Republican Lies Against Kerry Shattered

In an action that many of us involved in Veterans for Kerry wish he had completed during the presidential campaign, John Kerry finally signed a release giving the Boston Globe access to his entire military record. (The release is necessary due to privacy regulations.)

See the full story here.

As we all expected, Kerry's records show the Swift Boat Liars to be exactly what we all knew they were – downright unpatriotic frauds and a front group for the Republican party.

The Globe's analysis of Kerry's service record shows that the Senator was a heroic Navy officer whom a former commanding officer described as ''one of the finest young officers with whom I have served." The officer also wrote that Kerry was ''the acknowledged leader of his peer group," and was ''highly recommended for promotion."

Some of the other commendations were written by the same people who mysteriously surfaced in 2004 to contradict their own accounts of what happened in Vietnam and to question Kerry's courage and patriotism.

Fraud-in-Chief John O'Neill, the leader of the Swift Boat Liars, remains unrepentant at being caught lying about Kerry for the umpteenth time and said he would be disappointed if Kerry's files did not contain new information. ''I would still have the same beliefs expressed in my book," he said.

Many of us who worked so hard for the Kerry-Edwards ticket – and especially those of us who served in the military – wish Kerry had released his records a year ago. Senator Kerry says he didn't wish to feed the lies or to even acknowledge the people bringing them forward.

''The call for me to sign a 180 (release) form came from the same partisan operatives who were lying about my record on a daily basis on the Web and in the right-wing media," said Kerry. "Even though the media was discrediting them, they continued to lie. I felt strongly that we shouldn't kowtow to them and their attempts to drag their lies out."

True enough. But while I do not join in the many criticisms of how the 2004 Democratic campaign was run, I was one of many people grinding my teeth last summer waiting for us to squash the Swift Boat Cretins like so many bugs and wish we had hit back much, much harder.

Maybe this dose of the truth would have made the media hold O'Neill and his slimy crew responsible for their lies – or it at least might have caused them to quit giving those frauds almost unlimited ink and airtime. Maybe not.

What say you now, Mainstream Media? Are you willing to give as much time to the truth about Senator Kerry as you were to peddle the lies?