wizbang interviews john o'neill
O'Neill, in case you have been living under a rock this election season, is the spokesman and leader of "Swift Boat and POW Vets for Truth", authors of "Unfit for Command."

I have long maintained that the Vietnam stuff in this debate is overwhelmingly irrelevant, except perhaps to other Vets (especially Vietnam-era, who remember the Lt. Kerry from Winter Soldier) and the hippie-types that worship folks like Kerry as anti-war heros.

What amazes me is how easily the MSM spin has affected the whole issue. Many people, from independants to supposedly informed Dems, immedately brush off anything coming from the SBVFT as lies. What evidence do they have that these men are all liars? None. They counter that these guys didn't serve with Kerry. What evidence? Again, None. The response when you point out that this is Kerry's direct chain of command, people that worked on the boats alongside him, even one guy out of the few surviving that was actually on the same boat as Kerry? Either a brush-off, or "Well, they're still liars". I would say that this is a case of "Facts don't matter", but if you are repeatedly presented only one side of the facts as the whole story, I guess it is pretty easy to brush off any dissenting voices.

Anyway, Wizbangblog (the authors of the excellent poll aggregate you can see at the top of the page), has an interview up with John O'Neill. I don't know how much of a differance a thirty year old war makes to anyone, but I do think that to a certain extent it reveals Kerry's character under fire, in a literal sense. I'm not voting for Bush based on what Kerry did in Vietnam, but it's one more reason not to like him...or, more accurately, it reinforces my own perception of him.

Aylward - On a personal level, what has been the most surprising or shocking thing that you've learned through this whole experience.

O'Neill - The level of depravity in John Kerry's soul. I knew of his post-war activities, but I believed some of the stories in the Brinkley biography. I had no idea he fabricated the Sampan event. There was a point in our 1971 debate when I pinned him down and he was forced to admit he had never personally seen atrocities committed. In the writing of Unfit For Command and gathering the stories of other Swift Boat veterans we learned of the Sampan event, of Kerry burning villages with his Zippo lighter, slaughtering animals, etc. It turns out the Kerry lied about every single bit of his Vietnam story.

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