Etalkinghead

The over-blown and hasty reaction from the Kerry camp vis-a-vis the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth TV ad is a tell-tale sign that things are not going well for the senator from Massachusetts. Indeed, ever since Mr. Kerry changed his mind and, contrary to what he had repeatedly promised, decided to make of his four-month period in South Asia more than 35 years ago a central pillar of his current presidential bid, the media at large has refused to question or objectively examine anything of what is spoon-fed to them by the Kerry headquarters –a posture that has proven a dramatic reversal from the very critical and aggressive position they took in 1996, when Bob Dole’s heroic war record was not only questioned at nauseam but even mocked by such luminary publications as The Nation.

Contrary to conventional wisdom (i.e. the media pundits), and in clear contrast to their European counterparts whose only news is what their government-controlled media supplies them with, the American electorate is not made up of malleable zombies. In this the Age of Information, most Americans have quickly learned to identify and separate cheap propaganda from actual news; if the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth TV ad is proving to have a tremendous impact on those who watch it, it is because the men who appear on it, beyond their political and personal motivations, tell a compelling story that deserves not only to be heard but, more importantly, looked into, instead of being simply dismissed (like most in the media have done so) as yet another conspiratorial urban legend.

So far, the response from Mr. Kerry and his supporters has not been to produce facts and documents to disprove what it is said in the ad, but instead to denounce it as “morally reprehensible”, on grounds that it provides a different view (a view that happens to be shared by tens of veterans who served along John Kerry himself) on John Kerry’s purportedly heroic military record.

For a group that has wrapped itself around the new sacred cow of moral relativism –a group, lets remember, that not long ago failed to see acts of adulterous fellatio performed in the Oval Office as even morally questionable– it is beyond hypocrisy to denounce political dissent to their candidate on precisely moral grounds. But then again, hypocrisy seems to be what people like Max Cleland feed on, as exemplified by his cry that it is unseemly to attack Kerry’s war record, while at the same time he maintains absolute silence on Kerry’s vicious attack on the war record of his fellow soldiers.

At least Senator Kerry, Presidential Candidate, has today at his disposal the entire American media to respond when and as he wishes, a privilege that his fellow soldiers did not enjoy more than 30 years ago when then anti-war activist John Kerry accused them of committing the most gruesome crimes against humanity –certainly those who were still in the hands of the Vietcong, being tortured beyond imagination, did not.