To: letters@kcstar.com
Subject: Bush and the media
Date: 08/30/04

What happened to our national media? John Kerry has been attacked by
a front group for the Bush campaign, Swift Boat Veterans for the Truth.
They say Kerry lied about his medals. They say he lied about being in
Cambodia. They say a lot of things and almost all of them appear to be
lies. They are a proxy group for the Bush campaign. Of course the Bush
campaign denies it, but they have an established track record of lying.

Have we all forgotten that just five days before the last presidential
election, that George Bush finally admitted that he had been jailed for drunk
driving?  He had lied about it, but once he was installed in office by our
Supreme Court the media just let it go. Since then, George W. Bush seems to
have made quite a habit of lying to us. And yet, time and again the media
doesn't seem to want to point this out. Perhaps it is because they, too, were
fooled by so many of Bush's false claims and they don't want to look foolish,
so they let these lies slip away.

Let's just remember a few of them. For example, there were no weapons of mass
destruction, nuclear, biological or otherwise. There wasn't a link between
Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden either. Those were just lies. Colin Powell
knew they were lies, and he is quoted as saying at one point, "I'm not reading
this. This is bull----." Sadly, he read it anyway.

Now, let's fast forward to the last week or two. Just a few days ago, the
Bush administration has said that there was absolutely no link between their
campaign and the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth". The fact that Karl Rove and
others members of the campaign actually have a long history of very similar
"whispering campaigns" and character attacks was virtually ignored. But, then
we learned that one of these so called veterans for the "truth", Kenneth
Cordier, was sitting in on Bush's veterans advisory board meetings and a day
or two later, Bush's top lawyer, Benjamin Ginsberg, admitted that he was
providing legal advice to this group of lying veterans. The Bush campaign
responded that a lawyer for the Kerry campaign was doing basically the same
thing for MoveOn, but that, it turns out, is just another lie, or at least a
deliberate distortion of the truth. That lawyer worked for the Kerry campaign
during the primary season, not now. Besides, the Kerry campaign never lied
about the relationship, unlike the Bush campaign.

Combine these with many other lies, such as the one where Larry Thurlow says
that there wasn't any gunfire so that Kerry doesn't deserve the bronze star,
but Thurlow got a bronze star himself for the same action. So either he is
lying about Kerry or he lied himself to get the same bronze star.

So, the net result? Bush climbs in the polls. Kerry is blamed for mentioning
that he is proud to be a veteran. Bush says he is proud to have served his
country too, although he can't really prove were he was most of the time.
The eyewitnesses that served with Kerry in Vietnam all say that Kerry served
with distinction, but that doesn't matter to the voters. The polls are showing
that these lies worked. Doesn't any of this matter? Are we going to reward
lies and cynical manipulation with four more years? We'll find out in just a
couple of months.

Bill Underwood