Cap'n Ed dissects a hypocritical piece in Business Week on the Swift Boat controversy:

So let me get this straight -- MoveOn is more credible because of the transparent nature of the illegal coordination between the Democrats and the 527, while the Swiftvets suffer because no one can establish these links? And they claim inside knowledge because they served in the same unit and the same area as John Kerry, much the way William Rood did -- they went out on patrols with Kerry and observed him from close quarters on rivers and canals where the two banks often spread less than 100 yards apart while they patrolled with their 50-foot PCFs. Peterson hasn't spent much time distinguishing the operational tactics of PCFs, which rarely if ever went out alone on patrols.

Peterson's perspective, then, is that while John Kerry's testimony should go unchallenged because he served four months in combat, the Swiftvets -- who to a man completed at least their one-year tours or left due to disabling wounds -- should shut up about theirs. And the candidate who didn't make his service any kind of qualification should expect to be slandered, but the nominee who wrapped himself in his four-month stint and surrounded himself with former shipmates for his nominating speech should get a free pass to avoid scrutiny of that record. It's a point of view, all right -- one that reeks of hypocrisy and self-service.

reeks of hypocrisy and self-service

I wrote Thane Peterson about his editorial. Here is what I wrote:
All the 527s should go away. For you to claim MoveOn.org is better that the Swifties is ludicrous. This group left an ad on their web site for 2 days that compared the President to Hitler. They and their friends at America Coming Together have spent months and millions of dollars defaming the President and almost nothing has been said about it. The vets spend 250,000 on an ad and the press is treating them like the Rosenbergs. By the way, MoveOn.org makes no mention of any affiliation with the Democratic party. That’s a little disingenuous considering principals from the party and these groups admit talking to each other. I commend Kerry for serving, I dislike him for his treatment of his fellow soldiers and his lie about Cambodia.

Here is his reply:
Bill--I didn't say Moveon was better than the vets group. i said it was different. There's absolutely nothing hidden about what Moveon is doing. They're trying to get Bush and other conservative Republicans out of office. Nothing wrong with that.

Swift Boat vets for Truth is trying to keep Kerry out of office. Nothing wrong with that, either. The dfference is that the vets claim to have some great inside and special knowledge. With a couple of excpetions, they don't, as far as i can tell. So, it's a political group masquarading as something else. If they had just set up as a group of vets supporting Bush (or opposing Kerry, for that matter) they wouldn't have gotten anything like the attention they're getting with all the innuendo they're creating-- and they know it.

I report, you decide.

http://www.drudgereport.com/dnc98.htm

BRANT: "You should know what you said when you came back, the impact it had on the young sailors and how it was disrespectful of our guys that were killed over there."

[Brant had two men killed in battle.]

KERRY: "When we dedicated swift boat one in '92, I said to all the swift guys that I wasn't talking about the swifties, I was talking about all the rest of the veterans."