NO MORAL EQUIVALENCY BETWEEN SWIFT VETS AND FORGERS

A new and troubling line is emerging among the MSM: The TANG forgers and their willing accomplices at CBS are the moral equivalent of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The most prominent sign that this was the new party line arrived with this morning’s New York Times, where Michiko Kakutani reviews Kitty Kelley’s puerile new “biography” of the Bush family, The Family. Still smarting (from her liberal friends) for her admirable take-down of Bill Clinton’s memoirs, Kakutani returns to form in her opening paragraphs:

“Kitty Kelley's catty new book about the Bush family is a perfect artifact of our current political culture in which unsubstantiated attacks on Senator John Kerry's Vietnam War record and old questions about President Bush's National Guard service get more attention than present-day issues like the Iraq war, the economy, intelligence reform or the assault weapons ban.

“It is also a perfect artifact of a cultural climate in which gossip and innuendo thrive on the Internet; more and more biographies of artists and public figures dwell, speculatively, on familial dysfunction and disorder; and buzz – be it based on verified facts or sheer rumor-mongering - is regarded as a be-all and end-all.”

Did you catch the U-word there? “Unsubstantiated” attacks on Kerry? Two hundred and fifty veterans sign on to righting the story of Kerry’s Vietnam story, a best-selling (even by NYT standards) book painstakingly details their account, and the principal author and spokesman for their cause is a Naval Academy grad who was number one in his UT-Austin law school class and a Supreme Court clerk – and we’re given to believe that these charges are unsubstantiated? Even Kerry’s campaign has admitted that the Christmas in Cambodia story was a lie.

And we’re supposed to accept that this well-documented work is the intellectual and moral equivalent of forged documents? Think about the implications of this claim and the consequences if it’s allowed to spread unchallenged. Rigorous research, the recollections of historical actors, and the personal comportment of men in war and peace is held to be no better, no more convincing, and no more important than a half-assed forgery attempt that didn’t last a day after it was posted on the Net.

Ms. Kakutani’s underhanded efforts to bury the Swift Vets’ charges by equating them with the CBS forgeries can’t be allowed to stand. Kerry himself made his Vietnam service the centerpiece of his campaign for the Democratic nomination, a strategy he stuck with long after winning the top spot in March. The Democratic Convention in Boston featured more footage from Vietnam – highlighted by his trip by mock swift boat across Boston Harbor and his “Reporting for Duty” salute – than the average college course on the subject.

To boot, Kerry became a leader of the anti-war movement upon his return to the States. He chose to toss his medals (or ribbons, or someone else’s) over the White House fence; he chose to testify before the Senate about alleged war crimes committed by American troops; he chose to state before the Senate that his memories of Christmas in Cambodia in ’68 were “seared, seared” in his memory.

By contrast, George Bush has never made his National Guard service, or any other element of the Vietnam era, even a marginal element of his campaign, much less its centerpiece. His military record has been unimportant to his entire political career which, after nearly four years in the White House, couldn’t be better known and examined than it is. He has a record, it is in the public sphere, and his Guard service – whatever its shortcomings – are unimportant to his presidency except as the target of a smear campaign which began to fall apart as soon as it was launched.

But Kakutani isn’t alone. Elie Wiesel, an admirable man who has written so movingly on the Holocaust and the nature of evil in the world, penned an op-ed for today’s Wash Post, “Mean Season,” (translated from the French -- I'm not making that up) in an attempt to elevate the “can’t we all get along” message to a more philosophical level. Alas, Wiesel succeeds only in covering the issue with bleeding heart saccharine with lines such as:

“Too many Democrats feel hatred -- yes, hatred -- for President Bush, and too many Republicans fail to hide their contempt for Sen. John Kerry. These two sentiments should be excluded during electoral contests. Once upon a time, politics was a noble pursuit. Working for the polis, the city, the republic or the community signified a desire to give back what one had received. One had to be worthy of this honor. And many leaders were. Nowadays the word ‘politics’ evokes at best a contemptuous smile. We usually say it with a smirk. We instinctively suspect politicians of every sin, of any kind of scheme, of all sorts of manipulation. We consider them somewhat deceitful, a bit hypocritical, more than a little egotistical and certainly consumed with ambition. We watch them as though we expect to surprise them at any moment in flagrante delicto.”

Aside from the obvious historical questions – has he ever read Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Locke (never mind Hobbes), the Federalist Papers – Wiesel draws a moral equivalent between the two camps’ arguments. This is both disingenuous and absurd.

Hugh Hewitt argues persuasively that by this point in the story, everyone – including Dan Rather – knows the documents are forgeries. The implication he draws is that the MSM won’t be rushing to Dan’s defense for that very reason, and he’s right again.

But if they’re allowed to continue in this vein – declaring that the Swift Vets and the forgers occupy the same moral plain – they’ll at least succeed in creating a party line that will be recited for decades to come. “It was an ugly election, and everyone should be ashamed of their actions.” The hell they should. There is a right side and a wrong side to this story, and we’d better act now to ensure that posterity knows which was which.