Why the Left and John Kerry must destroy the Swift Boat Veterans

From Minion of the Great Satan What a name for a blog!

Psychoanalyzing the Left

Looking at the mainstream media's and the left's(but I repeat myself) reaction to the Swift Vets allegations, the level of denial regarding the story is just astounding. Even during the height of the Clinton scandals, when confronted with ugly facts or allegations, the media did report the facts, even if they did sometimes use language to obscure the more serious allegations.

This time, things are different. In almost a passive/aggressive fashion, the left has basically been whistling past the graveyard on the Swiftvets story. It is almost a mass psychosis, where the only response that the Democrats and the media seem to have is to slime the accusers, no matter who they might be, and no matter what the veracity of the charges are. It is almost as if the Swiftvets attack on Kerry is on something so personal, such part of their inner psyche, that it shakes their world view to its very core, and as a result, it cannot be true. The question is why has these series of ads, about acts that occurred between 33 and 35 years ago, creating this reaction?

When Clinton's pot use and draft dodging were exposed, it didn't create this response. Granted, the blogosphere wasn't there to fact check the mainstream media, but I don't think it would have made much of a difference anyway. Clinton's being a doper didn't really challenge the boomerleft's worldview to any extent. Even the abundant affairs, sexual pecadilloes, and various and assorted tawdry acts never really hit home with the boomerleft. Free Love, right?

But the SwiftVets allegations somehow have touched an open nerve amongst the left wing, and especially amongst left wing boomers. The reason for this, I think, is that these allegations not only attack John Kerry's conduct specifically, but, in the broad sense, they attack the entire moral stance of left wing baby boomers in general. Think about the following statements:


The Vietnam War was fundamentally immoral. This is the sine qua non of left wing boomerdom. It is simply established fact that the Vietnam War was a patently immoral act. The South Vietnamese did not believe in freedom, the Viet Cong were no different than the South Vietnamese Army, and Americans were dying to keep alive a corrupt militaristic regime. Kerry, along with other anti-war activists, repeatedly hammered home this point as justification. Of course, millions of Southeast Asians felt compelled to flee only after the Communists won. However, the reason for this is also simple. Nixon did it.

Since the Vietnam war was fundamentally moral, protesting the war, was fundamentally moral, and violent/seditious protest, while justified, was only a flawed execution of a moral protest. This is something which is still a fundamental part of the boomer left ethos. The boomer left, which now dominates Hollywood, the mainstream media, and the Democrat party, do not consider the bombings, shootings, riots etc, that were committed by leftist radicals in the '60s and '70s to be as offensive morally as the attempts of police, etc to maintain order. The Guardsmen at Kent State were evil. Robbing a bank and killing a cop to support "the resistance" was merely misguided.(A perfect example of this attitude is this episode(#92) from the series Law and Order. The DA gives a plea bargain to a leftist radical who killed a cop in the early 70s, because "times were different then)"

Vietnam Veterans committed unspeakable war crimes as a matter of course, and with the tacit agreement of their superiors. This was one of the key elements of Kerry's Senate testimony. Not only is it one of the key elements of his testimony, it is also one of the key bits of American folklore about Viet vets that persisted in movies for 30 years after Vietnam, and still is considered a simple and irrefutable fact by the left today.

Because of these war crimes that were committed, Vietnam Veterans were emotional cripples, and were psychopathically violent. Again, this is an allegation that came out of John Kerry's testimony, and was the prevailing conventional wisdom for at least 15 years, and is, to a much lesser extent, still considered true among portions of the boomer left. The prevailing one line joke during the '70s into the early '80s was about the Vietnam Vet having a flashback and and shooting up a McDonald's, which was the precursor to the "disgruntled postal worker" today.

That is why the Swiftvets are being responded to with such a virulent reaction by the mainstream media. Most of the senior editors, producers, and reporters among the national press corps came of age during Vietnam. Most were either anti-war protestors, or very sympathetic to the anti-war cause. As teens and adults, they bought into the anti-war ethos, and John Kerry's anti-war record was a big piece of that. The Swiftvet allegations not only attack John Kerry directly, they also, by using John Kerry as a proxy, attack the central tenets of the anti-war boomer left. While the Swiftvets aren't saying as much, the import of what they are saying is obvious. Not only is their attack damaging to John Kerry personally, it is also damaging to the entire argument that the anti-war boomer left has made for the past 35 years. And that is why the Swift Vets must be destroyed. If they are proven true, then the Vietnam anti-war protests were deeply wrong, and that just can't be tolerated.
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