Project Katrina

This is a statement by Stan Collier in a NYT article today, who was the officer in charge of a Swift in Vietnam. In a nutshell “Swift Boat” vets want to reclaim the name “Swift Boat,” folks that served with honor in Vietnam and not the verb it now is to smear somebody in a political campaign.

Tristero at Hullabaloo sums up the “real” issue better then I could:

Indeed we all have, whether or not we ever saw a Swift Boat. But this is what movement conservatives do with emotionally weighty situations or actions. They demean everyone involved.

In Schiavo, they took one of the worst moral dilemmas a family has to face—a decision which clearly must be private and for which definite legal guidelines are established—and put the family and the country through hell in the most cynical fashion imaginable, running roughshod over the Constitution for no reason whatsoever except to make the point that they had the power to do it. They took Katrina—where the fault was clearly an incompetent federal government, i.e. the Bush administration—and blamed the victims for their own suffering, even while they were still up to their necks in sewage. They characterized the tortures endured at Abu Ghraib as mere schoolboy pranks, demeaning the suffering of numerous totally innocent men, women, and children.

And they regularly demean the achievements of heroes, dismissing or laughing at them when they don’t like their politics and dragging everyone into the mud in their desperate, psychotic propensity to do anything and everything to gain power. name “Swift Boat” or what he was, folks that served with honor in Vietnam and not the verb it now is to smear sombody.