“Swiftboating” has become an all-purpose term, a synonym for smearing, but its accurate meaning is to accuse a candidate of embroidering his (or her) military record for political gain. In 2004 a group of hacks tried this against John Kerry. It may not have caused his defeat but it certainly didn’t help.
Now we have a very damning circumstantial case that John McCain’s “cross in the dirt” story, about a North Vietnamese guard’s act of compassion during McCain’s captivity, may in fact be cribbed from a disturbingly similar account from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. McCain repeated the anecdote during Saturday’s presidential forum with Pastor Rick Warren, to much applause. [Update: There’s some question whether the anecdote can be traced to Solzhenitsyn at all; it was first attributed to him by born-again Watergate crook Chuck Colson.]
This is an extremely serious, yet unprovable, charge. But it needs to be aired, and to the extent possible, resolved. If it’s true that McCain has falsified (stolen) this account — and there are mounting reasons to believe so — then he has betrayed the trust of the American people, displayed appalling cynicism on the very matter he considers most sacred, and forfeited his case for the presidency plain and simple.
On another matter, attention is being drawn — but still not enough — to the unsavory background of Jerome R. Corsi, Ph.D., one of the original anti-Kerry Swiftboaters and now author of The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality. It is not Obama who has to answer to Corsi’s charges, which are bogus. It is Corsi who must answer for being an associate of white supremacists and a 9/11 Truth adherent.
Which reminds me to recommend Matt Taibbi’s tightly argued and hilarious book The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire, containing one of the most merciless eviscerations of the 9/11 Truth Movement ever penned by a progressive. Here’s what Taibbi misses, however: He paints John Hagee’s nutcase church and the 9/11 Truth Movement as opposing examples of derangement, on the right and the left respectively. He doesn’t see that 9/11 Truth is in essence a movement of the extreme antigovernment right, as the case of Jerome Corsi makes clear.
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