Reply #17: In addition to the fact that some people emotionally couldn't give up hope

[karynnj]

there were evil people who have lived off exploiting these poor relatives. Some of them were the people who attacked McCain - both when they had the committtee hearings and later when they were used by Rove. From McCain's description of the POW/MIA committtee, it was him they hated when the committee started because he had already denounced them. The committee spent considerable effort checking out all their claims and rejected them. Not surprisingly they attacked Kerry last year.

The Kerry blog covered a lot of Kerry's endorsements. One of the weirdest was from the ultra conservative NH ex-Senator, Bob Smith, was the ranking member of the POW/MIA committee. It essentially said that they almost always cancelled each others votes, but that Kerry was a good person (and implied Bush wasn't), who constrainded by a Republican Congress wouldn't do much harm. Bush had supported his primary opponent, Sununu (sp?), so I don't know if it was anger over that caused him to do this. It was in the form of a letter to Kerry, but it was sent to and published by a NH paper. I never read any comments on whether he had a following in NH or what the reaction was, though I really can't picture a bunch of really RW people reading it and saying they were for Kerry.