:BRIGHTSTUFF:..Personal & Political Musings & Rants by a Liberal Leftist Black & Asian Teacher

How sad that the Right is stooping this low.

Recently, the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth came out with a new ad.

The ad (scroll down to the bottom of the page http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5771731/).

What the ad willfully leaves out is that these statements come from testimonies made by soldiers themselves.

This is typically dishonest.

The ad deliberately leaves out a portion of the audio. The statement John Kerry made begins like this:

"They told stories that at times they had personally..."

John Kerry did not make these accusations. He was reporting what soldiers themselves had testified to.

Now here is a portion of the FULL statement John Kerry made before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 23, 1971 that the Swiftvets are referring to.

"They told stories that at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Ghengis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country. "

Now here is the full statement:

http://hnn.us/articles/3631.html

Now here's the dubious part that screams Republican partisan-ism (is that a word???) all over it.

In an article from August 20, 2004 (uhhh....yesterday), The New York Times graphically revealed that the supposed non-partisan Swiftvets for Truth receive huge amounts of money from high profile Republicans donors.

"Mr. Perry, who has given $200,000 to the group, is the top donor to Republicans in the state, according to Texans for Public Justice, a nonpartisan group that tracks political donations. He donated $46,000 to President Bush's campaigns for governor in 1994 and 1998. In the 2002 election, the group said, he donated nearly $4 million to Texas candidates and political committees."

http://nytimes.com/2004/08/20/politics/campaign/20swift.html?pagewanted=2

Interesting, huh?

Dirty, dirty partisan politics.

It's only going to get uglier, folks.