SwiftVets offer Kerry peace with honor

I didn't intend to blog tonight while I'm clearly in a ranting frame of mind, but an alert reader emailed me with a link to the new open letter today from the SwiftVets to Sen. Kerry, entitled "Senator Kerry: Tell the Truth and We'll Stop the Ads."

I believe they would, but of course, he can't/won't/dare not.

I'm particularly tickled to read, at the end of the third numbered paragraph of the letter, that the SwiftVets have finally picked up on the Belodeau Eulogy.  Another reader has emailed me to say that Brit Hume has mentioned it again on Fox News.

The path outlined in the letter would be pretty close to what I sketched out some days ago in my post entitled "Staking the heart of the SwiftVets vampire."  The SwiftVets' own proffered stake would actually be less onerous — they'd let him get away without signing Standard Form 180 and releasing all the military records and other documents that he's stonewalling.  Think about it, Senator — you're being offered, in effect, a free pass for your cover-up, when conventional wisdom is that the cover-up is always a bigger deal than the underlying offenses themselves.  Heckuva deal.

The letter's conclusion:

Please know that Swift Boat Veterans for Truth are eager to close our own personal chapters on Vietnam and instead focus on the war we're currently fighting — the ongoing war on terrorism. In the absence of full public disclosure and a public apology, we will continue efforts to carry our message to an ever-expanding base of grassroots supporters.

Senator Kerry, we want to get Vietnam behind us. But, we can only do so if the truth is told.

Sen. Kerry, don't you remember when you were in the Navy's brutal SERE (survival, evasion, rescue, and escape) program in the fall of 1968?  Don't you remember the most terrible part of it, as your pet biographer Brinkley (without a trace of apparent shame or irony on his part or yours) related  at pp. 123-24 of ToD?

The first torture drill involved forcing seven [trainees being treated as pretend] POWs into a box, crammed in one against another.  After about thirty minutes claustrophobia set in.  Then they were all shoved into solitary confinement cells half the size of a country outhouse.  "I almost panicked," Kerry wrote his girlfriend of the ordeal.  "My head was crammed down between my knees and I couldn't move it up. I have always had a fear of small places — of being shut in something and not being able to move.  I have never thought that it might happen in such an awkward and frightening way."

Just in the nick of time, with Kerry at the end of his rope and pounding his fist, screaming for air, he was released.  "I don't know how many pounds I sweated off in those minutes in the boxes but I was wet from head to toe," Kerry recounted, "and so thirsty again that I determined to steal water."

.... But at dawn the men were called out into the courtyard.  "Up the flag pole went the Stars and Stripes in place of the Hammer and Sickle that had earlier been there and the [pretend] guards all translated their bows into salutes as we knew them," Kerry wrote.  "We stood there as relief and pride surged through every pore of the body."

Aren't you feeling now like you're back in that box again, Senator?  You can fire a few campaign aides and "bounce off the walls" in your frustration — but you can't get out, can you?  There's only one way out of the box of lies that you've constructed for yourself.

Can't you just imagine how good the relief and pride would feel, surging through every pore of your body again, if you would just tell the truth, finally?  You could look in the eyes, perhaps, the men who spent not a day or a long weekend as mock POWs, but year upon year upon bitter year in the Hanoi Hilton and worse, where the guards weren't pretend and the torture and executions weren't mock — where they were forced to listen not to mock propaganda, but the words of a brother officer named John Forbes Kerry calling them war criminals in sworn testimony before the United States Senate. 

This is a whole lot more generous offer than the capitulation peace plan you recommended that the United States follow after you returned from meeting in Paris with representatives of the North Vietnamese government and Viet Cong.  Dammit, man, you don't even have to "confess" to things you didn't do!  You don't have to sell anyone out.

All you have to do is tell the truth, and then you can get on with your campaign.  You might actually finally heal the enduring wounds of your country from Vietnam.  Win or lose in November, wouldn't that be a great way to be remembered in history, Sen. Kerry?