Today Senator McCain has put together what he calls his “truth squad.” His squad is made up of allies who will counter-attack anyone who challenges McCain’s military record. As mentioned below, a member of his squad is Colonel Bud Day, professional slanderer who was one of the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.” Bud Day’s defense of McCain was politicized and sharp:
“Things were very difficult for [McCain],he was horribly wounded in his extremities, and it was questionable if he would survive his experience. He set a high standard for himself because the Vietnamese tried to release him and he showed courage by refusing that to come about. We had an opportunity to watch a president in office, a Democrat who was extremely ineffective during those years. [McCain] learned an awful lot from that… General Clark spent a month in Vietnam, got badly wounded and was evacuated, that was his experience. I say let’s hold the two of them up and compare them.”
However, one should remember that this is the same man who slandered John Kerry by saying among other things that:
“My view is he basically will go down in history sometime as the Benedict Arnold of 1971.”
When confronted about the fact that he served as a partisan propogandist in the 2004 election, Day said:
The Swift Boat attacks were simply a revelation of the truth, the similarity does not exist here. What the Swift Boat campaign was about was to lay out John Kerry’s record. John Kerry has never produced any evidence to deny that. We are producing the evidence of these attacks right now to show that those remarks were completely inaccurate.”
Of course, someone who didn’t think “The Swift Boat attacks were simply a revelation of the truth” was John McCain as Senator Kerry points out:
“Colonel Day’s comments today only further highlight the McCain campaign’s disregard for a new kind of politics, John McCain condemned these kinds of attacks in 2004 when he called the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ‘dishonest and dishonorable.’ Senator McCain should condemn these remarks and cut ties with the Colonel and anyone else connected to SBVT. Day’s comments only serve to disparage all those who served on swift boats in Vietnam.”
Another man who doesn’t think they were telling the truth is Steve Hayes, an early member of the group and good friend of the group’s founder. In an interview with the New York Times, Mr. Hayes said:
“The mantra was just ‘We want to set the record straight, it became clear to me that it was morphing from an organization to set the record straight into a highly political vendetta. They knew it was not the truth.”
The photo used was uploaded to Flickr by jim.greenhill who licensed it under a Creative Commons Attribution License and my use of the photo in no way indicates an endorsement of the article from jim.greenhill .
