DMN Swiftvets editorial

The Dallas Morning News published an editorial entitled Clear the Decks: Swift boats throw a fog over real priorities today. In the editorial they ask, "Who's telling the truth...." (Kerry or the Swiftvets) and conclude "We may never know..". Perhaps the News should pay closer attention to this story. Senator Kerry has now admitted that his "Christmas eve in Cambodia" story was fabricated and his first Purple Heart really was self-inflicted. Score so far -- Swiftvets 2, Kerry 0.

The real story behind the Swiftvets controversy is the abject failure of the mainstream media to do what they're paid to do -- report the facts. The News quotes a 1979 statement of Kerry's, "I remember spending Christmas Eve of 1968 five miles across the Cambodian border being shot at by our South Vietnamese allies. ... The absurdity of almost being killed by our own allies in a country in which President Nixon claimed there were no American troops was very real.",

Kerry repeated the story numerous times including on the record, before Congress, in 1986 when he was contesting the Reagan administration's efforts to aid the Contras. Yet not one of the major media questioned the statement. Not ABC, NBC, CBS, the New York Times, the Washington Post or even the Dallas Morning News. No one in the mainstream media ever wondered why Kerry would make a statement that placed Richard Nixon in the White House almost a month before his inauguration.

Now the media is failing again. Failing to cover the biggest story in years -- the collapse of a Presidential campaign exposed by Internet bloggers while the mainstream media sleeps. For example, I reported on this blog, on Friday, August 13, that Kerry's diary entry proves that his first Purple Heart was fraudulent. Six days later Worldnet Daily News reported the story, and today the Drudgereport briefly published a note about it. Yet neither the News nor any other mainstream media outlet seems even to be aware of the story.

What should we think of professional journalists who can be outdone by amatuers with an Internet connection and the desire to find the truth?

The News editorial closes with this

Frankly, we care less about what John Kerry did in a war 35 years ago – and what George W. Bush did not do there – than we care about what both men would do in the war America's fighting today. Each day spent disputing Vietnam is a day not spent talking about the countries that matter most to America's present and immediate future: Iraq, Iran and North Korea.

Apparently the News is blissfully unaware that the story of what John Kerry did 35 years ago and how he is handling the Swiftvets controversy today is precisely the point.

If Kerry will lie in Congress to advance his political agenda and collapse under pressure when those lies are challenged, doesn't that tell us precisely what we need to know about what kind of President he would be?