Useful Fools

Here is the promised review of

To Set The Record Straight

How Swift Boat Veterans, POWs and the
New Media Defeated John Kerry

by Scott Swett and Tim Ziegler

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Expect one surprise after another in this brilliant and important book. In 2004, John Kerry’s run for the presidency suddenly energized thousands of Vietnam vets. This man, who said his fellow veterans had “raped, cut off ears, cut off heads,…randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan…” wanted to be President! (page 13)

This is the true story of how those vets fought against the vast battalions of the elite media…and against all odds, won. Swett, an insider from the start, and Ziegler nail journalists to the wall time after time. I have never read so many shocking instances of outright bias – or fraud – or stupidity – by the mainstream media.

Early on, the Swift Boat veterans held a historic press conference, where one after another of Kerry’s brothers-in-arms condemned him. You probably didn’t hear about it - it was all but ignored by the media.

“They [Swiftees] assumed that the media would validate their credentials and report their charges to the public. John O’Neill later admitted ‘We were naïve.’ …

“CBS was the only network that did anything, and they did a complete hatchet job…”

“By October, O’Neill no longer had any illusions about what to expect from the old media gatekeepers. The leading liberal networks and newspapers would try to discredit any information harmful to Kerry. Other Swift Vets and POW’s were astonished at the hypocrisy of news organizations they had once admired. While loudly praising the vital role of a free press, the old media imposed a nearly Soviet level of political censorship on the content of news reports.”

When you read the book, you too will be astonished. And you will be amazed at what you never heard, such as the evidence strongly suggesting that John Kerry acted as an agent of the enemy, and that he covered up a less-than-honorable discharge from the Navy.

A CBS report opined “But if you think this is just a concerned group of veterans, think again.” (page 99)

So who were the Swift Boat veterans? This book counters the myths about the vets, who are usually pictured in movies as druggie losers or enraged psychopaths. In particular, it clears up slanders against the Swiftees and their organization, proving they were part of a spontaneous grass roots uprising. The veterans were from all walks of life, Democrat, Republican or just plain ornery.

Expect howls of outrage… expect ad hominem attacks— that the authors are liars and the Swiftees… Bush operatives. Swett and Ziegler give the facts to prove this wrong.

Every practicing journalist in America needs to read this book and then ask and answer some hard questions.

Everyone else in America needs to read it to realize how many times the mainstream media seeks to mislead instead of inform.

You can buy the book directly from the authors here.

Scott Swett, webmaster for The Swift Boat Vets for the Truth, and Tim Ziegler have written a book chronicling the battle between Vietnam Veterans and John Kerry during the 2004 presidential campaign: “To Set The Record Straight”.

Scott is the ultimate insider in this affair, part of the effort from the start and also well connected in the conservative internet world. He was webmaster of both the Swift Boat site and WinterSoldier.com, the authoritative information site on John Kerry.

Check here for information on this book. I now have a copy and will be posting a review when the book becomes generally available for purchase. Let’s just say - you want it - it tells a very important story about how the real grass roots defeated the leftist media establishment.

John O’Neill, the Swiftie spokesman whose photo is on the front cover, was interviewed last year by Useful Fools. That interview, in snippets and in entirety can be heard here.

On Veterans Day, 2006, I had the pleasure of interviewing John O’Neill, well known spokesmen for the Swift-Boat veterans, who played a crucial role in the defeat of John Kerry in 2004. I knew John from my time with the Vietnam Vets for the Truth (VVT) during the 2004 election. The interview was held in Las Vegas where we were both attending a conference on terrorism by America’s Truth Forum, organized by Jeff Epstein, himself a former member of VVT..

The interview covers the formation of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, their motivations and actions. John frankly discusses media bias, the behavior of “Kerry thugs” and a number of related topics, such as how MoveOn.org inadvertently helped the “swifties” - their political enemy.

It is presented in two forms: a series of short clips, and the much longer full interview.

All statements by John O’Neill are his alone, and may not reflect the views of the interviewer, John Moore

UPDATE: A new (12/2007) book documents the Vets vs. Kerry activity in 2004. Check out “To Set The Record Straight” by Scott Swett (SBVT webmaster) and Tim Ziegler. Scott was an insider to the whole thing and tells it like it was.

THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH JOHN O’NEILL

• Full Interview (about 1.5 hours, 22 Megabytes)

THE CLIPS

• How SBVT started
• How MoveOn.org helped the swifties!
• Republicans couldn’t silence us
• How enemy spies worked directly with Kerry’s Vietnam Veterans Against the War (See also wintersoldier.com)
• Libeled for not being accused as a war criminal? Huh?
• Swifties scare liberal kiddies (this is really funny)
  
• New in the media lexicon: “swiftboating“
• CBS follies
• They push the first amendment, except when they don’t
• Yellow Journalism from the New York Times
• Local paper can’t get facts straight
• How to defeat the Main Stream Media
• Media Liar
• Why the swifties focused on Kerry’s Vietnam War record
• Yalie with an M-16
• How Kerry “earned” his medals
• Rice Pellets in the fanny
• Ross Perot’s fantasy becomes reality.
• What the swifties victory means
• Intimidating a war widow
• Wounded marine asks about Iraq
• The effect of the campaign on John’s life

My wife teaches an after-school class for public school 3rd graders at our church here in Arizona. A few weeks ago, one of the kids told how she could pronounce the name of our governor, Janet Napolitano (D).It turns out her teacher gave out tootsie rolls to kids who learned to say it right. Nobody was talking about her oponent - I guess the kids just automatically know how to pronounce Munsil. Not.
Today, election day, they all wanted to know how my wife had voted. Had she voted for Napolitano? Their teachers had told them everyone should vote for Napolitano.

If this bald electioneering on the public payroll isn’t a crime, it should be! Once again, the teachers have shown that their selfish interests are more important than their sacred trust.

It is this sort of nonsense that causes me to ALWAYS vote against public school district funding - and I did so today.

My mother spent 20 years as a public school math teacher. When my daughter was born, there was one commandment: “No grandchild of mine should ever go to a public school!”

Aren’t you glad we don’t have this gal as first lady? One state was all that stopped her.

From the Drudge Report:

Teresa Heinz Kerry is openly skeptical about results from November’s election, the SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER reports, particularly in sections of the country where optical scanners were used to record votes.

“Two brothers own 80 percent of the machines used in the United States,” Heinz Kerry said. She identified both as “hard-right” Republicans. She argued that it is “very easy to hack into the mother machines.”

Heinz Kerry did not offer any specific evidence that votes on the machines were altered.

“We in the United States are not a banana republic,” added Heinz Kerry during a fundraiser in Seattle.

“I fear for ‘06,” she said.

We fear for the future also, Teresa, which is why the veterans have not disbanded after we helped defeat your husband, the traitor.

Now we want to stop his re-election in ‘08′
Keep worrying. The Botox people need the money.

Even at this late date, Kerry supporters are threatening, harassing and suing Vietnam veteran activists who helped defeat his presidential bid.Not know is wheter Kerry approves of these actions, but his political future may depend on suppressing or discrediting these former soldiers. He has threatened John O’Neil with a libel/slander suit, to which O’Neil has said “bring it on” - he welcomes the opportunity to air his charges in court where the biased Main Stream Media cannot cherry-pick the facts.

Many of these soldiers witnessed Kerry’s actions in Vietnam. Others are unwilling to let Kerry, part of the treasonous VVAW, who gravely harmed our country and our veterans, continue with his privileges as Senator or become president. Those soldiers proved that Kerry had received medals which he did not deserve (the press has never pushed Kerry to release all of his military records, and he has not done so, leaving unclear how he manipulated the system, and also preventing the final validation of the charge that he received a less-than-honorable discharge, which was replaced in 1978 with an honorable due to the Carter amnesty).

Actions have included picketing individual homes, SLAP lawsuits (a lawsuit where a rich person sues someone not well off, leaving them with the choice of bankruptcy or making a settlement saving face for the plaintiff, background investigations with threats of revealing very private personal information (the so-called “brown folders”), offensive and unbalanced press coverage and intimidation through threats of lawsuits.

Vietnam veterans won the war in the field (twice) and won it again in the ugly political arena last year. We are not even given the freedom to criticize Kerry without facing potentially life ruining oppression.

Now we may have to fight and win yet one more time.

Stay tuned as we get exclusive details on this ongoing last battle of the Vietnam War over the next few weeks.

If you are one of the people who have faced attempts to suppress your opinions and testimony, or are facing preemptive or revenge attacks of any kind, please contact me.

It’s fair to say that the media this year did its best to unseat George Bush, using deceptive stories, over and under emphasis and every trick in their slimy book.

And George Bush may want to thank them for it.

On May 4, 2004, a previous unknown group, Swift Boat Veterans for the Truth held a historic press conference in Washington, DC. John Kerry’s entire Vietnam chain of command stated that Kerry was unfit to command, a totally unprecedented event. In addition, the group asked John Kerry to release all of his military records, something he still hasn’t done. The SBVT’s primary goal was to keep a man they considered dangerous from becoming president. They also wanted to give the Democratic party a chance to change nominees from this clearly flawed one.

The press reaction was interesting. At the press conference, they showed considerable discomfort when the message became clear. Ultimately, the story was treated as minor, with Kerry spin added to discredit the Swifties’ message, or spiked by the AP, ABC and NBC. See here for detailed media analyis. Needless to say, with press coverage so minor that almost no one remembers it, Kerry remained the nominee.

The press had made its judgment: Kerry was their man. Negative information would not be published.

The reaction of SBVT was to determine how to bypass the press imposed Iron Curtain. They decided to write a book containing their charges about Kerry that would inform people, and create a controversy that the press would have to cover. Somewhat surprisingly, this stratagem worked. It took a while - the book was #1 at Amazon before it was even available (showing the power of Samizdat in countering the US press monopoly). But the press still wasn’t interested. Eventually it became #1 on the New York Times list, and the Swifties released a dramatic advertisement to be broadcast in swing states.

Finally the press reacted. John O’Neil, co-author of the book, was a guest on many shows - often debating a Kerry representative. The commercial was played, allow folks not in the battleground states to see them.

Ultimately the press, using a remarkable double standard, pronounced all of the charges false.

But by then Americans were becoming suspicious of the main stream media (MSM). For many, the charges stuck. For those of us who knew some of the Swift Boat Veterans, the slanderous attacks on them were clearly desperation.

On November 2, the people spoke, roundly defeating the press by re-electing Bush and increasing Republican representation in the house and senate.

What if the press had treated the original charges as something as historic and important as they were? We might have had a different Democrat nominee, who might have won.

The MSM was too smart and dishonest. They defeated themselves.

And for that, I’m grateful.

But I’d be a lot happier if they were honest to begin with.

There are many powerful organizations that want to kick Bush out of office. They are showing their hands with their “October Surprises.”

First, we have Mohammed El Baradei, head of the IAEA. Bush, if re-elected, will have him replaced and he knows it. He appears to be the source of athe missing explosives story..

Then we have the New York Times, a leftist remnant of what used to be a great newspaper. They and CBS jumped all over the “missing explosives” story. Before they had enough information to actually know what happened, they were scaring the public by associating this theft with nuclear weapons. The evidence shows that most likely the explosives were removed by Russian Spetznaz troops right before the war, as reported by Bill Gertz, one of the best reporters on national security issues. Meanwhile, Kerry is running around saying Bush was careless to let 380 tons out of 600,000 tons get away. Bush is saying Kerry has poor judgment in his rush to condemn, and Bush is right. ABC says there were only 3 tons of RDX at the site, not 377 tons.

Al Qaeda certainly doesn’t want to miss their chance, so they produced a blood-chilling video tape saying that if Bush is re-elected, blood will run in our streets and we will forget 9-11. However, they didn’t mention their proclivity for killing people no matter what we do, and that if Kerry is elected, they will still try to make blood run in our streets. These guys don’t have a life - they are death nerds - and all they can think about is killing.

Another one that the media amplifiers are just discovering is a report in the Lancet, a prestigious British medical journal. Just by coincidence, they announced a new study (by Johns Hopkins) that shows 100,000 Iraqis were killed by Americans since the end of major hostilities. The International Herald Tribune reports:Editors of the journal decided not to wait for Lancet’s normal publication date next week, but instead to place the research online Friday, conveniently close to the election. The study’s authors are Americans.

Les Roberts, the lead researcher from Johns Hopkins, said the article’s timing was up to him.

“I emailed it in on Sept. 30 under the condition that it came out before the election,” Roberts told The Associated Press. “My motive in doing that was not to skew the election. My motive was that if this came out during the campaign, both candidates would be forced to pledge to protect civilian lives in Iraq.

Does anyone believe that motive? I don’t, especially when you read more of his words:

“I was opposed to the war and I still think that the war was a bad idea, but I think that our science has transcended our perspectives,” Roberts said. “As an American, I am really, really sorry to be reporting this.”

I’m sorry you are reporting it also, because your methodology is inadequate. Furthermore, your insistence on having it come out before the election can only be considered a sign of extreme bias. Since you timed your study to damage Bush, is there the slightest reason we should believe that your study is correct? Why does it produce a number five times the upper bound of the opinion of experts?

The results don’t pass the smell test. The study itself is flawed, which is sad since it came from my daughter’s alma mater. It trusts the reports of Iraqis, many of whom had an incentive to lie - for example, those in Fallujah ini the zone where the rebels are located.. Many Iraqis had an incentive to exaggerate the deaths. The result is a study where the results are automatically skewed high.

The deaths were attirbuted mostly to airstrikes, and yet a small percentage of Iraqis are in areas where post-war air strikes have been done.

The total number of Iraqis surveyed was small. These sorts of studies are common on medical issues, but on political issues they are harder.

The study’s lead author:

“This isn’t about individual soldiers doing bad things. This appears to be a problem with the approach to occupation in Iraq,” Roberts said.

This guy has an axe to grind. He opposed the war, he thinks the occupation is being done wrong even though we are using measures designed to minimize deaths of innocents, and he put his article out just in time to influence the election, but too late for much debate. This is a classic knife in the back to Bush. The conflict of interest of the author destroys the credibility of the study. Other experts are already criticising it, saying the numbers should be 10,000 to 20,000.

Count on this to be a big story designed to hurt George Bush, even though independent exprts from organizations like

I wonder how many more last minute surprises they are going to come up with?

“Both Candidates Ended Up from the Debate a Little Better Off”

Michael Barone
FOX New 2245Z

HUH?

[Still posting slowly - still busy]

Kerry has been running as a war hero, but now we know he was a shirker.

He left Vietnam after four months on the day his first purple heart (which showed up third) was awarded.

It is now clear that award was fraudulent, although Kerry refuses to authorize release of related paperwork. But we know that the scratch that led to the award happened in an incident where there was no enemy fire. Purple Hearts can only be awarded during combat.

In the mliitary, a shirker is a low-life who gets out of combat improperly.

Kerry is a shirker.