The Bush M.O.

Via Digby, recent over-the-top attempts to smear Kerry seem to have been oddly facilitated by the U.S. government.

The main point of the Nightline report was that the villagers confirmed the wartime accounts from Kerry, his crew and the official U.S. records – that there had been heavy firing in the clash between Kerry’s Swift boats and Vietcong cadre on Feb. 28, 1969. The villagers also debunked a central claim by anti-Kerry Swift boat veteran John O’Neill that the only Vietcong fighter was a youngster in a loin cloth who was wounded and fleeing when Kerry shot him in the back.

Contradicting O’Neill’s best-selling book Unfit for Command, the villagers identified the dead Vietcong as Ba Thanh, a man in his mid-20s who was dressed in the Vietcong’s characteristic black pajamas. He had been sent to the village by headquarters with a B-40 rocket launcher as part of a special 12-man unit targeting Swift boats, the villagers said.

But a curious part of the Nightline report was a statement by one villager, Nguyen Van Khoai, who said two men – an American calling himself a Swift boat veteran and a cameraman – had interviewed him about the incident about six months earlier.

Nguyen remembered that the two visitors had mentioned that another Swift boat veteran was running for U.S. President and they said he “didn’t do anything to deserve the medal” won for his actions during the 1969 battle. Nguyen said he declined to discuss whether Kerry had deserved his medal, and the two men went back down river.

Nightline said it couldn’t identify the two men, but their appearance at a remote Vietnamese village – when Nightline had to overcome government resistance to travel there – suggests that allies of the Bush campaign may be going to extraordinary lengths to discredit Kerry. It also begs the question of whether the U.S. Embassy in Vietnam has played any role.

Apparently a family tradition. Bush pere tried to pull the same thing in '92, impugning Clinton's patriotism by tampering with Clinton's passport files to raise suspicions that Clinton had made a nefarious visit to the USSR in the late '60s, early '70s.