spasms about Marxism and Communism evidence that you're not only a radical but also a flip flopper who will say whatever sounds right at the particular time.

There were hard leftists running in the primaries. Dennis K. (out of Iraq now!) for example. They lost to Kerry.

It becomes a crime of conspiracy only if a material act is done to bring about the base crime.

Uhm, you sure about that? IIRC from some conversations with a law student friend, criminal conspiracy merely requires intent to commit, not actual commission. IOW joking about a crime or even making serious statements about the nature or means to accomplish crime are not by themselves conspiracy, but if they are discussed with intent to follow through then a crime is committed. Of course, if some provable action never occurs, 'intent' can become pretty slippery and difficult to pin down.

Any further info?

No, he's right: for conspiracy you need one overt act on the part of one of the conspirators, not just discussion with intent. For example, if you and I discuss robbing a store and talk about how we should tape the locks on the doors, we haven't committed conspiracy yet, but if I then go buy a roll of masking tape, we've both committed the crime of conspiracy, even though buying masking tape is legal and only one of us did it.

"There were hard leftists running in the primaries. Dennis K. (out of Iraq now!) for example. They lost to Kerry."

This statement will make sense to any nutjob leftist in Manhattan.

To the rest of the universe, Kerry is a hard leftist nutjob.

Why would someone have to live in Manhattan to see that Dennis K was much more to the left than Kerry (or even Dean for that matter)? Is this really news to you?

No, it is not news to me.

What I am trying to tell you, and what you refuse to listen to, is that the Democratic Party is dangerously out of whack.

The evidence is that it has once again nominated a candidate who appears as a centrist only to the nutjob leftists who now control the caucus and primary process in the Democratic Party.

The question I've been asking all along is: How can the Democratic Party change so that it nominates candidates that appear sane to middle class Americans?

Return to my original post and you will find the answer. It appears that only repeatedly electoral catastrophe will bring the Democrats back to some semblance of sanity. If that's what it takes, I'm all for it. Evidently, the catastrophic losses of Carter, Mondale and Dukakis weren't enough.

The goofball sex change, feminist, gay activist wing of the Democratic Party is so out of touch with the needs, ambitions and ideas of middle class Americans that it seems intent on going extinct. And I also suggested that this goofball wing will commit suicide in the future. The Joker in this deck is black voters. As the Democratic Party goes every more stratospheric in pleasing the nutjob Manhattan, San Francisco, LA wing of the Party, it risks losing black voters, who are overwhelmingly religious. It's coming. It will be breathtaking when it happens.

The other alternative is to change. But, I don't have much confidence that the nutjob left has the sense to pull back from its descent into political suicide.

Let's see. Cheney had 5 draft deferments because he had different priorities, the Shrub went into the Texas Air fucking National Guard when most of us couldn't enlist in the Air Force, Navy or Coast Guard in 1968(read 2 choices for most of us in '68 Army or USMC) and we have a Navy Lt. Cmdr. who doesn't have a CAR (combat action ribbon) or any kind of a 'heart' raising questions about a guy who had a corpsman remove shrapnel from his body.

I'm unaware that Kerry has ever made 'sex changes' a major feature of his political career. I'm unaware that he has even made gays a major feature of his campaign or political career. The only thing I recall hearing about Kerry & gays was that he supports civil unions & would rather the states decide the issue of gay marriage. That appears to be pretty mainstream since the Federalization of Marriage under the FMA doesn't seem to be generating much support.

I have a feeling people like Stephan would say if the Dems nominated anyone other than Sean Hannity for office the guy would be a radical left wing thug.

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