I find the whole Vietnam thing very annoying.  Kerry did not so much enlist as preemptively enlist.  He has said a number of times that it was inevitable that he was going to be drafted and by enlisting he gained some flexibility.  He never supported the war, even when he enlisted.  He did not volunteer for the swift boats because they were dangerous.  At the time he signed up for them, it was a relatively safe assignment.  As it turned out, once swift boat members began going up river they had a very high rate of causalities. This may account for his getting 3 purple hearts, that and the fact he is bit clumsy.  Leaving aside the accusations of men whose credibility the Washington Post and others have torn to sheds, he took advantage of a technicality and left.  Smart man.  Despite being a reluctant warrior, he served honorably, winning a Bronze Star and a Silver Star.  True to his convictions, once he got out of the war, he became an anti-war advocate.

It is thus utterly bizarre that he is now cast as having “defended America as a young man”.  He did no such thing; and in 1971 Kerry would have said straight out that N.Vietnam posed no danger to the US.  Thankfully, in the interviews I have not until recently seen him play up the notion that he defended America as a young man; indeed, he has on a number of occasions undercut that message.  These pronouncements are reserved primarily for speeches.  All of this does not show that Kerry is extraordinarily dishonest as it shows that he is probably too honest.  He forgets to stay on message.  However, it shows more than anything else that his campaign team is a bunch of amateurs getting their ears boxed in by Karl Rove.

That said, my hackles are raised every time someone spits out verbatim what the Republicans are trying to say about Kerry’s war record.  What they say is false and repeating verbatim what any political party says strikes me as intellectual laziness.  Politicians do not so much as lie as deliberately miss lead and lie by omission.  That is the nature of the business, especially now that sound bites have become so important.  My hat goes off to Karl Rove.  Under his stewardship, the Republicans have perfected the art and taken it to a level never thought imaginable.  His motto: lie big or go home.      

What particularly annoys me is that while Kerry was allegedly not manly enough to stay in Vietnam and get shot at, Bush was on a two decades long bender.  Besides, being a drunk, Bush is probably guilty of insider trading and is arguably the most ignorant president the US has ever had.   

As to Kerry’s voting record, I will leave it up to the Slate’s Fred Kaplan to explain. 

“The main falsehood, we have gone over before (click here for the details), but it keeps getting repeated, so here we go again: It is the claim that John Kerry, during his 20 years in the Senate, voted to kill the M-1 tank, the Apache helicopter; the F-14, F-16, and F-18 jet fighters; and just about every other weapon system that has kept our nation free and strong.

Here, one more time, is the truth of the matter: Kerry did not vote to kill these weapons, in part because none of these weapons ever came up for a vote, either on the Senate floor or in any of Kerry's committees.

This myth took hold last February in a press release put out by the RNC. Those who bothered to look up the fine-print footnotes discovered that they referred to votes on two defense appropriations bills, one in 1990, the other in 1995. Kerry voted against both bills, as did 15 other senators, including five Republicans. The RNC took those bills, cherry-picked some of the weapons systems contained therein, and implied that Kerry voted against those weapons. By the same logic, they could have claimed that Kerry voted to disband the entire U.S. armed forces; but that would have raised suspicions and thus compelled more reporters to read the document more closely.

What makes this dishonesty not merely a lie, but a damned lie, is that back when Kerry cast these votes, Dick Cheney—who was the secretary of defense for George W. Bush's father—was truly slashing the military budget. Here was Secretary Cheney, testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Jan. 31, 1992:

Overall, since I've been Secretary, we will have taken the five-year defense program down by well over $300 billion. That's the peace dividend. … And now we're adding to that another $50 billion … of so-called peace dividend.

Cheney then lit into the Democratic-controlled Congress for not cutting weapons systems enough:

Congress has let me cancel a few programs. But you've squabbled and sometimes bickered and horse-traded and ended up forcing me to spend money on weapons that don't fill a vital need in these times of tight budgets and new requirements. … You've directed me to buy more M1s, F14s, and F16s—all great systems … but we have enough of them.

I'm not accusing Cheney of being a girly man on defense. As he notes, the Cold War had just ended; deficits were spiraling; the nation could afford to cut back. But some pro-Kerry equivalent of Arnold Schwarzenegger or Zell Miller could make that charge with as much validity as they—and Cheney—make it against Kerry.

In other words, it's not just that Cheney and those around him are lying; it's not even just that they know they're lying; it's that they know—or at least Cheney knows—that the same lie could be said about him. That's what makes it a damned lie.” 

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By comparison, Michael Moore looks like a diligent scholar dedicated only to uncovering the truth.