Guilty by Ann Coulter Page B

of the action that day, but we could trust the memory of a deceased commanding officer's widow, who was not there but was an antiwar activist and Kerry supporter.
    The George Soros–funded group Media Matters for America quickly produced a document titled “The Lies of John O’Neill.” Among O’Neill's heinous lies was his claim on CNN's
Crossfire
that hehad had “no serious involvement in politics of any kind in over 32 years.” To this, Media Matters retorted, “In fact, O’Neill has made more than $14,000 in federal contributions to Republican candidates and causes since 1990; most people would consider giving $14,000 a ‘serious’ involvement.” 70
LIAR!
While I'm not sure how to fact-check what “most people” think, I doubt whether “most people” would consider political donations of about $1,000 a year proof of “serious political involvement.”
    While the Swift Boat Veterans went back to their lives after the 2004 election, happy to have defeated the mountebank Kerry, liberals never moved on from defaming the Swiftees and their supporters. They never quit. In 2007, ABC News matter-of-factly referred to 294 Vietnam War veterans as the “the slanderous Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.” 71 That same year Senate Democrats rejected Bush's nominee to be ambassador to Belgium, Sam Fox, because he had donated to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. In the committee hearings, Kerry harangued the nominee, accusing him of contributing “to that very group that is smearing and spreading lies.” It's perfectly acceptable for a U.S. president to have donated to Trinity United Church, but not for an ambassador to have donated to 294 military veterans.
    A 2008 op-ed in the
New York Times
explained that the reason “it took some weeks for the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign against Senator John Kerry to have an effect on his standing in the polls” was that a “false statement from a noncredible source that is at first not believed can gain credibility during the months it takes to reprocess memories.” 72 Note the March Hare tenacity of the American liberal. Four years after the Swift Boat Veterans ran their ads, liberals were still feverishly writing articles for the
Times
that nonchalantly called 294 military veterans a “noncredible source.”
    On the bright side, after four years of maligning the Swiftees, the
Times
finally coughed up how exactly liberals believed the veterans had been “discredited.” On August 13, 2008, a
Times
article said O’Neill's book,
Unfit for Command,
had “included various accusations that were ultimately undermined by news reports pointing out the contradictions.” In a parenthetical the
Times
article explained, “Some critics of Mr.Kerry quoted in the book had earlier praised his bravery in incidents they were now asserting he had fabricated; one had earned a medal for bravery in a gun battle he accused Mr. Kerry of concocting.” 73
    That was pretty thin gruel after years of hysterical denunciations of the Swiftees. First of all, even if we accept the dubious assumption that “news reports” are more accurate than 294 Swift Boat Veterans, a “contradiction” is not proof of error; it's proof of a contradiction. Second, the
Times's
objections were noticeably limited to claims in the book and had nothing to do with the four television advertisements run by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. But most important, the fact that some Swiftees had once praised Kerry and one had received a Bronze Star for the same action that Kerry did reflected only the fact that Kerry had written his own vainglorious After Action Reports. It was only when Kerry began running for president based on his undaunted military valor that the facts about his service came under scrutiny.
    Larry Thurlow was the Swiftee who, according to the
Times's
account, “earned a