Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Traditional media irked that Swiftvets have been able to tell their story

Dave Kopel:

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LBJ was the darling of the establishment media when he won a landslide election in 1964, and a World War II vet who tried to expose Johnson's lies would have stood little chance of being heard. But the subplot of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth vs. John Kerry saga is the mounting fury of the traditional media at its inability to suppress the Swift Vets. The candidate who boasted that he was "Reporting for duty" and will lead the United States just like he led in Vietnam no longer can shield his war record from scrutiny just because the traditional media loathe his opponent at least as much as they loathed Barry Goldwater in 1964.

Typical of the traditional media attitudes was the Aug. 23 column from Denver Post media critic Joanne Ostrow telling readers that "the Kerry camp knocked down the claims intended to discredit the candidate's war record." Not hardly. In fact, the Kerry campaign had already admitted - as the Swift Vets charged - that Kerry's repeated stories about his spending Christmas Eve 1968 in Cambodia were false.

Early this week, a Kerry campaign spokesman admitted - as the Swift Vets had charged - that Kerry's first Purple Heart might have been the result of an accidentally self-inflicted injury on Dec. 2, 1968, rather than as a result of "intense combat" as Kerry's Web site has claimed. (As reported by columnist Bob Novak late this week, retired Rear Adm. William L. Schachte Jr. said that he was on Kerry's boat that day, and that "Kerry nicked himself with a M-79" grenade launcher.) The campaign's admission was reported by Fox News and The Washington Times, while most of the traditional media pretended that nothing had happened.

By the way, the first journalists to point out that Kerry's wound was probably not the result of enemy action were Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, writing in their far-left magazine CounterPunch, in a July 29, 2004, article. Of course Fox, The Washington Times, and CounterPunch, are biased and have an agenda. As do the traditional media. According to an informal New York Times poll, journalists at the Washington bureaus of the mainstream media support Kerry over Bush by a 12-to-1 margin.

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Likewise advancing the story was a Boston Globe article (reprinted in the News on Aug. 19) which investigated Kerry's claim that even if he hadn't been in Cambodia for Christmas, and even though he has described the supposed Cambodian Christmas as a turning point of his life, he was in Cambodia sometime. As the Globe reported, no person from any of Kerry's boats recalls ever being in Cambodia.

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The Swift Vets have been proven right on some incidents, and cannot prove their case on others. The avalanche of traditional media articles denouncing the Swift Vets as a pure smear is itself a smear, as the traditional media flails in rage at the loss of its ability to control public discourse.