• Optional@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Can’t find the documentary, here’s a relevant article:

    On Friday, the group, who served with Mr. Kerry in Vietnam, sent a letter to T. Boone Pickens, the billionaire Texas oilman who helped finance the 2004 attack advertisements, taking him up on a challenge he issued last November: that he would give $1 million to anyone who could disprove a single charge the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth made against Mr. Kerry.

    . . . Mr. Pickens did not reply.

    So Mr. Kerry’s veteran allies took up the cause. In a 12-page letter — with a 42-page attachment of military records to support their case — they rebut not one but several of the accusations of the Swift boat group.

    The veterans offer to go through Mr. Kerry’s record and the video with Mr. Pickens “page by page, frame by frame.” And they demand an apology, to them “and to the American people.”

    Of course, none of this is new. Extensive news media accounts undermined the Swift boat charges in 2004, pointing out that some of the Swift boat critics had written statements in Vietnam lauding Mr. Kerry for extraordinary bravery in the incidents they later said he made up. One critic had himself received a medal for heroism during a hail of gunfire he later claimed Mr. Kerry had concocted to win his third Purple Heart.

    But that did not blunt the political impact.

    Ah yes. Texas scumbag T. Boone Pickens, the Musk of his day, funded the whole smear campaign.

    And it’s a reminder that republiQans do not give one good goddamn how true something is or not. If it has “political impact” they’ll use it.

    • Wrench@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      The Republicans have never given a single shit about veterans, they just like the flag waving and faux patriotism. They nominated the guy who consistently insults veterans, calling those who fell in war “losers”, and the rest of their elected officials consistently starve the VA so that veterans can’t receive the care they were promised.

      Like everything else the Republicans claim to “support”, it’s in name only, and no substance. They only support their billionaire overlords, and the orange fuhrer himself.