Guilty by Ann Coulter

and in eight speeches on the Senate floor. 63 It was a memory that was “seared— seared—in me,” as he said in the Senate in 1986. “I remember Christmas of 1968,” Kerry reminisced, “sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia. I remember what it was like to be shot at by Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge and Cambodians, and have the president of the United States telling the American people that I was not there; the troops were not in Cambodia.”
    No one, not one person, backed him on that claim. So eventually Kerry was forced to retract this one, too. 64 What kind of adult tells a lie like that? (Answer: The kind who carries a home-movie camera to war in order to reenact combat scenes and tape fake interviews with himself.)
    Kerry had long maintained that he did not attend the 1971 meeting of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) in Kansas City, Missouri, where the assassination of U.S. senators was discussed. Kerry campaign spokesman David Wade said, “Kerry was not at the Kansas City meeting.” Later, FBI files showed that Kerry was at the meeting. So Kerry had to take back that claim, too. As the
Washington Post
reported on August 28, “Told about the FBI records earlier this year, Kerry said through a spokesman that he now accepted he must have been in Kansas City for the November meeting while continuing to insist that he had ‘no personal recollection’ of the contentious debate. Many people associated with VVAW find this difficult to believe.” 65
    By contrast, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth weren't forced to retract any part of their story. There's a reason it was Kerry—and not the Swift Boat Veterans—who told the
Washington Post,
“I wish they had a delete button on LexisNexis.” 66
    With all the talk about the dastardly Swift Boat Veterans, one is left to wonder how precisely they were able to spread their wild calumnies against John Kerry. The Swift Boat Veterans were given no time with Tim Russert, no
Today
show appearances, no fawning
New York Times
editorials or
Vanity Fair
hagiographies. The only way they could have gotten less attention would have been to be interviewed on Air America Radio.
    When the
New York Times
could no longer ignore the Swiftees, it had to manufacture a special typewriter key for the Swift Boat Veterans so that any story mentioning them would read: “the unsubstantiated charges of the Swift Boat Veterans.” As with many words liberals create new meanings for—“everyone,” “constitutional,” “is,” “we”—the
Times
was apparently using the word “unsubstantiated” to mean “tested repeatedly and proved true.” At least sixteen times, the newspaper described the Swiftees’ charges as “unsubstantiated.” By contrast, not once did the
Times
describe the laughably unsubstantiated charge that Bush went AWOL from his National Guard service as “unsubstantiated” out of eighteen mentions of that allegation.
    The
Times
got so desperate that it called on the Federal Election Commission to shut down the ads of the Swift Boat Veterans, bitterly remonstrating in an editorial that the Commission had “done nothing to rein in” the Swiftees’ free speech. 67 Similarly, the Democratic National Committee threatened to sue TV stations that ran the Swift Boat Veterans’ paid ads. When Democrats are this terrified of a book, it's not because they have a good response. The problem wasn't Kerry's want of alacrity in responding, it was that he didn't have an answer.
    Far from not responding, Kerry and the media wing of his campaign responded to the Swift Boat Veterans aggressively and repeatedly. Apart from Fox News and the
Navy Times,
stories about the Swift Boat Veterans generally had titles like these:
    â€œSwift Boats: Bet It's Nice to Have Grassroots Support That Writes $35k Checks”
    â€œAnti-Kerry Veterans’ Group Now