LANHY DAVIS, HELP THE KERRY CAMP DOESN'T NEED
I know many conservatives like Sean Hannity and (I think) Rich Lowry like Lanny Davis personally. But why did this guy get a reputation as a great spin doctor, a master of damage control? I can’t remember one situation where his combination of attacking the credibility of his opponents, semantics, goal-post moving and issue-changing has actually helped the political figure using him as a spokesman.
On MSNBC's “Joe Scarborough” last night, with Pat Buchanan guest hosting, Davis was trotted out to refute the Swift Boat Vets for Truth. Almost the entire interview consists of Davis insisting that because the Swift Boat guys criticizing Kerry weren't in the boat with him, they’re liars.
How can guys in the boat have perfect, reliable testimony, and the guys on the next boat over be completely unreliable? And the counterpoint, how can guys in the boat have completely false, unreliable testimony, and the guys in the next boat 50 yards or less away be 100 percent certain?
He contends that the perceptions of the Swift boat guys “spurred by venom and by anger and by hatred, starting back in 1971,” but the perceptions of the guys on the boat are completely unaffected by their emotions.
Then Davis says, “You yourself know that that’s false, because the third Purple Heart was the one involving Jim Rassmann, which he put in for. And O‘Neill knows that. Yet he says on television knowingly that the Purple Heart came from the rice and the shrapnel in the butt, rather than what he did with Jim Rassmann. That‘s a knowing falsehood.”
From FactCheck.org’s assessment, generally sympathetic to Kerry:
Kerry's account is in the book Tour of Duty by Douglas Brinkley, who based it largely on Kerry's own Vietnam diaries and 12 hours of interviews with Kerry. "I got a piece of small grenade in my ass from one of the rice-bin explosions and then we started to move back to the boats," Kerry is quoted as saying on page 313. In that account, Kerry says his arm was hurt later, after the mine blast that disabled PCF-3, when a second explosion rocked his own boat. "The concussion threw me violently against the bulkhead on the door and I smashed my arm," Kerry says on page 314.
And according to a Navy casualty report released by the Kerry campaign, the third purple heart was received for "shrapnel wounds in left buttocks and contusions on his right forearm when a mine detonated close aboard PCF-94," Kerry's boat. As a matter of strict grammar, the report doesn't state that both injuries were received as a result of the mine explosion, only the arm injury.
The official citation for Kerry's Bronze Star refers only to his arm injury, not to the shrapnel wound to his rear. It says he performed the rescue "from an exposed position on the bow, his arm bleeding and in pain." The description of Kerry's arm "bleeding" isn't consistent with the description of a "contusion," or bruise.
Hmm. Looking at that casualty report more closely, it says, “Lt. JG. Kerry suffered shrapnel wounds in the left thigh when PCF 94 came under intense hostile A/W and rocket fire.” The next page, it says the bit about the left buttocks. This report doesn’t say anything about the rice — instead, the shrapnel is from “intense hostile A/W and rocket fire.” There’s a discrepancy between the report (rocket fire) and Kerry’s statement in Tour of Duty (grenade blowing up a rice cache). Was the report filed less-than-fully accurately to avoid the awkward tale?
It appears that the third purple heart was awarded for a combination of injuries in a short period of time - which means both sides could have a point. That vital third purple heart, and a discharge from combat zone, resulted from a self-inflicted wound from an embarrassing incident involving standing too close to an exploding pile of rice, and from a contusion (dictionary definition: an injury in which the skin is not broken; a bruise) suffered during the rescue of Rassman
KERRY CAMP UPSET ABOUT IRAQ QUOTE
Good stuff in the New York Times (how often do you hear that on NRO?):
For five days now, as the long-distance arguments between President Bush and Senator John Kerry have focused on the wisdom of invading Iraq, Mr. Kerry has struggled to convince his audiences that his vote to authorize the president to use military force was a far, far cry from voting for a declaration of war.
So far, his aides and advisers concede, he has failed to get his message across, as Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have mocked his efforts as "a new nuance" that amount to more examples of the senator's waffling...
"Kerry has always had this vulnerability of looking flip-floppy on the issue and Bush is using this very shrewdly," said Walter Russell Mead, a scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations. He added "Being silent on the question makes him look evasive, and saying something, anything, gets him in trouble with one side of his party or another."
Mr. Kerry's friends concede the first rounds have gone to the president - "it's frustrating as hell," Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware said on Wednesday...
Across the weekend, the Kerry campaign debated how Mr. Kerry should respond. "There were a lot of ideas," said one official, "from silence, to throwing the question back in the president's face."
But the decision, in the end, was Mr. Kerry's. He chose to take the bait on Monday at the edge of the Grand Canyon. Asked by a reporter, he said he would have voted for the resolution - even in the absence of evidence of weapons of mass destruction - before adding his usual explanation that he would have subsequently handled everything leading up to the war differently.
Mr. Bush, sensing he had ensnared Mr. Kerry, stuck in the knife on Tuesday, telling a rally in Panama City, Fla., that "he now agrees it was the right decision to go into Iraq." The Kerry camp says that interpretation of Mr. Kerry's words completely distorted the difference between a vote to authorize war and a decision to commit troops to the battlefield.
Mr. Kerry's answer is being second-guessed among his supporters, some of whom argued that he should have been more wary of the trap...
Kerry's team is still trying to figure out how their man can crystallize a message on Iraq. "You have to hand it to Bush and Cheney,'' Mr. Biden said. "When it comes to using the big megaphone of the presidency, they are the masters."
Yesterday's e-mail included a message from a Kerry Spot reader saying he overheard "a 20something Kerry worker was on his cell phone with someone at the campaign. He was very upset at the "knowing what he knows now" quote. He said it hurt with the base and that it was being misinterpreted by the "media" (hey they hate em too!) as meaning he would have gone to war knowing what he knows now. He was incensed." I don't usually pass on this kind of secondhand information, but this little anecdote does appear to fit in with the situation that the Times is describing.
AS JOHN MCLAUGHLIN WOULD SAY, 'WRONG!'
Kerry adviser Jeh Johnson, on the book's claims: "None of the people who are in this book actually served with John Kerry on a boat who were there in the line of fire with John Kerry. They are all second, third, fourth-hand accounts by people 35 years later."
John O'Neill: "That is not quite accurate. Steve Gardner was the gunner on Kerry's boat. He was actually the guy who served the longest as an enlisted guy under Kerry on Kerry's boat. He has joined Swift Boat Veterans For Truth. And he is extensively quoted in connection with this book. It is true that more people on Kerry's boat who served as enlisted men under him are in favor of him than are opposed to him."
Both men made these comments on "Scarborough Country," on August 10.
THE 11 MINUTE VIDEOTAPE RESURFACES
Remember the 11 minute videotape? Well, according to USA Today, before Bush shows up at each campaign event, an RNC-produced video is shown to audiences which traces what it describes as a history of Kerry reversals on Iraq
More -->The Kerry Spot on National Review Online
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