Posted on June
15, 2014
Not So Swift
Libs use U.S. military as a pejorative
by
Daniel
Clark
swift boat (n): a small American military vessel
used to navigate narrow, interior waterways
swift-boat
(vb): to expose
the disloyalty of a soldier, esp. when done by a large number of that soldier’s
far more loyal, honorable and trustworthy peers
While
explaining how the Obama administration could be surprised by criticisms of its
prisoner exchange with the Taliban, NBC White House correspondent Chuck Todd
reported, “a few aides describe it to me as, ‘we didn’t know that they were
going to swiftboat [Bowe] Bergdahl.’” The “they” in this case are Bergdahl’s fellow soldiers who outed
him as a deserter. These aides probably
didn’t anticipate the ensuing outrage because they do not find desertion to be an
objectionable thing.
To understand how that can be, you have to think
like a liberal, which means eyeing American soldiers with either suspicion or pity. Because liberals see American military force
as immoral, they perceive our soldiers either as willing participants in the
immorality, or else as hapless victims of unrelenting coercion.
From that premise, they conclude that disloyal
soldiers are the superior ones, having been driven to rise above their
condition by their disillusionment with the sinister American “war
machine.” If you doubt this, just try
finding unsympathetic portrayals of deserters, draft-dodgers and traitors in
liberal pop culture, from the Vietnam era right up until now.
Then again, who needs Hollywood when you’ve got real
life? Remember how the media gushed over
the “deeply thoughtful” and “courageous” letter that a 23-year-old Bill Clinton
had written to Col. Eugene Holmes, a Bataan Death March survivor, in 1969. In it, the future president flippantly
professed to “loathe the military” before obliviously adding, “Merry
Christmas.” Clinton, who had already
been drafted, had subsequently received an unprecedented deferment in exchange
for his promise to join the ROTC upon returning from Oxford. The letter was to inform Col. Holmes that he
was welshing on the deal.
During the 2004 campaign, liberals treated John
Kerry like he was the greatest – if not the only – military hero in America,
and no wonder. It was Kerry and his malicious
band of impostors from Vietnam Veterans Against the
War who had conducted the “Winter Soldier Investigation,” during which they
reinforced every liberal prejudice against the American military.
Kerry had been a naval officer aboard a swift
boat. When he ran for president, many of
those who had served with him formed a group called Swift Boat Veterans for
Truth, to educate the public about his anti-American activities. In reaction to this effort, the Democrats and
their friends in the media coined the term “swiftboating,”
which they take to mean the act of dishonestly attacking one of their heroes.
In reality, the accusations leveled by the Swift
Boat Vets were infinitely more accurate than those that had been fabricated by
Kerry and his VVAW, who slandered the entire U.S. military with a litany of fictitious
atrocities, which Kerry himself recounted before the Senate in 1971. Telling scurrilous lies about American heroes
isn’t an example of “swiftboating,” though. Telling the truth about a turncoat is.
It’s instructive that liberals so comfortably
describe “swiftboaters,” i.e., American sailors, as
the enemy. If anyone else were to choose
a military vehicle to use as a symbol of treachery, he would pick one from the
other side. An American non-liberal
might refer to perpetrators of an unjust attack as “kamikazes” or “Scud
launchers,” but he would never complain that he’d been “Sherman tanked” or
“A-10 Warthogged.”
Only
a liberal would consider the worst villain from the Cold War to be Joe
McCarthy, who is reviled for telling indelicate truths about Communist
infiltrators. Meanwhile, liberals have
all but airbrushed the Rosenbergs from history, and
they persist in defending Alger Hiss, whose guilt has not been seriously in
doubt since the declassification of the Venona
Project in 1995.
“Swiftboating” is intended
to become the new “McCarthyism,” except that a whole category of military
heroes is a lot tougher to smear than one flawed Senator. Liberals are unable to see the difference
from within their insular world, where disdain for America’s defenders is
simply the way of things.
During Vietnam, the liberal comic strip Pogo became famous for the punchline,
“We have met the enemy, and it is us.”
Leading up to the 2007 surge in Iraq, MoveOn.org ran an ad against Gen.
David Petraeus, in which it renamed him “betray
us.” Assuming that the “us” in both contexts
is the same, it looks as if Pogo had
a point after all.
The
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