Promoting Misinformation

Regarding the kerfuffle about Tim Walz's military service, we've seen defenders of Walz claim he is being "Swiftboated", an allusion to attacks on John Kerry during the 2004 campaign.  A recent example is from PBS News Hour Anchor Amna Nawaz who asserts:

“This is so reminiscent of that swiftboating attack on John Kerry back in 2004 . . . Why run with these attacks when there’s no evidence for what they’re saying right now?”

She goes on to say that the attacks on Kerry were “discredited".  If Nawaz was drawing a comparison with the attacks on Kerry, the accurate one would be that the allegations against Kerry and Walz were similar, in that both are correct.  However, I doubt that is what she meant.  

Walz did not have the rank claimed as of his retirement and, on multiple occasions, stated, or left the impression, he had served with his unit in combat in Iraq, rather than resigning once he learned the unit would be going to Iraq.  The governor's immediate superior, battalion commander, and unit chaplain, all confirm the allegation. Attempts to defend Walz have relied upon mischaracterizing the allegations.

As for Kerry and Swiftboating, I wrote in 2016 (and updated in 2020) about the true story:

For those of you who may not remember, the "Swift Boat Incident" or Swiftboating as Democrats liked to call it, was in their version the slandering of Presidential candidate John Kerry's Vietnam War record during the 2004 campaign.  If you notice, Baquet refers to it as an "allegation".  In the preferred liberal summary, the Incident was about mischaracterization of Kerry's record as a Swiftboat commander during the war and the awarding of his combat medals.  In reality, the television ads by Swift Boat Veterans For Truth focused primarily on Kerry's alleged treasonous actions in carrying out secret negotiations with the communist government of North Vietnam and in denouncing his fellow soldiers for atrocities in front of the U.S. Congress, a denunciation used by the communists as justification for torturing American POWs.  All of this is completely true.

A secondary theme was an attack on Kerry's claim, made on the floor of the Senate, that he spent Christmas on his Swift Boat in Cambodia, in what would have been an illegal incursion at the time, a demonstrably false claim.  The final claim was that his actions in combat were not deserving of his medals and that he had manipulated the system to obtain them.  This claim is controversial and the only one by the Veteran's group which may not be accurate (unfortunately the Wikipedia entry on this topic focuses almost exclusively on this last point and is very one-sided).

When YouTube first became available several years ago, I went back and found the original Swiftboat ads.  Unfortunately, they are not all still available but my fragmentary notes indicate that six of them focused on Kerry's post service actions - negotiating with the enemy, his Congressional testimony and throwing the ribbons from his medals away in a protest.  Two others and part of a third dealt with his Christmas in Cambodia fabrication and one part of one raised the question of the validity of his medals.  I view all except the last as fair game. 

The Swift Boat Veterans were a coalition of two groups.  The first were POWs, held in North Vietnam under brutal conditions, who deeply resented John Kerry's support for the enemy.  The second were members of the Swift Boat unit who had served with, before or after Kerry.  The leader of the second group was John E O'Neill, who had debated Kerry on the Vietnam War back in 1971 on the Dick Cavett show.  I happened to see O'Neill on C-Span during the 2004 campaign.  In response to a question he referred to President Bush as "an empty suit".  This was always about John Kerry, not Bush.

By mischaracterizing the substance of the Swiftboat attacks and turning them into merely a dirty political tactic, Democrats and their media accomplices sought to avoid dealing with the substance raised by the ads; Kerry's statements after his service disparaging the U.S and his fellow servicemen and the question of why so many people disliked the man.  I was still reading the Times back then and the Swift Boat ads were out there for weeks before it wrote a word about them.  It was as if it was awaiting instructions from the Kerry campaign about what to do.  Finally, the Kerry campaign responded and the Times printed a front page story but as it was mostly an attack by Kerry without a full explanation of what the controversy was about it must have been very baffling for most readers.  In any event, Baquet appears to have fallen for this hook, line and sinker.

If what Nawaz meant to reference were inaccurate and discredited allegations there is an example from the 2004 campaign that fits the bill - the attacks on George W Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard (TANG).  In fact, the better term for unjustified and false allegations about a candidate's military service is being "TANGed", not "Swiftboated".  

In the case of the TANG controversy, Dan Rather of 60 Minutes used the vice-chair of the Kerry election campaign as his primary source for the allegations against Bush, a man whose claims had been denounced by his own daughter (a fact not disclosed on the broadcast)!  Rather himself, a native Texan and partisan Democrat, also had a son who was running fundraisers for the Texas Democratic Party.  60 Minutes ignored the substantial evidence contradicting its thesis (no one who served with Bush confirmed the story) and, most famously, used a document to seal its case, allegedly from 1973, that turned out to have been composed using Microsoft software not invented until the late 1990s!!  Oh, and Rather's producer gave a heads up to the Kerry campaign before the broadcast, so they were in position to release campaign ends as soon as the segment broadcast.

Whether it is New York Times editor Dean Baquet in 2016 or Aman Nawaz in 2024, they exist in a enclosed universe in which their crowd just repeats the same lies to each other over and over again, until they become accepted truth.  This is the same crowd claiming to be so alarmed about misinformation, by which they mean information they disagree with.  The press has beclowned itself in recent years.   Yesterday, the White House correspondent for the Washington Post pleaded with the White House to do something to shut down Elon Musk's interview with Donald Trump.