The Swift Boat counter-story: consider the source

This week's release of the book, Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry, seems carefully calculated to distract our attention from more pressing matters. Certainly there will be endless demands that Senator Kerry justify his service in Vietnam. We'll probably hear again from the Angry Puppeteer Dick Cheney, perhaps snarling about "sensitivity." And through it all, another week will pass with nobody seriously considering how George W. Bush served his country during those years.



Before you lend too much credence to the Swift Boat counter-story, consider the source. Take a look at the authors:



John O'Neill's obsessive hatred of John Kerry goes back to the Nixon administration when he was employed by Watergate burglar Chuck Colson to run a smear campaign against the young leader of Vietnam veterans against the war. In a particularly ironic twist, Colson directed O'Neill to, "destroy this young demagogue before he becomes a Ralph Nader." Initially, O'Neill's anger was simply over Kerry's anti-war activities, particularly his claims that American troops in Vietnam had committed atrocities (which proved to be true). But over the years O'Neill's anger became a blind obsession as Kerry rose to national prominence. What is new is that the now Bush Campaign has seen fit to give O'Neill a platform for national exposure.



However, co-author Jerome R. Corsi has an even darker side. As documented by the group Media Matters, Corsi has called Islam "a worthless, dangerous Satanic religion," and said that, "Boy buggering in both Islam and Catholicism is okay with the Pope as long as it isn't reported by the liberal press." Corsi's obsession is a broad as it is deep, "RAGHEADS are Boy-Bumpers as clearly as they are Women-Haters -- it all goes together." And he tosses in a helping of anti-semitism for good measure: "After he married TerRAHsa, didn't John Kerry begin practicing Judaism? He also has paternal grandparents that were Jewish. What religion is John Kerry?"



Finally, there's the matter of the book's publisher, Regnery Publishing, a subsidiary of Eagle Publishing, which prides itself on being, "America's leading conservative publishing company." The Regnery catalog is chock full of astonishing tomes including: a book blaming September 11 on Jimmy Carter, another offering a defense of the WWII internments of Japanese Americans recommending that we imprison American Muslims, and David (brother of Rush) Limbaugh's impassioned argument that the religious right in America is actually the victim of persecution at the hands of the liberals.



No doubt it will be quite a week for the media.



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