I imagine that with the Republican National Convention starting tonight and the associated counterprotests already in progress, a load of fresh bile and new arguments will soon nudge aside the Swift Boat controversy that has dominated national discourse over the past few weeks. In fact, I’m probably at least a week past the sell-by date for this particular topic. Nevertheless I would like to voice a few thoughts before the Next Big Thing hits the airwaves.

I get most of my political news from the Internet, so I don’t know how aware average people who don’t spend half their day online have been of the Swift Boat story. My parents, for example, had no clue of what I was talking about when I raised the subject recently, and I suspect that their ignorance of the story isn’t uncommon, at least not around here. As I noted recently, Utah’s electoral votes are already locked in on the side of the GOP, so this part of the country has been blissfully free of any political TV ads. However, the story has been inescapable for those who spend any time at all inside the echo chamber we call the blogosphere, and I’ve read opinions ranging from “Kerry is a liar” to “Bush is a liar.” (Actually, I guess that’s not much of a spectrum, is it? More like two sides of the same coin.)

To review the pertinent details, John Kerry made a big deal out of his military service at the Democratic National Convention, recounting his adventures as the captain of a “Swift Boat” during the Vietnam War and hammering on the point that he was awarded three Purple Hearts and a variety of service awards. In response, a group of guys who call themselves Swift Boat Veterans for Truth began running TV spots in which they flat out accuse Kerry of lying about his service record. The primary claim of the SwiftVets, as some bloggers have taken to calling this group, is that Kerry’s Purple Hearts were for minor injuries that were far from life-threatening and were not obtained under valiant conditions.

Since those anti-Kerry ads appeared, the claims of the SwiftVets have been pretty thoroughly debunked. None of the men who appear in the TV spots actually served on Kerry’s boat and some of them weren’t even in Vietnam at the same time as Kerry. In addition, some of the men associated with this group were singing the praises of Kerry’s ‘nam service only a few years ago, indicating that they were either lying then or they’re lying now. Either way, their credibility is questionable. A number of Kerry’s former crew have come forward to back their old captain’s account of those firefights that the SwiftVets say weren’t firefights, even some who admit that they don’t like Kerry and are reluctant to vote for him. The official military citations back Kerry’s account of events. And, most damning of all, a number of connections have been revealed between the SwiftVets group, the Republican Party, and the Bush Administration itself. Even though the White House refuses to acknowledge any such connection (or denounce the ads), it seems pretty likely that the SwiftVets are at least operating with the approval of the president’s re-election campaign, if not under the direct control of the campaign.

Unfortunately, as so often happens with this sort of tawdry tabloid shit, the initial claims have been reported more loudly than the refutation of those claims, and it appears as if the SwiftVets may have done some damage to Kerry’s campaign. Recent polls do indicate that he’s lost some ground because of the Swiftie ads. Whether those losses develop into something significant remains to be seen.

My own reaction to all of this has been multi-faceted. On one hand, I despise the tactic of character assasination on general principles. It’s childish and it inevitably reduces discourse in our nation to the level of the grade-school playground: “He called me a liar!” “Did not!” “Did too!”

I firmly believe that candidates should run on their ideas and their past job performance, no more, no less. I don’t care who had sex with whom, and for the most part I’m willing to give people the benefit of the doubt when it comes to stuff they did thirty-five years ago. I don’t care that Bill Clinton “experimented” with mary-jane while in college, and I don’t care that George W. Bush used to drink like a fish, as long as I’m reasonably convinced that they’re going to have stable, consistent personalities while they have access to the nuclear launch key.

And yet, I’m not too proud to admit that I’d love to see the Democrats grow a pair of stones and hit back hard on this issue, and any other dirty trick bullshit their opponents want to dig up next. Despite my best efforts to maintain a balanced perspective and concede that everyone occasionally makes a valid point, regardless of where they stand on the political spectrum, I am essentially a leftie and I’ve gotten mightily sick of my side constantly being accused not merely of being wrong — which is what debate is all about, after all — but of being unpatriotic, stupid, slothful, decadent, and even downright evil. (Think I’m overstating with that last point? I’m not. Blogger and journalist Josh Marshall recently documented an incident in which Republican Jim Oberweis called the Obama-Keyes Senatorial race “a debate between good on the right and evil on the left.” I don’t think that sentiment is unusual among Republicans, especially here in Utah, and it is insulting nonsense!)

For some twenty years now, the arrogant loud-mouths on talk radio (not to mention the Senate floor) have been impugning and insulting the left, dragging the debate to the lowest possible level and then telling us that there’s nothing to debate, and the most frustrating thing for me has been that the lefties don’t fight back, at least not in any effective manner. Their failure to do so does not mean that their opponents are correct; it’s more a problem of organization and the liberal tendency to say, “live and let live.” There is a part of me that wants liberals to stop saying that. I’d love to see Kerry to get mightily pissed off and say, “Fine, you want to play, let’s play.” I’d love to hear him say something like Arkhangel said a few days ago:

You want slash and burn? You do? Really?

It goes without mentioning that while John Kerry was patrolling the Mekong, George W. Bush was sunning himself by a Houston pool. But it bears repeating, over and over, that Kerry chose to go to Vietnam, and Bush, when given the choice, chose not to.

Fine. Lots of people, including my dad, didn’t. They had the courage of their convictions, and marched against the war, seeking to bring to an end the senseless slaughter on both sides.

Not Bush, who as Josh Marshall said, spent the first two decades of his adult life reciting the alphabet under legal compulsion, in a quest for the endless keg of beer promised to all Deke members. Not Cheney, who had “other priorities”, and skipped out on service fit for others, but not himself, five times.

For that matter, let’s add that fatuous fool Denny Hastert, for whom sacrifice means passing up the all-you-can eat lunch buffet at Ponderosa for the seven-course lunch at the Speaker’s table on Capitol Hill, and that sanctimonious killjoy Tom Delay, who said there were so many minorities wanting to serve in Vietnam that there was no place for him.

Nope, none of these guys had an iota–a micron–a scintilla of courage. They’re all cowards, the kind with a bright, electric yellow stripe racing down their cowering backs. They had a chance to show what they were made of, and boy, did they ever. When the crucible of Vietnam came calling, they went running home to Mommy, screaming like sheep, “Send him! Send him! Not me!”.

(For the record, Arkhangel is a member of the armed forces, he has served in Iraq, and he used to vote Republican. He says he would still vote Republican, “but not in this current incarnation of the GOP.” He’s a good, articulate writer who usually backs his arguments with sound reasoning. If you’d like to read his full blog entry that I’ve quoted from, look here.)

As much as I would love to start playing tit-for-tat, however, I recognize that doing so only causes more anger, more cynicism, more of the bullshit that has caused over 50% of the people in this country to stop voting. If Kerry got too nasty in striking back against his attackers, he would likely alienate the swing voters he needs and maybe even lose some of the base he already possesses. (Although if Dick Cheney can get away with “making himself feel better” by telling a legislator to go fuck himself, I don’t see why anyone should hold this sort of thing against Kerry. Ah, double standards…) So really, the best thing liberals can do about the SwiftVets is to debunk their claims whenever they come up in conversation, as well as point out that if the Republicans want to try and attach some sort of sliding scale of validity to the circumstances under which veterans received their Purple Hearts, they’re going to insult a lot more men than just the one who’s running against G.W. The truth is that a lot of vets got their Purple Hearts for relatively minor wounds. As far as I’m concerned, if you get scratched while you’re under fire, you’ve been wounded in combat. Period. You deserve that medal. Not because you received some devastating wound or did something heroic, but because you were brave enough and dedicated enough to be in the middle of a firefight in the first place. Kerry’s shipmates and the military itself says that he was under fire when he was injured. That’s enough for me.

The SwiftVets have also made hay out of the fact that Kerry was only in Vietnam for four months before rotating home and that he himself may have initiated the paperwork for the third Purple Heart that got him his ticket back to the States. So what? He was still there. He may have been in-country for only four months, but that’s four months in which he could have been killed. As Arkhangel pointed out, it’s four months longer than his opponent faced possible death. Some guys were only there for a day before being wounded or killed. Does that invalidate their service? As for starting the paperwork himself, I would’ve, too, given the same circumstances. If you see an opportunity to get out of there, why stay? Again, at least he had the courage to go there for a time, even if it was short. I’m not sure I would have had enough courage for four days, let alone four months or a complete year-long tour.

And then there is the related sub-controversy over Kerry’s anecdote about being on his boat inside the Cambodian border on Christmas Eve. Conservative bloggers have whipped themselves into a frenzy over this one because the history books show that the United States never officially sent forces into Cambodia and the dates of Kerry’s service don’t synch up with the Christmas time frame (he didn’t actually arrive “in-country” until January). Well, this one doesn’t hold water either. In the first place, the time frame isn’t any big deal to me. Thirty-five years is a long time and I’m willing to grant a man a little bit of leeway in remembering when things happened. I know a lot of my memories have blurred together, too. It happens. And anyone who doesn’t acknowledge at this point that the U.S. was operating in Cambodia and Laos during the Vietnam War is either ignorant or a right-wing shill. Kerry’s boat was in the general vicinity of the Cambodian border and it’s entirely possible, if not downright likely, that he was sent across on some mission once. The records don’t show it happening because we weren’t supposed to be there; doesn’t mean that we weren’t.

Even as I’m defending Kerry against his SwiftVet critics, however, I’m wishing that it wasn’t necessary. I’ll be honest: I think he’s mishandled his campaign. Badly. I think it was a big mistake for him to focus so much on his military record, and by doing so he opened himself up to exactly this sort of smear attack.

I understand why he’s done it. He had little choice, really. The Republicans have fetishized the military to a huge degree and spent thirty years — even since the end of the Vietnam War, ironically enough — painting the Democrats as pacifists and appeasers. During peacetime it didn’t make that big a difference, but I’m sure Kerry (or someone on his campaign) was greatly concerned about trying to run in the middle of this War on Terror without somehow showing some alpha-male characteristics. Kerry had to convince the American people that the stereotyped image of the Democrat is wrong, that a Dem can be a strong leader and supporter of military action when it is necessary. To accomplish this, he definitely had to highlight his action in ‘nam, but he also should’ve made more of his reasons for joining the anti-war movement when he returned home. He should’ve hammered unrelentingly on the idea that he showed just as much courage by speaking against the war as he did by fighting in it, and that the courage to admit mistakes — especially about something as big as a war — is an important leadership quality. A quality, incidentally, that sets him apart from the incumbent president.

But then, after briefly highlighting these aspects of his bio, he should’ve presented a bold platform that covered everything that currently matters to Americans, not just the war. As Paul Glastris has pointed out, “you came away from [Kerry’s convention] speech with little concrete idea of what Kerry will do if he is elected president. The policies are there, and a number of them–in healthcare and education, for instance–are quite bold and promising. And Kerry does talk about them on the stump. But in the one moment this entire summer when he had the American public’s attention, he and his staff chose not to give over even five minutes to a discussion of his specific agenda.” Instead, we’ve been talking about Vietnam — a war that is nothing more than a distant memory to many Americans and a meaningless name in a history book to a sizeable number of people. John Scalzi hit the nail on the head in a little rant on his blog a while back:

All this crap happened 30 years ago and has as little bearing on what’s going on in the world today as the gravitational pull of Pluto has on my pasty white ass as I sit here typing these words…

I’m going to spot them both their military careers. Kerry can trumpet his service all he wants, and I’m going to filter it out. Bush can do what he wants with his time, too. And I’ll go even further than that: I’m here to say I don’t care about the rest of either Bush’s or Kerry’s non-political life, except to the extent that it has some direct bearing on their policies or mandates or platforms. Bush a cokemonkey who failed upwards through business life? Fine. Whatever. Kerry a bland, shapeless goo who married for money? Groovy. So be it. Short of either man having actively strangled babies on national television sometime in the 80s, I’m going to let it all go, and I think you should too.

What I care about is their record since they’ve been in politics. Trust me, people, as far as Bush is concerned, there is absolutely no need to look beyond his presidency and administration to date: There’s enough red meat there to feast through November. Likewise if Kerry’s opponents can’t make hay with his years in the senate, they need to be fired and Kerry needs to get some more competent enemies. It these guys’ policies and political actions that matter and that will affect our lives now, tomorrow and in the future. If you all could just friggin’ focus on what’s actually relevant, please, we might all ultimately be better off.

Two months remain before Election Day. Maybe Kerry will be able to wrest control of the agenda away from the Republicans and actually talk about the important stuff and maybe he won’t. Maybe he’ll be able to somehow gain an overpowering lead in the polls and maybe he won’t. I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’d like to see G.W. return to his ranch in Crawford for good, but I’m not holding my breath until November 3rd. The sad truth is that, while I have confidence in Kerry’s ability to be president, I’m not nearly so confident of his ability to convince people that he can be president.