PBS' Frontline program

PBS is running a program which supposedly chronicles the lives of the 2 men running for President of the United States. I thought it was a fairly clear hatchet job against President Bush, meaning it was fairly mainstream for PBS. Here is the transcript, and here are some areas I found most interesting and biased...

JOHN SHATTUCK, Friend: Vietnam is really at the heart of John Kerry's capacity to lead.

BOB WOODWARD, Author, Plan of Attack: If you want to know who George Bush is, look at the Iraq war. This is a George Bush decision.

Well said. Kerry is all about American failure, and Bush's war is about American success. Not surprisingly, as with Vietnam, the American media has taken the side of America's enemies, and has undermined Republican leadership. The same people who were protesting then are protesting now, and they are again making American victory doubtful and certainly more difficult that it would otherwise be.

NARRATOR: In 1966, 385,000 Americans were fighting in Vietnam; 4,000 had already died there. John Kerry enlisted in the Navy with another Yale buddy, David Thorne...After eight months of officer training, Lieutenant Kerry was assigned to a guided missile frigate safely patrolling the coast of southern California, the USS Gridley. His first two-year tour passed uneventfully, until, with only a week to go, the Gridley was ordered to Southeast Asia.

NARRATOR: Just before graduation, George Bush applied to the Texas Air National Guard. A former Texas lieutenant governor, Ben Barnes, says he was asked by a now deceased Bush family friend to help smooth the way.

BEN BARNES, Texas House Speaker, 1965-'69: I made a call because a friend asked me to, for-- to allow young George Bush to be considered for the National Guard. His father was a congressman, and that would be the reason, probably, that I made the call. But you know, you got to look upon this and turn the clock back to 1967, '68 and '69. There was a war going on, and there were many, many requests to get in the Reserves and National Guard at that time.

Hmm...seemingly no mention of the fact that Kerry actually signed up with a reserve unit which was not expected to deploy. This whole issue is BS in my mind. Both Kerry and Bush got into units that were not likely to see combat in Vietnam. Once in, Kerry's unit got called and Bush's did not, and somehow that makes Bush a coward who was AWOL. [Didn't Kerry call Vietnam a mistake? So Bush avoided a mistake, and that's a character flaw apparently.] Not to mention that Ben Barnes is a disgraced liar and a Democrat operative. I'm still looking for that part of the transcript...

"Frontline" goes on to offer quotations from David Aston and Dell Sandusky (who've I've seen in person, and know to be a liar), but curiously they don't mention anything about John O'Neill and 270 Swift Vets who disagree with Kerry and the stories being told by his handful of buddies.

NARRATOR: Kerry threw away his ribbons. He left his medals at home. By the week's end, 250,000 protesters marched, danced and partied on the Mall.

Remember, there's a difference between ribbons and medals. Or is there? According to Kerry's own website: "We all referred to them as the symbols they were representing," he told 'Good Morning America' on ABC. So, he threw back the ribbons because he was against the war. But he kept his medals because he was for the war? Seems about right...

A brief exchange from the famous O'Neill/Kerry debate on the Dick Cavett show follows, after the narrator declares O'Neill is working for President Nixon, and they quickly delve back into the George Bush AWOL story. Oh yea, in case you forgot, Bush was a big drinker in those days too.

Then, discussing Kerry's first campaign for the US House, in which he had been a 2-to-1 favorite,

NARRATOR: Overconfident, the Kerry campaign was blindsided by the local newspaper, The Lowell Sun, and its editor, Clem Costello.

DAN PAYNE: Costello was a very right-wing conservative guy who hated the idea of Kerry. I don't even know that he had much opportunity to meet John, but it was the idea of John Kerry that offended Clem Costello so much.

DAVID THORNE, Campaign Manager: Day after day, the paper printed full-page editorials that were treated like hard news about John Kerry and Vietnam, John Kerry the carpetbagger, John Kerry the radical, all these kinds of things.

Sound like any of today's media? Apparently they've warmed up to Mr. Kerry.

NARRATOR: On the eve of a congressional vote on aid to the Contras, Kerry flew to Managua with his colleague, Tom Harkin, of Iowa. Kerry was just three-and-a-half months into his first term as a senator. The Reagan administration accused them of conducting their own foreign policy.

Sen. JOHN KERRY: [April 18, 1985] We're here to clarify a larger set of issues regarding how you peacefully resolve what's happening down here.

Oddly, there was no mention about Kerry's similar meeting in Paris with North Vietnamese leaders where he discussed a strategy for getting the US to pull out of Vietnam all together.

CASPAR WEINBERGER: And for the life of me, I cannot understand why a communist regime in Nicaragua has so much support in the Congress.

NARRATOR: A few days after Kerry and Harkin returned, Ortega flew to Moscow, where he was seen embracing Soviet leaders and accepting communist aid. Kerry looked as if he'd been duped.

I don't understand it either, but we're on the verge of having that very same man occupying the White House.

Later on came a highlight from a debate in the 1996 Massachusetts Senatorial campaign. Oddly, there was no commentary from the moderator either criticizing Kerry's apparent lack of achievements in the US Senate either then or now, nor was there any further information given as to his accomplishments.

NARRATOR: In 1996, John Kerry was facing a tough reelection battle that would put his 12-year Senate record on trial. His opponent was Massachusetts' popular governor, Bill Weld, considered and a Republican star with presidential prospects. The two candidates faced off in 8 televised debates.

REPORTER: [April 8, 1996] Senator, you've been in Washington for 12 years now. Why do so many Massachusetts voters lack a clear idea of what you've accomplished there for the state?

Sen. JOHN KERRY: Andy, that's a very fair question, and I think it's one of the difficulties of the United States Senate and the difficulties of what gets covered. I am very, very proud of the fact that I led the fight to put 100,000 police officers on the streets of America--

NARRATOR: Kerry listed a slew of legislative accomplishments, from getting more cops on the streets to youth job programs and flood relief.

Sen. JOHN KERRY: These are not the things that make the front page, but they are the stuff of being a United States Senator, and I'm proud of it.

Surely there must be more than just a handful of laws bearing the name of John Kerry (D-MA) as sponsor, right?

After saying that Bush's entire agenda was complete within the first summer of 2001, the narrator said the general wisdom was that nobody knew "how they're going to fill the time over the next three years." And then came the event which changed this Presidency and indeed America, forever.

RICHARD CLARKE, National Security Council, 1992-'03: There was a fairly long period of time when he stayed in the classroom in Florida. And I blame that not so much on the president but on the party that was with him. During this period of time, it was clear what was happening. They were being told through multiple channels that this was a major terrorist attack, and it was ongoing. It was still coming. So it took them a long time to get their act together.
...

NARRATOR: The night of September 10th, Senator John Kerry attended a dinner in Boston honoring his efforts to normalize relations between the U.S. and Vietnam. The next morning, he was back in his Senate office, and like everyone else, watching the disaster on television.

JONATHAN WINER, Counselor to Sen. Kerry, 1983-97: He was so angry about what these people had done to the United States, what the terrorists had done to Americans, that there was this pent-up energy that needed release and couldn't be released because there wasn't action to take as a senator, as opposed to as a president, at that moment.

Apparently, PBS forgot about the Larry King interview where Kerry said that between he and the others he was with, 'nobody could think' for 40 minutes.

The program concludes by discussing the supposed fact that Kerry was chosen in the Democrat primary because of his war record, and that some Americans believe that both men have been less than honest about their military service. John O'Neill is quoted as a spokesman for the Swift Vets for Truth, and a subtle message is spoken about Bush having gone AWOL. No mention of the facts that the Bush AWOL charge has been probed for years with no substantiation, while the Swift Vets have been largely ignored by Kerry and the mainstream media.

I think that somebody at PBS might just want John Kerry to be the next President of the United States.