WASHINGTON -- As we watch the left of the Democratic Party
pressing its case to return to the top of the heap in American
politics, or at least evade the fate of the Dodo, we have ever more
evidence validating an insight on which I stake my reputation as a
political seer. To wit: partisan politics falls more often under
the professional expertise of the psychiatrist than that of the
political scientist. A learned shrink can often tell us more about
a political issue than any other professional, not excluding a
swami or a voodoo priest.
Consider the ongoing controversy over Senator Jean-Francois
Kerry's military service in the faraway Vietnam War. You doubt that
the controversy is ongoing? Just last Sunday a front-page story in
the New York Times reported that some of Senator Kerry's
supporters during his ill-fated 2004 presidential campaign are
endeavoring to prove him a war hero with an unblemished record of
heroism. Their targets are the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. These
Swifties, as they are called, are the Vietnam vets who claimed that
when they served with Kerry they found him to be a
self-aggrandizing, self-indulgent showoff. All insist he
exaggerated his feats of heroism, and some testify that he lied
about his wounds and heroics. Many American voters were
persuaded.
Now why is this debate being launched? Any innocent observer who
watched the showboating senator from Massachusetts bungle his 2004
presidential campaign must know that he is today a
self-aggrandizing, self-indulgent showoff. Why would he not have
been one as a youth, back in the late 1960s when he brought camera
equipment into the jungles to film himself at war? After an early
exit from military service, he proceeded to follow the fashion of
the times and oppose the war, appearing before a Senate committee
in 1971 to accuse the American military of systematically
committing war crimes. Then just over three decades later this
strange man chose to make his Vietnam experience a major theme of
his presidential candidacy. This is a matter for a seasoned
psychiatrist to explain. To the rest of us it appears as egotism at
the outer reaches of sanity.
Yet this attack on the Swift Boat Veterans is not contained to
Senator Kerry's supporters. The Senator himself has been obsessive
about the Swifties since their ads against him did his campaign so
much damage. As David Holman reported
in the May issue of The American Spectator, "A year and a
half after he lost the 2004 presidential election John Kerry can't
get enough of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. No matter the
occasion, he [Kerry] doesn't miss an opportunity to parade his
campaign wounds however incoherently and obsessively."
Kerry has complained of the "Swift Boat-style Republican attack
ads" in fundraising appeals on behalf of other candidates. He
invoked the Swifties in opposing the Supreme Court nomination of
Judge Samuel Alito. When asked if he had received contributions
from the disgraced Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff, Kerry
snapped: "that's another of their Swift Boat-style tactics where
they throw up the mud and stick it." Holman reports that Kerry has
resorted to these slurs on the Swifties in eight other fundraising
appeals. Moreover, in the asylum that is the Democratic Party's
Angry Left, "Swift Boat" has become a verb and an adjective. The
left-wing magazine Mother Jones writes of the Bush
administration "Swiftboating their enemies." Senator Hillary Rodham
Clinton admonishes against the dread Republicans' employment of
"swift boat tactics." In the Kultursmog's parlance of hate terms
"Swiftboat" is about to join such terms as McCarthyism and
McCarthyite.
Now we read that the campaign against the Swifties is going to
gain momentum. The sorehead Kerry supporters have joined together
in a group called the Patriot Project. It will seek out the
Swifties and scrutinize their complaints against Kerry. It will
also support opponents of the war in Iraq and visit editorial
offices to make the case for such veterans as the Hon. John P.
Murtha, a Vietnam War vet who now opposes the Iraq War. All of this
sounds like political harassment to me, but as the shrinks are wont
to say, "If it is true for you it is true for you." For a
certitude, the left wing of the Democratic Party believes that
whatever it believes is true. Senator Kerry believes he would be
president today if he had not been swiftboated. He has hired a
researcher to prove from naval archives that he was in Cambodia
three decades ago for a few hours when the Nixon Administration
said he was not supposed to be there. What does this prove? I think
it proves that beyond being a self-aggrandizing, self-indulgent
showoff, this guy is a nut. Yet I leave all this to the
professionals.
topics:
Supreme Court, Military, Iraq, NATO
