Who was telling the lies? Will the truth come out

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During the run up to the last Presidential election, there were accusations made by the Swift Boat Vets who were in turn called liars and political hacks by Democrats. Recently the New York Times did a piece in which Mr. Kerry stated he was right and Navy records and the Swift Boat vets were wrong. If you are interested in an investigative series, two articles are linked below.

June 12, 2006

This morning on RealClearPolitics Tom Lipscomb has Part II of his reporting on John Kerry which combines an analysis of the public record with accounts from more than two dozen interviews conducted over the last week to try and get to the bottom of Kerry's claims about the skimmer mission on December 2-3, 1968 that led to his first purple heart.

Some people might wonder why we're rehashing this story now. Two reasons, really. The first is that the media declined to hash it out properly in the first place. What Lipscomb has done (and continues to do) is to gather up all the evidence from the public record and the parties involved and lay it all out, which is something I don't believe any mainstream media outlet has ever done. As I mentioned in my last intro, Lipscomb isn't out to try and prove or disprove one side of the story or the other, only to put out the facts as he finds them and let the chips fall where they may.

The second reason we're rehashing this story is John Kerry himself. In the recent New York Times piece by Kate Zernike (the one that prompted the first article by Lipscomb that ran on RealClearPolitics last week) Kerry reasserted that he was in command of the three-man skimmer mission on Dec 2-3, and that "it is a lie" to say Bill Schachte was on the boat. Why is that important? Because Bill Schachte, who was second in command at Coastal Division 14 at the time and eventually rose to rank of Rear Admiral and acting judge advocate general of the Navy, says he was on the boat with Kerry and tells a different version of events that night. So Kerry is publicly calling a retired Rear Admiral of the United States Navy a liar.

Kerry claims he has "all kinds of ways of proving" his version of the story. Lipscomb makes a couple of recommendations on how Kerry could clear the whole thing up. Read the story and decide for yourself. Most importantly, compare the work Lipscomb has done investigating the charges and reporting the story versus the way the New York Times handled Kerry's claims.

The Truth, John Kerry, and The New York Times

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John Kerry's Skimmer Scam

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