It is time for the Swift Boat Vet's for Deception to cut the crap....

[whistle]

...In the New York Time Editorial today Kerry earned and deserved all his medals. If John Kerry has been guilty of anything, I would say it is the same sin almost all of us are capable of committing when drawing on experiences from the past, favorable embellishment. See the editorial snips below and the link:

<snip>
September 18, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
A War Hero or a Phony?
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

o is John Kerry a war hero or a medal-grabbing phony?

Each time that I've written about President Bush's dalliance with the National Guard, conservative readers have urged me to scrutinize the accusations against Mr. Kerry. After doing so over the last week, here's where I come out:

<snip>
Did Mr. Kerry get his first Purple Heart for a self-inflicted wound? That's the accusation of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, who say that the injury came (unintentionally) from a grenade that Mr. Kerry himself fired at Viet Cong. In fact, nobody knows where the shrapnel came from, and it's possible that the critics are right. It's not certain that the Viet Cong were returning fire. But the only other American on the boat in a position to see anything, Bill Zaldonis (who says he voted for Mr. Bush in 2000) told me, "He was hurt, and I don't think it was self-inflicted."

Did Mr. Kerry deserve his second and third Purple Hearts? There's not much dispute that the second was merited. As for the third one, the Swift Boat Veterans' claim that he received it for a minor injury he got while blowing up food supplies to keep them from the enemy. But documents and witness accounts show that he received a shrapnel wound when South Vietnamese troops blew up rice stores, and an injured arm in a mine explosion later that day.

(This paragraph above says it for me, I would not ever want to be faced with this type of situation, but John Kerry did it twice in one day.)

<snip>
The bottom line? Mr. Kerry has stretched the truth here and there, but earned his decorations. And the Swift Boat Veterans, contradicted by official records and virtually everyone who witnessed the incidents, are engaging in one of the ugliest smears in modern U.S. politics.

<link> http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/18/opinion/18kristof.html?th=&pagewanted=print&position=

So, if any reThug, neo-con, right-wing bonehead, fundie, freeper or like-minded closed-minded retro-grade attempts to discredit our next president, John F Kerry's military record in Vietnam, you can smile and know that there is one journalist who has objectively evaluated the record and put his conclusions in print for 20,000,000 readers of the New York Times to see.