Time to revisit Joe Conasons piece about the Slime Boaters

[trumad]

Get the day pass if needed to read this great piece that exposes these assholes to it's core!

May 4, 2004 | The latest conservative outfit to fire an angry broadside against John Kerry's heroic war record is Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which today launches a campaign to brand the Democrat "unfit to serve as commander in chief." Billing itself as representing the "other 97 percent of veterans" from Kerry's Navy unit who don't support his presidential candidacy, the group insists that all presidential candidates must be "totally honest and forthcoming" about their military service.

These "swift boat vets" claim still to be furious about Kerry's 1971 Senate testimony against the war in which he spoke about atrocities in Indochina's "free fire zones." More than three decades later, facing the complicated truth about Vietnam remains difficult. But this group's political connections make clear that its agenda is to target the election of 2004.

Behind the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth are veteran corporate media consultant and Texas Republican activist Merrie Spaeth, who is listed as the group's media contact; eternal Kerry antagonist and Houston attorney John E. O'Neill, law partner of Spaeth's late husband, Tex Lezar; and retired Rear Adm. Roy Hoffman, a cigar-chomping former Vietnam commander once described as "the classic body-count guy" who "wanted hooches destroyed and people killed."

Spaeth told Salon that O'Neill first approached her last winter to discuss his "concerns about Sen. Kerry." O'Neill has been assailing Kerry since 1971, when the former Navy officer was selected for the role by Charles Colson, Richard Nixon's dirty-tricks aide. Spaeth heard O'Neill out, but told him, she says, that he "sounded like a crazed extremist" and should "button his lip" and avoid speaking with the press. But since Kerry clinched the Democratic nomination, Spaeth has changed her mind and decided to donate her public relations services on a "pro bono" basis to O'Neill's latest anti-Kerry effort. "About three weeks ago, four weeks ago," she said, the group's leaders "met in my office for about 12 hours" to prepare for their Washington debut.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2004/05/04/swift/print.html

[Sporadicus]

Already a Modern Classic

I used Conason's article several months back when the Smear Boat Veterans first reared their ugly heads. It gives a good background on John O'Neill and his ties to Nixon's Dirty Tricks Machine.

[burythehatchet]

1. Quite a public relations coup Merrie

Business should be rolling in now. Idiot.

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2. kick

[ikojo]

3. I just sent this article to my mom yesterday after

she forwarded a piece of right-wing e mail to me. I let her know in no uncertain terms that there was an organized smear campaign against John Kerry. I also let her know that much of it was being orchestrated by the same people who smeared John McCain in 2000. That will resonate with her because she lived in Arizona for 21 years and really liked McCain (I don't know why but she did).

[Octafish]

4. Conason sent TWO torpedoes into the Slime Boat.

Conason and the feller from Boston Globe -- Oliphant -- know all about the Slime Boat:

The GOP's not-so-impartial hit man

Desperate to denigrate John Kerry's war record, Republicans have trotted out a "nonpartisan" Navy Vietnam vet -- who was a protege of Nixon dirty trickster Charles Colson and whose law firm is closely tied to the Bush White House.

By Joe Conason

April 23, 2004  |  Houston attorney John E. O'Neill, the Navy veteran who has emerged recently as a harsh and ubiquitous critic of John Kerry's military service, tells reporters that he has never really been interested in politics and isn't motivated by partisan interests. In the media, O'Neill is often described simply as a Vietnam vet still enraged by the antiwar speeches Kerry delivered more than 30 years ago. That was when O'Neill first came to public attention as a clean-cut, pro-war protégé of the Nixon White House's highest-ranking dirty trickster (aside from the late president himself), Charles Colson.
Colson, who went to prison for Watergate crimes, saw O'Neill as a perfect foil to Kerry, whom Nixon and his aides feared as a decorated, articulate and reasonable opponent of the war and their regime. Indeed, O'Neill was perfect -- a crewcut officer who had served on the same Navy swift boat that Kerry had commanded, although their stints in the Mekong Delta didn't overlap. In June 1971, Colson brought O'Neill up to Washington for an Oval Office audience with Nixon. His impressions live on in a memo filed later:

"O'Neill went out charging like a tiger, has agreed that he will appear anytime, anywhere that we program him and was last seen walking up West Executive Avenue mumbling to himself that he had just been with the most magnificent man he had ever met in his life."

CONTINUED...

http://archive.salon.com/opinion/conason/2004/04/23/o_neill/index_np.html

Yeh. Yogotta go Day Pas, but it's worth knowing.



SINK the BFEE!