Young Kerry and Young Dubya and Undead Dick

There has been lots of good stuff out lately about the Republicans' campaign against Kerry's wartime service because to today's fanatical Reps, patriotism=supporting the Republican Party.  In their increasingly FoxNewsified world, where Rush Limbaugh's Oxycontin fantasies pass for sane commentary, reality is what the Republican National Committee says it is.

The Democrats are far more in hock to corporate conservatism and big money than it's healthy for any party in a democracy to be.  But they haven't totally surrendered to crony capitalism and a totalitarian-minded partisanship, where anything goes as long as the Party wants it: wars based on lies, exposing undercover CIA agents, setting up rogue intelligence operations, whatever.

This whole business of trying to compare Lt. AWOL Bush's inability to even fulfill his duty to the country-club unit of the Texas Air Guard Old Man Bush got him into as being so much superior to John Kerry's wartime service and documented heroism must be some kind of Republican Baby Boomer brain spasm.  Harold Meyerson has a good analysis of it (Prince Hal vs. King Henry American Prospect 04/29/04):

It was precisely because Kerry's impulses were so mainstream that the Nixon White House feared him. Nixon didn't sit around with his goon squad of Bob Haldeman and Chuck Colson plotting against Kerry because they thought Kerry was Hanoi John. On the contrary, Kerry had to be taken down because his patriotism was so glaringly obvious.

[Kerry] had, after all, joined the service despite the grave doubts -- to which he gave voice in his Yale class oration in the spring of 1966 -- he harbored about the war. He had thrown himself in harm's way repeatedly while skippering "swift boats" in the Mekong Delta. He had worked to build an effective, law-abiding antiwar movement. Such men were dangerous [in the eyes of Nixon and his inner circle].

There are days in this campaign when Kerry must think he's still up against Nixon and his thugs. The same slanders that Dick [Nixon] and his boys cooked up then -- Kerry as dangerous radical, Kerry as inauthentic liberal -- are being served up now by Nixon's ethical heirs.

Tom Oliphant is yet another example of a Big Pundit who normally manages to stay safely entrenched in the conventional wisdom of the moment.  But he did have a first-person account of Kerry throwing his ribbons onto the White House lawn in the now-legendary 1971 protest that doesn't square with the Reps latest trivia version, reminding us once again how silly our lazy press corps is in eating up Republican spin points and processing them out the other end: I Watched Kerry Throw His War Decorations Boston Globe 04/27/04.

Washington Post Big Pundit E.J. Dionne, Jr., did a column called GOP attack dogs smear Kerry's war record (also here) 04/27/04 that so far departed from the current press corps trivia obsession that it earned lavish praise from the Daily Howler's Bob Somerby - who does not praise Big Pundits lightly!

At long last, Dionne uses the accurate language which “good guy” pundits have long eschewed—White House attacks on Kerry are described as a “smear,” while House Republicans are called “demagogic.” Readers, this is the column that wasn’t written during the mayhem of Campaign 2000, when good-guy pundits slept at their desks, permitting the two-year smear against Gore which so plainly put Bush in the White House.

We have long admired Dionne’s intelligence and decency—and we’ve long despaired about his lack of fight. Today, he uses accurate language. It’s too bad that one of his colleagues still sleeps, expressing those Millionaire Pundit Values which are making a joke of your lives (keep reading).

Actually the rest of that column, as well as the rest of the Howler's material this week is well worth reading.

Meyerson in the quote above wasn't just being literary about the Nixon connection to today's Republican demagoguery.  In Jerry Lembcke's The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam (1998) from which I've previously quoted, he devotes quite a bit of analysis to the Nixon Administration's attempt todiscredit the antiwar movement in general and antiwar veterans like John Kerry in particular.  They wanted to set up an opposition between "good veterans" (those who supported Nixon's war policies) and "bad veterans" like John Kerry (who didn't support those policies).  In late 1969, confronted with the prospect of a series of antiwar demonstrations known as the "moratorium":

What the administration needed was an embraceable Vietnam veteran, a "good" veteran, a veteran faithful to the ideals of American foreign policy and the image of male military prowess.  But very few Vietnam veterans fit the bill.  Research done by the Veterans' World Project at Southern Illinois University found it "difficult if not impossible to find a 'hawk' among Vietnam veterans."  "Very few," the researchers reported, "finish their service in Vietnam believing that what the United States has done there has served to forward our nation's purposes" ([Peter N.] Gillingham 1972, II-10 ["Wasted Men: The Reality of the Vietnam Veteran: The Report of the Veterans World Project."]). The administration's approach to this dilemma began with its countermobilization of veterans from previous wars for pro-war activities in connection with the Veterans Day observances on November 11.

In an earlier post, I quoted a Joe Conason column about a direct connection between Bush's anti-Kerry smears and those promoted by Nixon and his unsavory crew.  (Don't get me wrong; the Bush crowd is Worse Than Watergate.)