1. They want Bush to say the name of the group, so they can cut out that part of the sentence and use it in ads against him, or make funny cartoons for MoveOn...
2. They want him to harshly condemn them, so if they stop they can claim that Bush really WAS in control, because once he told them to they stopped...
3. They want him to use his Presidential authority to limit the free speech of a number of veterans trying to make a statement about Kerry. Then Bush will still be hated by the Left and have offended free speech proponents and people who believe the Vets...
4. They want him to condemn them so that they can use Bush's words to defeat the claims, even if all or part of it ends up being true.
5. All of the above, and probably a half dozen I haven't thought of... (Pick this one...)

Put simply they want Bush to either fight their battle against Swift Boat Veterans for them, or give them something to throw back at him later.

It's frustrating. Not only will they not convince anybody not to vote for Bush, but they'll show how ridiculous they are to anybody who doesn't think of Bush as the Devil. Aren't there other reasons they have against Bush based on some sense of reality? They should focus on those reasons instead? It might help them look a little less irrational and dishonest.
In fact, it's why I won't watch The Daily Show again until after the election. I understand that it'll always have a liberal bias, but I never thought it would be dishonestly liberal.

Regarding your third point BakerStreet, doesn't eliminating all 527s effectively stifle free speech? This is not a matter of wanting Bush to fight the battle for Kerry, this is a matter of simple irrefutable facts. There is not a shred of truth to the claims by the Swift Boat Vets.

Check here: http://mediamatters.org/items/200408250006.

" Regarding your third point BakerStreet, doesn't eliminating all 527s effectively stifle free speech?"

Nah, anyone that wanted to write or speak about candidates could. They couldn't, however, pump millions of dollars into loosely-regulated political organizations. Swift Boat Vets could still say what they are saying, but only as private individuals, same as anyone else.

The fact is, the Swift Boat Vets are within their rights according to the law, so Bush telling them to stop in particular would be an abuse of his position.

I went to you link. If you look closely you'll see that most of those editorials aren't objectively looking at the claims, on the contrary, they are trying much harder just to place the blame for them on Bush. I would have found their opinions more authoritative if they hadn't just been using the opportunity to slam Bush.

Reply #3 By: Citizen mhale85 - 8/25/2004 7:08:53 PM

I have to agree with Baker here. I just got done spending an hour at the website. One thing is that Editorial oponion does not make a lie a fact. I did not find to meny facts there just alot of talk. There was so much speculation on the articals there that it made my head spin. I would have to say about 95% of that site has already been debunked here within this Forum, but I just don't have the time to tear that site apart it would just take to long type every thing up.

In my oponion the Kerry Camp. just believes that if they keep chanting the Lie over and over again then the uninformed will believe it. When I started to hear Kerry and every person in the DNC chanting the same line I knew that Kerry is just thinking that people will have to say its true because no one would say such a big blaitent lie. The sad thing is this guy wants to be President and leader of this Country.

It's an old Soviet trick, The big Lie, now used by tabloid journals and sensationalist journalists everywhere.
It starts with a flat out lie ala 1984 or innuendo that cannot be disproved. (Have you ever tryed to prove a negative?)
The average guy says, hey that sounds like BS. But Someone else repeats what they read or heard repeated, over and over.
This makes old Joe User think; Hey maybe there is something to that story about the politician and the sheep. and BAM, the next
thing you know, Joe thinks the politician is engaged to the sheep, even though his rational self knows it's a pile of crap.
the internet is a huge warehouse of such crap, so Blogger beware.

I have one simple question: Can any of you point to any single claim by the SBV's that is true?

" I have one simple question: Can any of you point to any single claim by the SBV's that is true?"

Baited question, since I wasn't there to tell you what "true" is. Kerry did testify willingly to things that POWs were tortured to admit, and characterized them as common practice.

One thing to watch is the journal entry that says he had yet to take enemy fire, nine days after his first purple heart. All that aside, this isn't about what I believe, it is about what the SBV believe. I think people are jumping the gun and assuming a lot when they tell them to shut up. It is their right to speak.

Granted, if there are legality issues, they should be addressed, but in the end they have the right to make accusations, just like the folks that spent half of last winter bitching about Bush's service record, and the asshats that spent the 2000 election calling him a cocaine addict.

My problem with 527s isn't that they can slam people, it is that they can use millions of dollars of private dontions as a megaphone...

I wonder if the average Joe or Jill on the street really care whether Kerry was in Viet Nam, or that George Bush served in the Air National Guard. Isn't it time to give this subject matter a rest, and least move on to the more important matters. What are those you ask, well if you have to ask then you are not looking at what is really worrying the average American. How about things like job security, taxes (all levels), health insurance, etc. Its time to find out where these two individuals stand on the problems we are facing in the Middle Eas, Iraq, and other hot spots on this planet.

I personally could care less about there service related adventures. I want to know where they stand on the issues that are important to the status quo, and not to some damn special interest group like the SBVs or the 527s.

Pam

every other ad

Hmm that's a odd statement. It means he wanted to stop EACH OTHER ad, which means he wanted to stop half of ads?

I wonder if the average Joe or Jill on the street really care whether Kerry was in Viet Nam, or that George Bush served in the Air National Guard. Isn't it time to give this subject matter a rest, and least move on to the more important matters.

Exactly. How does those affect the current days? Bush still is not a good president, and Kerry is still dubious replacement, although I think I will vote for Kerry.

I don't believe that the question was baited at all. There is the truth, and there are lies. Kerry has the majority of the people on HIS boat to verify what happened on HIS boat. I assume also that you've read the account by the Chicago Tribune's Rood that also verifies part of Kerry's story.

The accusations about his service in Vietnam are coming largely from people who witnessed what took place from other boats - they had their own lives to protect, own crews to defend and were likely preoccupied. They have also markedly changed their positions since the 35 years have passed. If they had problems with Kerry's awards, then they should have filed their complaints when he recieved them.

I completely agree that people have no right to censor the SBVs in any way, but if ANY group - 527 or not - is lying about one of the candidates for political gain or personal vendetta, then it cheapens the debate for ALL Americans. This brings me to what Pam Johnson was saying - I believe the purpose of this post and of this forum in general is to have an academic debate about the nature of politics and where we are going as a society. I believe that this debate we are having here is a microcosm of a much larger debate that is much more urgent and important - the nature of the media. I found out that the SBV commericials are only playing in about 5-6 cities. Nationwide. If the media hadn't covered this group, we would likely never have heard of them. Certain 527s don't need a megaphone, the megaphone is held to their mouths in the form of CNN, MSNBC, and FOX News.

In closing, I would ask you, BakerStreet, to step back for a moment and analyze both the Democratic leaning MoveOn 527 and the Republican leaning SBV 527. While both have collected millions from private donors, the SBV's sole purpose is to launch attacks at Kerry. MoveOn has a broad organization with many purposes including voter registration - never a bad thing right? When the Pentagon was first rotating troops back from Iraq, they weren't providing trips from military bases to troops' homes and MoveOn had a program where members could donate Frequent Flier miles to provide plane tickets for the new veterans without transportation home. I don't think that blanket characterization of all organizations of a particular type is fair and I would urge you to reconsider before you label all groups unnecessary because the debate goes south for a few weeks. As soon as something new pops up, the SBVs will be out of the picture. The 527s can provide a valuable service or an unvaluable disservice to the debate. I've read some of your other posts about MoveOn and the Hitler-ad debacle. I ask that you read this...


http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/forum.cgi?read=51167
Hitler Image Used in Bush Campaign Web Ad
1 hour, 17 minutes ago
By JENNIFER C. KERR, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - Adolf Hitler's image has surfaced again in the White House race. President Bush (news - web sites)'s campaign is featuring online video of the Nazi dictator, taken down months ago from a liberal group's Web site and disavowed, in a spot that intersperses clips of speeches by Democrats John Kerry Al Gore and Howard Dean........ Democrats want the video pulled from the site. Campaign aides said it would remain.

Republicans had criticized the group MoveOn.org in January because it briefly posted an ad contest entry that linked Hitler and Bush. It showed images of Bush with text saying, "God told me to strike at al-Qaida," before turning to images of Hitler with the words, "And then He instructed me to strike at Saddam." The submission ended with the words, "Sound familiar?" on a black and white screen.

The 77-second video on the Bush-Cheney re-election site splices footage of Kerry, the presumptive nominee, and his 2004 rival Dean along with 2000 nominee Gore and film director Michael Moore. The spot calls them Kerry's "Coalition of the Wild-eyed." Clips of Hitler's image are seen throughout the spot.

"The use of Adolf Hitler by any campaign, politician or party is simply wrong," said Kerry's campaign, Mary Beth Cahill, who called on the GOP campaign to remove the Web video from its site.........



I saw that ad, and it was one of the most disturbing things to come out of either party.

Hmm that's a odd statement. It means he wanted to stop EACH OTHER ad, which means he wanted to stop half of ads?

Really, XX. I hope you had your tongue placed conspicuously in your cheek when you wrote that, otherwise I dunno...

Cheers,
Daiwa

doesn't eliminating all 527s effectively stifle free speech?

Those multi-million dollar ads are hardly free.

mhale: You are misrepresenting the ad. If you had watched it objectively you would have seen that they were refering to the ads posted on MoveOn that were anti-Bush. It said at the bottom: "Images from MoveOn.org ad". People are reading just the headline of Dem propaganda and taking it to mean that Bush was making the allusion. On the contrary, he was showing the lengths Kerry supporters go to, which was why the pig Moore was in it...

I don't think you can defend the tone of MoveOn and condemn SBVfT. Once is a patently poltical organization with deep ties to the Kerry campaign and the Democratic party, the other are private citizens who have been supported by Republicans. To me, there is a vast difference betwee veterans using soft-money to get their word out, and a PAC made up of poltical insiders and sponsered by someone like Soros, who's hatred for Bush has become a life's calling. I don't like either, frankly, but one looks a lot more like true political expression to me., while the other is simply an under-the-table extention of the Democratic party.

And we are waaaaayyyy off topic.

 

To address the point of the article, the reason that Kerry's folks won't acknowledge what the President has said is that there is no reason for them to do so. They can milk this more on the downside for a bit of political hay on Kerry' side. Why would they let it go? Altruism? There is precious little of that to be had here...