CAN I GET A WITNESS?

WHY I DON'T ASSUME THE SWIFTEES ARE LYING

I understand that during his (apparently Constitutionally permitted) Kerry campaign speech in Riverside church recently, former President Clinton opined that the Bush campaign and the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth should be ashamed of themselves. We are not supposed to bear, the former president and admitted serial liar reminded us, "false witness." I have also heard this mantra from various purveyors of Democratic talking points. It is apparently designed to silence religious Bush supporters, by tarring them with a brush of hypocrisy.

But it doesn't work.

The assumption this operates on is that the Swiftees are "bearing false witness." But bearing false witness--usually termed "lying" requires that one state something is true that one knows to be false. (This is why "Bush lied, kids died" is a canard. Unless you want to list all the people, including Senator Kerry, who "lied" by believing and disseminating and acting on the information that Saddam probably had WMDs, you can't claim Bush "lied.") Yet there is no reason to believe this to be the case, unless you are predisposed to believe that Senator Kerry is presumptively NOT lying.

True, we are not to bear false witness. But a witness is someone who testifies to something they saw or heard or have first-hand knowledge of. A false witness invents those things. While Kerry denies the claims of the Swiftees, it is unclear to me why my adhesion to the 10 Commandments requires me to accept Kerry's veracity over theirs. (And coming from Clinton, who accused his accusers of lying about him while he was lying himself the entire time, it is even more murky.)

The Bible does say to let everything be determined by two or three witnesses. But here we have a dozen or so on one side and at least 150 on the other. What are we to do with that? If they are telling the truth, then Kerry is lying, and he is the one bearing false witness, and he did it first. Therefore, my loyalty belongs on the side of those who expose the truth in the service of justice and to protect America from a bad and uninformed choice.

Moreover, if they are lying--which I have no way of knowing, not having been there--their evidence should be answerable, and it is the duty of Kerry (because he is asking us to make him president on the basis of his valor as a soldier) to answer them. Instead, he has behaved as a guilty man, accusing the accusers and refusing to engage the issue.

My duty as a Christian and a voter is to vote for the man I believe will be the best and most God-honoring president for this nation. In the process of doing this, I must evaluate the character, statements, and policies of both men. When accusations come, I should indeed note the character of the accusers, but not to the exclusion of the content. Thus, I look at the Swift Boat veterans and I see noble men who don't particularly like John Kerry. And I see a lot more of them than I see of veterans in the Kerry camp.

I look at those accusing President Bush of various nefarious intents, and I see Michael Moore, a self-aggrandizing propagandist driven by an unreasoning hatred not only of the President but of America itself (if you don't believe me go look up the things he says in other countries.)

More importantly, I weigh the character of each man in consideration of each accusation. President Bush's character is well-established. He is a godly man, who reads The Word and Oswald Chambers daily. He is a leader concerned with the well being of the nation, a man whose destiny was forged in the twisted steel of the Twin Towers, who swore that such carnage would never again take place on American soil. And he has held to his word, chasing the terrorists across the globe and employing our military to kill and capture them. He has no intention of ending the war against terrorism while the terrorist philosophy still holds a death grip on billions of the world's people. And he has no intention of signing a treaty with evil and calling it a day.

When I look at Senator Kerry, I see a man with no convictions. He claims to be a Catholic, yet he disagrees with the Church on nearly every issue. As I have written here before, his confusing position on abortion paints him as a sociopath. You can't believe something is murder and still, in good conscience, vote for its unending continuance. On this issue he leaves us two choices: he is lying or he is evil. His positions have changed with the political winds--not, as some would claim, merely evolving as he observes the nuances of the situation. Instead, he has parroted members of his party (like Howard Dean) when their ideas were popular and contradicted them (as when he tries to decorate himself with "conservative values") when it became convenient to him.

The idea that the Swift Boat Veterans were an invention of the Bush Administration is ridiculous. The men who now want to stop him from being president long ago wanted to stop him from testifying in Congress. Especially the ones who were being tortured by North Vietnamese sadists quoting his very words to them to prove America was a wicked country destined to lose against the Communists.

When I was in college, I did my master's thesis on the image of the Vietnam War and its veterans that Hollywood gave us. It was not a pretty picture. Until Rambo arrived, the Vietnam veteran was depicted as a crazed baby-killer, conflicted by his continuing thirst for war and bitter at his nation. That was the image John Kerry fed us all. And the men who fought the war did not deserve the disdain, cruelty, and venom that was hurled at them when they returned--largely as a result of Kerry's claims (which, by the way, were later demonstrated to have involved at least some totally fabricated stories.) The anti-war hippies wanted to "bring the boys home," but when they got them home, the flower children met them at the airport with protest signs and spittle.

The claims of the Swift Boat veterans are logical, considering the character of John Kerry. The evidence is compelling. I do not believe they would have sought this publicity had they not felt forced to by what they saw as the danger of Kerry becoming President without their having lifted a finger to stop it. I cannot say they bear false witness, and I cannot judge their claims. The best I can do is accept their right to make those claims, and weigh them against what I can and do know.

Are hundreds of decorated veterans to be assumed liars because they accuse one? Are their medals and ribbons (which they kept and honored, instead of throwing them over the White House wall) less deserving of respect than Kerry's merely because he is a Senator who wants now to be president?

During the Vietnam war, the President spent 5 years in the National Guard and Kerry spent four and a half months in Vietnam. The president flew planes, Kerry piloted a boat. Both left the service for political activity. Both served. Both should be proud of their service. The President has done the right thing. He deplored all the 527 ads and has moved to pressure the FEC to close the loophole that they slithered through in the McCain-Feingold legislation. He honors Senator Kerry's service. He does not ask the question.

Kerry has done the opposite. He has continued to question the president's service, let his surrogates call him a "draft-dodger" (note to Democrats: "serving" is not "dodging."), and trashed the Vice President for taking family deferments. For those who don't know (which seems to be most of those backing the Senator at his rallies), the law allowed various types of deferments during different periods of the war. They were based on government assumptions about the value of those activities the deferments applied to. Being newly married could earn you one. Having a small child counted, too. The idea was that we didn't want to draft people into a situation that unfairly burdened their family. Today, lest we forget, the Democrats complain when mothers and fathers are deployed at the same time, even though they volunteered for the armed forces. You would think that Democrats would appreciate the "family leave" concept applied to the draft. Guess not.

The Vietnam era is not yet over. It will not be over, no matter how many other wars we fight and win, until the last veteran and the last anti-war protestor are lying in their graves. As long as anti-war protestors like Senator Kerry try to perpetuate their vision of the war and try to stand on their service to justify their thirst for power, people like John O'Neill will try to stop them.

My faith tells me that God invented government. Attacking a nation at war from the inside is simply wrong. Are the Swiftees bearing false witness? Maybe. But even if they are, they are not running for office. It is the Senator who asks for the mantle of leadership, and it is the Senator who must be judged by the voters.