I’m not sure why this is news today. Kerry says the record shows that the charges from The Swift Boat Liars were false. The claims have been disputed to the point where only partisan Republicans, who care little about reality, are going to believe them and those who still believe these lies are not going to change their minds regardless of how much evidence is presented. From The Patriot Ledger:
John Kerry said Monday there might be a next time for his presidential aspirations, and if there is, the 63-year-old U.S. senator from Massachusetts says he’ll be ready for the political torpedoes that helped sink his 2004 White House bid.
Kerry, whose service as a U.S. Navy Swift boat skipper during the Vietnam War came under attack in his race against President Bush, said he has compiled a dossier on his war record critics that he wishes he had as the Democratic presidential nominee.
“We have put together a documented portfolio that frankly puts their lies in such a total light of absurdity and indecency, that should they ever rear their ugly heads again, we have every single ‘t’ crossed and ‘i’ dotted, and I welcome that in a sense,” Kerry said following a morning address to the South Shore Chamber fo Commerce. “It’s a shame we weren’t able to produce all that at the time.”
Kerry said he regrets his slowness to counter accusations from the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which faulted Kerry’s war record and his subsequent anti-war activism.
“I think the bigger problem was the campaign should have spent more money putting the truth out there,” Kerry said. “I think there was an assumption that is was out there, it was sufficiently out there.”While Kerry is sitting out the 2008 presidential election n he’s instead focusing on his own his race next year for a sixth term as U.S. senator n he expects he’d be dogged by the same war record critics in a subsequent race for the White House.
“I have no doubt at all that some of the people involved on the other side don’t care about the truth, think nothing about distorting it, will not hesitate to say and do whatever they think is necessary to win,” Kerry said. “But I think we are now much more prepared and savvy about those kind of things, and certainly in my own involvement, I will make certain that people don’t get away with that.”
Kerry said he regretted that the term “swift boating” has taken on the meaning of a political attack, but that such attacks have become a part of national politics.
“I hate to see the term become a negative term in American politics, it is what is is,” he said. “Would those same tactics be used against people? Sure, absolutely.”