http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/...oat/index.html

I wondered if this was coming after Kerry made the charge yesterday.

Sooner or later Kerry is going to have to have the records opened up.

Right on Kerry Campaign! Time to call these jokers' bluff!

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Why are they called the "right", if they are so wrong?

I bet Kerry is going to have a real hard time proving any collusion between the group and Bush's campaign.

Can anyone say Moveon.org?

Who did Kerry's campaign manager work for prior to coming to work for Kerry?

I'm sure there is no coordination there. Officially, anyway.

Catz

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Hedonistic Lemming

Billy Bob: "From now on I don't want to be quoted. EVER! "

The National Interest
Shadow Warriors

The Media Fund and ACT, run by Harold Ickes and former Kerry manager Jim Jordan, are working hard for Kerry—but they’re not allowed to say so.

By Michael Crowley

Harold Ickes has always been a behind-the-scenes kind of guy. That was his style during his years as Bill Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, where his unofficial title was political fixer, the man in charge of jobs no one else wanted—like controlling the fallout from Whitewater, coordinating Hillary Clinton’s health-care crusade, and orchestrating the president’s voracious fund-raising.


In each of those sensitive missions, discretion was a must.


The same held when Ickes helped to mastermind Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign. It was Ickes, more than anyone else, who helped convince Hillary she could undertake such a daring adventure. And yet Ickes was never officially on the campaign payroll, rarely spoke to reporters, and didn’t lunge for political celebrity on the TV talk shows like so many of his ilk.


And so when a digital audio recorder is placed on a table in front of him, Ickes eyes it quizzically. “That’s a pretty nifty little deal there. Boy,” Ickes says. His manner is disarmingly folksy. This is a man fabled for his volcanic temper, who once bit a colleague’s leg in a brawl (“a good, solid bite,” he later boasted). Bill Clinton reportedly fretted that Ickes would be undone by his own rage.


An aide explains that everything’s digital now. Ickes gives his wiry frame a shrug and looks up with penetrating dark eyes.


“I’m usually off the record,” he explains, a harder edge to his voice now. “So there’s no sense in turning the bleep thing on.”


But it’s harder for Ickes to lurk behind the scenes. Three years ago, Ickes thought he was finished with electoral politics, but he’s back for one last campaign—this time in as close to a leading role as he’s ever had.

“We are not in the business of electing or defeating candidates,” Harold Ickes says with a poker face.


No, he’s not working for John Kerry—not officially, anyway. Ickes is a field general behind two newly formed Democratic groups that aim to raise and spend up to $150 million in a drive to bring down the president and help Democrats nationwide this fall. Think of it as a parallel campaign, a second front in the Democratic war against Bush. Working from offices just blocks from the White House, Ickes and his colleagues have swamped swing states with millions of dollars in Bush-bashing advertising and are planning a massive voter-turnout operation to bring hundreds of thousands of Democrats to the polls.


There is something absurd about the way these groups—known as 527s for the section of the tax code that regulates them—pretend that they’re not trying to defeat George Bush. “The goal of the Media Fund is to create, test, and then air ads that raise issues that we think are important in this election,” Ickes says with a poker face. “We are not in the business of electing or defeating candidates.”


Still, with John Kerry facing a Bush campaign machine that could outspend him by tens of millions, the success or failure of Ickes’s project might well decide the November election. And yet Kerry, by law, can’t have anything to do with it.


Howard Wolfson, another party operative who worked with Ickes on the Hillary campaign, says that outside Kerry’s campaign, “he is the most important person in the Democratic Party today.”


Ickes had intended to take a break from the harrowing madness of campaign politics. “This is much more of a younger person’s game. I’m 65 this year,” Ickes explains.


But over the past three years, Ickes watched with astonishment as the compassionate conservative became what he considers an extremist. He was also stirred by a new campaign-finance law, passed by Congress in 2002, that banned the parties from raising “soft money”—i.e., huge contributions of up to a million dollars or more at a time. Most Democrats supported the theory behind the law—namely, that such donations (say, a million dollars from Denise Rich) risked a corrupting influence on officeholders (say, a Bill Clinton pardon for Marc Rich).


Unfortunately, Democrats had come to rely far more than Republicans on soft money, and the law left them at a sudden and huge disadvantage. Ickes knew that if Democrats couldn’t replace all that soft money, they’d be spent into oblivion by the GOP. Their only hope was to rebuild the party in a new form, one that could again be fueled by six- and seven-figure donations. There was a way to do this: by exploiting a legal loophole that allows political groups to accept unlimited soft-money contributions so long as they don’t explicitly advocate the election or defeat of any candidate and don’t coordinate with any candidate or party. The 527s didn’t exactly have a chaste reputation; a typical 2000 New York Times editorial scorned them as “secret groups” and “slush funds.” Faced with the prospect of ruin, however, Democrats felt they couldn’t afford to sweat such niceties.


In early 2003, Ickes started up a 527 he called the Media Fund, whose mission would be to ensure that the eventual Democratic nominee had air cover early in 2004. Before long, Ickes hooked up with other leading Democratic operatives building their own 527s. Two of them were Steve Rosenthal and Ellen Malcolm. Rosenthal was an AFL-CIO political director famed for his organizing prowess. Malcolm had spent years as the head of Emily’s List, raising cash for pro-choice female Democratic candidates. Together they had formed a 527 they called America Coming Together (ACT). Its goal was to register and turn out millions of voters in the roughly twenty “battleground” states Democrats have identified as in play.

(Pull up the link for the other two pages.....


Next >>>
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http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news...372/index.html

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"This is a time for a national imperative not to fail in Iraq." Condoleeza Rice, January 11, 2007

Not that I care if he loses... LOL

But, why did he make this the central plank of his platform? Why couldn't he just say, "I served my country in Viet Nam and I'm proud of my record." And be done with it? I bet the SBVFT would have left him alone.

He could also have ignored the story into oblivion. The press certainly didn't want it to be promoted. They're still avoiding having to ask him the really pointed questions. But no, he had to open his mouth and answer them. Now the SBVFT campaign has the media spotlight.

He said they would "go dark" until after the RNC. Now he's out spending his money to defend himself.

If he wants to win, he should fire all his staff and start over. Whoever he's got... they're idiots. Surely they could see this coming. Surely they would advise him on how to avoid all this.

He can still just have his records released and put it all to rest, but no. Let's file a complaint that we can't prove. They're throwing up any and all obstacles they can. They are threatening lawsuits to T.V. stations, radio stations, publishers, and book sellers to intimidate them into NOT advancing the story. This only serves to get people asking... "What story is that? Where can I get this book? What is he hiding? What is he trying to avoid?"

He should fire his advisors and get someone with a little sense. There it is. I offered my advice. Let no one accuse me of not trying to help.

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"The heart of the wise inclines to the right, but the heart of the fool to the left."
Ecclesiastes 10:2 (NIV)

Download a FREE Chapter of "Unfit For Command"
Sun Aug 22, 2004 8:02 am

Go to this link for your free chapter from this RUNAWAY #1 BESTSELLER!

In fact, demand for this book has been so HUGE that it is heading for a 2nd printing as the publisher under-estimated the demand for this EXPLOSIVE new book revealing the truth behind John Kerry's Vietnam service.

Go to:

*link deleted*


From the book....

Quote:
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Perhaps this is the question that needs to be asked by the American people and answered by John Kerry: Who was the last American POW to die languishing in a North Vietnamese prison, forced to listen to the recorded voice of John Kerry disgracing his service by dishonest testimony before the Senate?

Paul Galanti, a Navy pilot who was shot down over Vietnam in June 1966 and then spent seven years in Communist captivity as a POW, remembers Kerry’s antiwar rhetoric all too well. Galanti told the Los Angeles Times in February 2004 that during torture sessions his North Vietnamese captors had cited antiwar speeches as “an example of why we should cross over to [their] side.”

As far as Galanti was concerned, “Kerry broke a covenant among servicemen never to make public criticisms that might jeopardize those still in battle or in the hands of the enemy.”

Galanti’s criticism of Kerry was particularly biting: “John Kerry was a traitor to the men he served with.”
-------------------

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"John Kerry gave the enemy for free what I and my comrades in the prison camps in North Vietnam took torture to avoid saying. He sold us out."
- Paul Galanti, US P.O.W.

As anyone with more than two brain cells to rub together has figured out by now, the Vietnam (undeclared) War was a huge mistake. We got our butts kicked, lost over 50,000 American soldiers KIA and many more than that wounded, maimed, or crippled. We managed to kill about 2,000,000 Vietnamese(mostly civilians)and wounded and maimed God knows how many more AND committed atrocities, well-documented massacres, war crimes and torture.

Certainly a great many (but not all) of our troops tried to behave honorably but as anyone who has seen actual combat will tell you, when the bullets start flying and bombs and mortars start hitting, (*)(*)(*)(*) happens and even good people caught in war zones do things they regret later.

Some men had the moral courage to come home and talk about what was actually happening over there and to protest it and work hard to end it. John Kerry was one of those. There were thousands of others who came back and joined Vets Against the War and other similar groups. (If you are too young to remember those times, rent "Born on the Fourth of July" and watch it to get a good snapshot.)

Some of the people who were there came back and repressed any guilt they might have had over shooting civilians by denying it and getting angry at anyone who talked critically about what was really happening in Vietnam. These are the ones who have created these anti-Kerry attack ads. Wealthy far right wing supporters and associates of Bush and his crew are paying for them.

Their slanders and lies are coming apart as documents are discovered and other eyewitnesses come forward (many who actually served with Kerry on the same boat or other boats in his group and who weren't just somewhere else in Vietnam at about the same time like almost all of these Republican vets in the attack ad were - that's what they mean by "I served with John Kerry").

The biggest hole in their stories is that they never said anything about any of this for over thirty years and only try to make these claims now that Kerry has a good chance to defeat Bush.

So now they're going to try to make a big deal out of Kerry's recollection that he was in Cambodia on a certain date back 30 some years ago. Like maybe he might have gotten the date wrong so that "proves" he's a big liar. It is solidly documented history that the U.S. did massively bomb Cambodia and illegally send troops in over the border.

The whole thing is a ridiculous attempt to divert attention from the fact that Bush dodged service in Nam by pulling strings to get put at the top of the list to get in the National Guard and then couldn't even fulfill that obligation honorably but instead went AWOL. Kerry's documented service record is all there for everyone to see. Bush's service records mostly "mysteriously" disappeared.

Furthermore it is so pathetic and feeble to try to make a case that Kerry might have lied about something fairly trivial that happened 30 some years ago when we all know Bush lied outrageously and repeatedly about Iraq having massive amounts of chemical and biological weapons and an active nuclear bomb program. It's been a year and around 130 days since the "conquest" and after a very intense search nobody has found any Iraqi WMDs anywhere It is also well documented that the neo/cons were wanting to conquer Iraq and making plans for it long before Bush was appointed President. It wasn't just an "intelligence failure" as they are now claiming as a cover-up. They knew better at the time. Iraq was not an "imminent threat". That was a deliberate fabrication. Bush's lies have resulted in the deaths of close to a thousand American servicemen and tens of thousands of Iraqi men, women and children. That's not trivial!

Bush and his gang used these lies about WMDs as a pretext for suckering America into an illegal, immoral and shameful war in which we have bombed and invaded a small country that had not attacked us and posed no real imminent threat but did have massive amounts of oil. We have lost so much esteem and good will in the rest of the world over this and we have turned Iraq into a quagmire that is recruiting and training ten times more fanatical terrorists with good reason to hate us than we ever had before.

Bush and his people regularly use the "Big Lie" technique developed by Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels in the 1930's and 40's. This consists of telling outrageous lies very loudly and repeating them often until some of the people start to believe them.

These sleazy lying attack ads are another attempt to use character assassination as a desperate ploy to avoid debating the real issues at hand in our country today like:
the faltering economy,
the job losses,
the enormous and growing gap between the rich and the poor,
the loss of fundamental Constitutional freedoms,
the creation of an enormous deficit
by giving huge multi-billion dollar tax cuts
to the super-rich and the corporations
and
by pouring truly enormous sums of
our(and our children's)tax dollars into the black hole of this unnecessary
and very, very costly war,
(costly in both dollars and lost and shattered lives on both sides),
the enormous and permanent damage to our environment
brought about by Bush's new rules and de-regulations,
the refusal to join the international effort to curb global warming
because it might harm the profits of Bush's oil industry backers,
and, of course,
the immense fiasco that the conquest of Iraq has turned into which is
strengthening terrorism and making us all much less safe.

Will we allow this smirking, over-age frat-boy to lead us further down the rosy road to fascism and total corporate control of our government and economy or will we take back our democracy from those who corrupted and stole it in 2000 and try something different and BETTER? 'Cause it sure couldn't be any worse. I guess we'll see.

I don't know how old you are, but I was around during the Vietnam War. My husband was a C-130 pilot in the US Air Force. Even though he volunteered to go to Vietnam right out of pilot's training, he was never sent. Our best friend who got assigned a forward air control type small airplane did NOT volunteer for Vietnam because he had a baby and another one on the way. Eventually he WAS sent and was shot down and killed. There was not always a rhyme or reason as to who was sent and who wasn't. But it didn't mean that those who weren't sent, were not doing their jobs and were not supporting their country. Everyone had a job to do...whether stateside, or in the European theater as my husband was.

And the reason we lost in Vietnam was because #1) Pres. Johnson never fought to win....and #2) the country lost heart. And why did they lose heart? In large part because of the likes of John Kerry, Jane Fonda and others who took to the streets and the Senate floor blasting their country and aiding the enemy. Fonda actually traveled to Hanoi. That's why she got her name, "Hanoi Jane." She was akin to the "Tokyo Rose" of WWII.

So....while it was probably a war we shouldn't have gotten into in the first place.......it was two Democrat presidents who got us there and escalated it...and who continued sending American military there when they had no plans of winning it. It was a Republican president...Nixon who began immediately upon election bringing the troops home. And that's why by 1972 there was a surplus of pilots. It's why it was no big deal that Bush was given permission to go to Alabama and make time up later. And it was why the AF asked my husband to take an "early out."

Maybe you had to be there in those times. Many people commenting on it don't seem to realize what was happening.....or why.

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"This is a time for a national imperative not to fail in Iraq." Condoleeza Rice, January 11, 2007