UNFIT COMMAND OF THE TRUTH:

TWO GROUPS, TWO BOOKS, ONE PREDICTABLE MAINSTREAM MEDIA

I don't often do this, but I'm about to comment on a book I've never read.

The reason I can do so is that its genesis is essentially the question at hand, not its contents, because I'm making a point here.

Concentrate.

There's a group of people who call themselves SwiftBoat Veterans for Truth. Every one of them was a swift boat commander during the Vietnam War, and they are on record accusing John Kerry of, essentially, various forms of dereliction of duty, fraud, and malingering. Their leader, John O'Neill, is the man who took over the boat Kerry was commander of when he bugged out of country 8 months early.

John O'Neill, a lawyer, knows the consequences of telling lies in print. He has even said publicly that if Senator Kerry can prove them false, he should sue them. So far, there have only been threats to block distribution of the book, but no lawsuits based on libel. The men quoted in the book by the veterans, "Unfit for Command," (a book I HAVE read) have signed affidavits concerning their contributions and eyewitness accounts of Kerry's conduct.

This book was number one on the amazon best-seller list before it was even released. Yet only FoxNews gave it any serious attention until Kerry himself made an issue of it while whining that the President (who has nothing to do with O'Neill--I'll get to that) was being mean to him. Then the mainstream press gave it just enough attention to dismiss it as a "pack of lies" and insist that there was no need to answer its charges. It was even compared to the Democrat 527s as an example of McCain-Feingold poisoning the political well.

The lefties insist that the Swiftees are creatures of the Bush campaign, despite the fact that John O'Neill has clearly been an adversary of the Senator since 1971, for reasons having nothing to do with politics. At that time, O'Neill was the chief spokesman for a veterans group that sought to match the visibility and credibility of Kerry's largely fantasist Vietnam Veterans Against the War (which was later proven to have included a surprising number of people who had never even been in the service, much less in Vietnam). They never told Bush what they were going to do, and Bush didn't see it coming.

Fast forward.

Now we are engaged in a great and uncivil war. A war testing whether this nation or any nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal is willing to practice "equality" between political parties. The press has not pursued the questions of Kerry's service and his post-war treason with nearly the zeal it put into generating fake memos and chasing 30-year old dental records from President Bush.

Now there comes forth a group calling itself "Texans for Truth." Its goal is to focus America on the president's National Guard record and spread unsubstantiated rumors, while suppressing the actual evidence that Bush fulfilled his duty to the Guard in less time than he was enlisted for. It is not made up of National Guard members, but of Texans who hate Bush. (The Swiftees have limited their actual membership to people who were in swiftboats in Vietnam.) None of their number, as far as I know, claim to have been in the Guard with Bush (indeed, that is much of their complaint--that no one has surfaced that can confirm the lieutenant was there in the first place).

They, too, have a book (this is the one I haven't read). It is, cutely, called "Unfit Commander," and it recycles old stories about Bush's National Guard record. It has no affidavits, though I understand it contains reams of photocopies of the president's records, so perhaps they just don't know one kind of documentation from another. Its author is Glenn W. Smith, a longtime Democratic Party operative, founder of DriveDemocracy.org, a creature of Moveon.org, the George Soros-backed far leftist advocacy 527 that has helped cause all the trouble this election cycle. If voters are angry that there has been little discussion of "issues," they can thank Moveon for its cerebral discussion of such vital questions as whether President Bush is Hitler or just Mussolini with a funny mustache.

(Brief aside: For those who are curious, the top financial donors to the 527 groups are financier and currency manipulator George Soros, Hollywood producer Steve Bing, Progressive Insurance founder Peter B. Lewis, and…..(drum roll please)…Jane Fonda. Astonishing coincidence. I guess what goes around truly does come around. But do me a favor and spread that information to your favorite Vietnam Vet, especially if he's voting for Kerry.)

The Texans are clearly a politically-driven me-tooism from the innards of the Democratic left, the lowest form of imitation that the campaign silly season can devise. Yet since they have popped up, I have seen mention of them and their empty accusations on mainstream news media--a location in which John O'Neill and his many decorated heros were not welcome.

To review: one group is made up of eyewitnesses to what they consider John Kerry's chicanery surrounding the Vietnam War. These men--many of them multiply decorated war heros, both Democrats and Republicans--made themselves available to the media, which had no time to talk to them. When the media did discover them, it was to villify them--not far off from the "nuts and sluts" defense of the Clinton administration against all who would accuse the president of things that later turned out to be true.

This group is marginalized.

A second group is made up of Democratic operatives who have no knowledge of the president's National Guard record or of the president himself, yet presume to write a toss-off tell-all based on nothing but photocopies of records long in the public domain. This group is backed by a 527 dedicated to getting rid of Bush, which itself was birthed through a start-up grant from a 527 dedicated to getting rid of Bush, bankrolled by a man who has promised to spend his entire fortune, if necessary, to defeat Bush.

When this group makes itself available, the media is at home and receptive.

It is astonishing that anyone believes in the myth of an objective media anymore.