Simple: It wasn't the ads themselves that have forced our country once again to revisit the pain of the '60s and Vietnam. It was the motivation and network of people behind them.
Once the ads were debunked, a lot of the nation tuned out of the coverage, even though the ads and the group behind them are still active. That's too bad, because it was the further coverage that has the most potential impact on this country.
The people behind the swift boat ads have been grinding this axe with Kerry for a long time, and their motivation is about Kerry's anti-war stance in the early '70s. More or less, Kerry seems to have talked about some of the atrocities he no doubt saw during his four months of the war and applied them with, in his own assessment earlier this year, perhaps too broad a brush.
While no one doubts that the things Kerry describes were generally present in Vietnam, it was the vociferousness and high profile of Kerry's anti-war campaign that sat wrong with a lot of other vets. Among them was John O'Neill. O'Neill is now a leading force behind the Swift Boat ads, carrying on a debate that he and Kerry actually had for over an hour on the Dick Cavett Show in the early '70s. I saw clips of that debate this weekend, and the young Kerry is something to watch. He takes the high road and knows in his heart it's the right road. You can almost hear the also-young O'Neill sneer when Kerry talks about the Geneva Conventions. His comebacks belitting Kerry's four-month tour with the 16 months O'Neill served showed just how raw this debate was, and is, for a lot of these guys. Here's Kerry, an east coast junior officer who does a fast tour, then has the balls to come back and talk about the darness of a very dark place when thousands befoe him didn't see fit. Or if they did, nobody seemed to listen like they listened to Kerry, a young, smart, decorated soldier who wasn't afraid to speak out. It galled many of those vets then and it still galls them now.
At the heart of that is a pretty power-packed trail down history lane for a lot of this country. We always hear about how our country was "torn apart" during Vietnam. It's not hard to imagine that to be the case considering what Iraq has done to this country, and most of the people dying in Vietnam were plucked right out of their youth by the draft.
And now you've got a Presidential campaign trying to tear a guy down because he spoke out about that war? Saying that speaking out against an unpopular war is unpatriotic?
Sounds familiar, doesn't it?
Take it a step further. Do you know who introduced Richard Nixon at the '72 convention and presented him with the nomination?
John O'Neill.
Look at footage from that '72 convention, as I had the chance to on MSNBC this weekend. In the front row, as Nixon waves to the crowd, you'll see Donald Rumsfeld, member of the Nixon cabinet. There's George H.W. Bush, then an Ambassodor to the UN. And, who's that next to Bush but his 26 year old son, G.W., looking like he's more concerned about which party he's going to hit that night.
You start to notice all these faces that look so familiar to us now, albeit a bit younger. The lines become even clearer now than before, even though we knew the lines were there anyway.
These people were there with Nixon. They were Vietnam. They have always been on the side of not seeing the folly of American forces in a bad situation, always believed they could lie or cover-up their way out of a series of mistakes.
They've always known the way you deal with a dissenter is to smear them as unpatriotic.
They've always known you might need to break some rules to stay in power.
Those War Pigs Ozzy talks about? That's these guys. It's the same guys.
So much of what fueled the '60s and the aftermath is right here, battling over the same issues again, all for control of the country. Control of the world. It's the very same fight, with a lot of the very same people.
Oh, and you think this fight matters to Democrats, who have suffered the G.W. Bush for four years? How desperate do you think people like Rummy and John O'Neill are, who have for over 30 years been known as architects, or at least accomplices, in one of the greatest debacles of American History? You think they might see this election as a bit of historical vindication?
Perhaps it's nothing more than people whose paths crossed many years ago that feel they have a score to settle. But I don't think that. I think these people see this election as a chance to underscore the values and ideas they believed in the first time around.
Such as, you never criticize your country in a time of war. You always trust your leadership, or at least give them total power to conduct war. (Nixon had the War Powers Resolution, Bush chose WMD) And if the war goes badly, it can always be managed behind the scenes, provided you don't let a protest movement gain traction.
I think it's all happened so subtly and fast that people aren't really ready to discuss it. And perhaps they won't. There is a lot of pain there, and I figure that most people wish it hadn't come up again.
But it has, and at a most critical juncture of our nation's history. We're obviously not going to solve the '60s in the next couple of months, but you better believe that a lot of the fervor about this upcoming election is about what happened 34 years ago as much as what happend 4 days or 4 years ago.
